Buddhist Philosophy offers the concept of anattā, the principle of no-self that leads people to the always changing present in life. Buddhism believes that everyone needs to have one’s own responsibility to purify one’s life to reach its purification state out of the suffering cyle of saṃsāra. In 2028, Indonesia will celebrate the 100th birthday as a nation. It was through the Youth Pledge or Sumpah Pemuda in Indonesian, young Indonesians proclaimed three ideas of one motherland, one nation, and a unifying language: Indonesia. They came with this narration as a respond for the colonization practice for 350 years that eventually has brought Indonesia to its proclamation of independence in 1945. In parallel, Paul Ricœur comes with similar ideas that the concept of self has the unchanging side (idem) and the changing side (ipse). The balance of these sides of self helps people to form a narration of one’s own life to overcome one’s experience in life. By comparing the Buddhist’s concepts of anattā and self-purification with Paul Ricœur’s concept of self-narrative, we can reflect on the phenomenon of the Indonesian Youth Pledge as a capable self that leads to the purification process through the narrative process of a nation.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
While writing aids like Grammarly promise to improve students’ work, they also marginalise the role played by teachers. To grasp the scope and implications of this problem, I turn to one of the earliest accounts of the good of learning and teaching we have, the Xunzi. This early Confucian text identifies two key components of the social value of education, which services like Grammarly threaten to undermine: the importance of learning proper models, li (禮), for self-expression and of accruing active effort, wei (為), in one’s studies.
While Grammarly can correct work to a tolerable standard, it does not teach proper models, which risks making students reliant on it not only to express themselves but to understand their work without its help. Moreover, while Grammarly primarily helps students to capitalise on the effort they do put into their studies by offering them significant shortcuts that again leave them dependent on this software. If AI writing aids risk making students more exploitable like this in turn for an easier time in the classroom, then we ought to be extremely worried about the genuine possibility that students, and perhaps even institutions, will delegate teaching responsibilities to this software.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
