The 16th International Conference on Persons, having been postponed one year because of Covid, was held last week at Anahuac University in Mexico City. It was at the same time the first Congreso Mundial de Personalismo, organized in collaboration with the Asociación Española de Personalismo and the Asociación Iberoamericana de Personalismo. Among the organizers was also the Hildebrand Project of the Franciscan University of Steubenville. More information here and the programme here.
This is the abstract of my paper, ‘Christian and Vedantic Personalism’:
What could perhaps, with proper explanations, be called “Vedantic personalism” has been introduced on a few occasions at the International Conference on Persons, and most fully in a panel at Lund in Sweden in 2013; it has also in fact been briefly mentioned by a few Western personalist thinkers ever since the 19th century. In this paper, I will point to what I find to be the central difference between western, Christian personalism and such Vedantic personalism, and provide a basic account of what I regard as its main historical cause, namely the specific features which define the general view of the human being in at least “exoteric”, orthodox Abrahamitic and, in some respects, specifically Christian religion and theology. This will be a kind of introduction to a further exploration of some manifestations of this difference and of its influence throughout the western theology and philosophy that have been relevant to personalism, an exploration that will also highlight points or moments which nonetheless, due in large part to the different influence of Greek idealism, to some extent approximate Vedantic personalism.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 