Opening up the Space Between Us Inaugural Panel 2024

Jay L. Garfield directs the Buddhist Studies Program and Tibetan Studies in India program at Smith College. He is also visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. Academicinfluence.com has identified him as one of the 50 most influential philosophers in the world over the past decade.

Garfield’s research addresses topics in the foundations of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind; metaphysics; the history of modern Indian philosophy; topics in ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of logic; the philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment methodology in cross-cultural interpretation; and topics in Buddhist philosophy, particularly Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. He is the author or editor of over 30 books and over 200 articles, chapters, and reviews.

Garfield’s most recent books are: Getting Over Ourselves: How to be a Person Without a Self (2022), Knowing Illusion: Bringing a Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse (with the Yakherds 2021), Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (2021), ̛What Can’t Be Said: Paradox and Contradiction in East Asian Thought (with Yasuo Deguchi, Graham Priest, and Robert Sharf 2021), The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise From the Inside Out (OUP 2019), Minds Without Fear: Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance (with Nalini Bhushan, 2017), Dignāga’s Investigation of the Percept: A Philosophical Legacy in India and Tibet (with Douglas Duckworth, David Eckel, John Powers, Yeshes Thabkhas and Sonam Thakchöe, 2016) Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (2015), Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness (with the Cowherds, 2015) and (edited, with Jan Westerhoff), Madhyamaka and Yogācāra: Allies or Rivals? (2015).

Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor in Moral Philosophy at the University of Cagliari (IT) and at the Center for Ethics of the University of Pardubice (CZ). Her main research field is philosophy of emotions, at the crisscross of enactive ethics and social epistemology. She is leading two research projects: (1) “Vicious Epistemic Cultures”, on the ethics of knowledge with a specific focus on emotional friction in revision responsibility; (2) “Loving is Caring”, on Plato’s care of the soul and its contribution to the contemporary ethics of care.

Over the last ten years, she has worked on love, compassion, wonder, grief, and shame, bridging her expertise in the Socratic method of inquiry and the enactive approach to participatory sense-making. She contributed to the epistemology of emotions research by carving out a situated model of epistemic emotions as embedded in dialogical interactions and communities of inquiry. She is now focusing on environmental emotions, especially the intertwining of love, grief and hope in inhabiting a place that is dying and in climate migration. She is very much interested in the potential transformative power of the affective experience under the weight of oppression. As a Tibetan Buddhism practitioner and member of Mind and Life Europe, she has a longstanding interest in the role of emotions in contemplative practices with a focus on embodiment and desire. She edited "The value of emotions for knowledge" (Palgrave 2019), "Emotions in Plato" (Brill 2020), "The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions" (Routledge 2025). By December 2026 "Vice Epistemology and the Philosophy of Emotions" will be out with Routledge. She wrote four monographs in Italian and she is now completing her first monograph in English, titled "Emotional Friction" (forthcoming in 2027).

Websites: www.emotionsfirst.org; https://upce.academia.edu/LauraCandiotto; https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/doc-laura-candiotto-phd

Perla Kaliman holds a PhD in Biochemistry. She is a honorary fellow at the Center for Healthy Minds (University of Wisconsin Madison), exploring the gene expression and epigenetic impact of meditation practice. She is an associate professor in Nutrition and Public Health at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where she teaches nutrigenomics. She collaborates with the NGO “Innocence in Danger Colombia” (IIDC), exploring the psychological and epigenetic benefits of a program to heal trauma in adolescents with a history of multiple adverse childhood experiences. She has published numerous scientific articles, and she co-edited the book Epigenetics of Lifestyle (Bentham eBooks). She is the author of a neuroscience-cooking book on food for brain health with the chef Miguel Aguilar (Cocina para tu Mente, 2014, Ed. Blume, Barcelona) and “La ciencia de la meditación: de la mente a los genes” (2017, ed. Kairos, Barcelona). She founded the non-profit organization Generation Alpha Minds (www.generationalphaminds.org) dedicated to developing and scientifically validating programs to promote children’s resilience and mental health in vulnerable communities.

Venerable Losang Gendun has dedicated nearly four decades to practicing Buddhism and has served as a Bhikshu in the Tibetan tradition for more than 18 years. Prior to his ordination, he worked in diverse fields such as palliative care, technology, refugee organizations, and commercial management. His extensive training includes ten years of studying Buddhist philosophy and practice in monasteries across France, India, Nepal, and Myanmar. Additionally, he spent over four years in retreat, immersing himself in Tibetan sutra and tantra, as well as the Burmese Theravada Forest Tradition. For the last 15 years, Ven. Gendun has taught worldwide, sharing his knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and meditation, as a member of the FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition). Ven. Gendun is also a member of Mind & Life Europe, a multidisciplinary laboratory that brings together researchers and contemplative practitioners to explore the nature of experience. Beyond his Buddhist affiliations, Ven. Gendun serves as an interreligious canon at the Peace Cathedral in Tbilisi, Georgia, and teaches at a Mevlavi Sufi dargah in Istanbul. In 2023, he founded The Buddha Project, which engages in long-term guidance for Buddhist meditators, scientific research, art projects, and intercontemplative social engagement.

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialized in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early '80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training.

Prof Joanna Cook is a Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her books include Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century (2023, Princeton University Press) and Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (2010, Cambridge University Press).

Her research interests focus primarily on the UK and Thailand and extend across a range of different theoretical questions: the anthropology of joy; monasticism, gender and ethics in Buddhist Thailand; mindfulness, politics and well-being in the UK; power in Southeast Asia; detachment as an ethnographic object and as a theoretical tool; democracy, subjectivity and sociality; the anthropology of intellectual exchange.

Johanna Magin is MLE's Community and Programs Manager. Originally American and based in Paris, Johanna holds a PhD in French literature from Columbia University (New York) and a BA in French from the University of Chicago. Her research has focused on the medico-philosophical practices of several early-modern French authors in an attempt to understand the relationship between mind and body, and more broadly between science and spirituality, in that time period. Always keen to understand mind-body processes from an experiential perspective, she has also practiced Buddhism intensively since 2008 (Zen and Dzogchen), practiced improvisational dance and theatre since 2009, and is currently training to become a Rosen Method bodywork therapist. Before joining MLE, she worked as an academic program manager and adjunct faculty member at Sciences Po in France, where she taught on a wide number of subjects, from philosophy as a way of life to the politics of poetry.

Brother Pháp Linh (Brother Spirit) is a Zen Buddhist monk, musician, and seeker. He began his monastic training with Thích Nhất Hạnh in Plum Village in February 2008 and has since composed many of the community’s most beloved chants. Before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer. A co-founder of the Wake Up Movement for young people—active in 28 countries with over 2,000 members—today Brother Pháp Linh is actively engaged in teaching applied mindfulness to climate activists, business leaders, artists, and scientists. As a leading voice in the new generation of Buddhist monastics in the West, he is passionate about exploring how meditators and scientists can help each other to go further on the path of understanding and discovery. Brother Pháp Linh's work is animated by the conviction that a modern form of monasticism will play a crucial role in bringing about a more compassionate society and a much-needed collective awakening to our interbeing with all life.

Erick, a Luxembourger, has a 34-year experience in private equity and corporate governance; he is a co-founder and partner of Impact Expansion, a social and environmental fund. Erick's core skills include initiating change at board level, negotiation, advising management teams on value creation and leadership. He sits on the board of private companies and trusts in Luxembourg, London, Paris and Geneva. Erick has had a daily mindfulness practice for 18 years and is regularly in silent retreat. He is an Executive-in-Residence at IMD in Lausanne, teaching mind training to corporate leaders and teaches at the University of Strasbourg In France in the Medicine, Meditation and Neurosciences master degree program. Erick currently gives 100% of his coaching and mind training fees to Karuna-Shechen and Global Nomads for projets in the Himalayas. He received his MBA from Columbia Business School in New York (Award for Excellence) and is an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher (trainer at Bangor University, UK). He has also been studying Buddhist psychology and philosophy for 18 years.