The Yogacara school of Buddhist thought claims that all language-use is metaphorical. Exploring the profound implications of this assertion, Roy Tzhoar makes the case for viewing the Yogacara account as a full-fledged theory of meaning, one that is not merely linguistic, but also applicable both in the world and in texts.

The paper deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a ‘mere representations’ view. Examining Vasubandhu, Asaṅga, and Sthiramati’s use of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts, it is demonstrated that in contrast to the way in which it was often interpreted by contemporary scholars, this example in fact served these Yogācāra thinkers to perform an ironic inversion of the realist premise—showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects (...) but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, the paper then proceeds to unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity, its implications on the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, arguing that it proposes a radical revision of the way we conceive of the ‘shared’ and ‘private’ distinction in respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically. (shrink)

Can the early Yogācāra be said to present a systematic theory of meaning? The paper argues that Sthiramati’s bhāṣya on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikā, in which he argues that all language-use is metaphorical, indeed amounts to such a theory, both because of the text’s engagement with the wider Indian philosophical conversation about reference and meaning and by virtue of the questions it addresses and its motivations. Through a translation and analysis of key sections of Sthiramati’s commentary I present the main features of (...) this theory of meaning and discuss the ways in which it is distinct from Vasubandhu’s ideas. I demonstrate how this theory of meaning enabled Sthiramati to present a unique understanding of discourse that distinguishes between varying levels of truth within the conventional realm. This understanding sat well with the Yogācāra soteriological and theoretical needs, and most importantly, enabled him to establish the meaningfulness of the school’s own metaphysical discourse. Securing this meaningfulness was especially important to Sthiramati in meeting the challenge posed by the radical conventionalism of the Madhyamaka, and his response as I interpret it suggests that one of the main disputes between the early Yogācāra with the Mādhyamika, at least as reflected in the Triṃśikā-bhāṣya, in fact turns on linguistic rather than ontological issues. (shrink)

“Separation/disassociation from what is dear is suffering . . . ” declares the first noble truth of suffering, in a statement that is overwhelming in its decisiveness and scope, encompassing both the severance of ties to loved ones and the discontinuity of any attempt to hold on to what is pleasant or liked. However, in first-millennium Indian Sanskrit classical lore, Buddhist not excepted, separation comes to mean and convey much more—in terms of emotional phenomena—than just suffering. It is understood in (...) terms of diverse and sometimes excluding emotional phenomena, which are experienced under different (and sometimes contrastive) contexts. In Sanskrit belletristic literature and aesthetics, where lovers’ experience of “love in separation” is listed under the rubric of the erotic emotion, separation comes with its own particular sub-moods, typical landscapes, and associated practices, all of which are extended also under virahabhakti to the religious realm and the highly aestheticized relations with the divine. And in the case of philosophical texts and themes connected with Śramaṇic ideology, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, a sense of doom regarding one’s impending demise and the inevitable separation from all that is dear becomes a dominant mood, and carries with it normative and moral prescriptions, a theorization of action, and a particular kind of perceptual salience. These various outlooks on separation, however, are not unrelated, and often both come into play within the confines of a single work. This is especially true in the case of the Buddhist belletristic poetical works (mahākāvya) of Aśvaghoṣa (second century CE ), Life of the Buddha (Buddhacarita, BC) and Beautiful Nanda (Saundarananda, SN), in which separation—and here I refer primarily to the term viprayoga in both its concrete sense as the separation from loved ones and its broader existential sense—features as a central theme. Exploring the range of meanings and dynamic use of the term within Aśvaghoṣa’s SN, the first part of this article provides a brief theoretical framework with which to approach Aśvaghoṣa’s understanding of separation and its relation to the emotions. In this regard, I argue that separation, more than just an umbrella term for a cluster of associated feelings and emotions, serves as a unique emotional context—prescribing specific kinds of perceptual and moral saliency, practices and regimes of the self—under which emotional phenomena become meaningful. As such, its analysis may also contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion about the adequacy of using the very category of emotion in the context of Buddhist literature. Drawing on this framework and focusing on Aśvaghoṣa’s BC, the second part of the article turns to deal specifically with the role he allocates in the work to philosophical moral arguments regarding separation. Through analysis of the workings of a particular recurrent argument that I will call “the argument from separation,” I argue that, in addition to its role in justifying Buddhist ideology, it functions in Aśvaghoṣa’s BC primarily as a self-therapy of the emotions. (shrink)

Both of Aśvaghoṣa’s poetical works conclude with somewhat apologetic statements regarding his use of kāvya to deliver the Buddha’s words. Previous studies of his work have often read these statements as empty rhetoric, designed to assuage the typically suspicious attitude of the Buddhist canon toward kāvya, which consists in language beatified through ornamentation for the sole purpose of pleasure. This paper suggests that we should take Aśvaghoṣa’s statements seriously, and that indeed his poetry can be understood as conducive for liberation. (...) Focusing on the Buddhacarita, the paper provides a close reading of a selection of passages from the work, and draws from literary analysis to examine the way in which Aśvaghoṣa uses the narrative voice to provide a multi-perspectival account of experience. What defines these opposing perspectives for Aśvaghoṣa, it is argued, is primarily the way in which they stand in relation to the world of poetry and to the aesthetic values of kāvya, and in this respect Aśvaghoṣa should be understood as offering a highly reflexive account of his own choice of medium. (shrink)

According to the early Yogācāra, following non-conceptual awareness, the advanced bodhisattva is said to attain a state characterized by a "subsequent awareness". Yogācāra thinkers identify this state with ultimate knowledge of causality and view it as involving a unique kind of conceptual activity and propositional attitudes, which are very different, however, from ordinary conceptual awareness insofar as they do not involve vikalpa. Translated back into the terms of some version of the contemporary debate between conceptualists and nonconceptualists, this would amount (...) to something like the claim that we can use concepts in a non-conceptual way. But how can we make sense... (shrink)

The prominence and the importance of Aśvaghoṣa’s works and persona—to the understanding of the history of Sanskrit poetry, to the understanding of Indian Buddhism in a transitional stage and to its introduction to other parts of Asia—is well acknowledged in contemporary scholarship. But with few exceptions the existing scholarship on Aśvaghoṣa has tended to be highly specialized and focused, inviting further reading that builds on this in-depth research to offer an integrated treatment of the variegated aspects and contexts of his (...) works. This special issue of the Journal of Indian Philosophy is intended as a modest step toward a holistic exploration of Aśvaghoṣa works, which reads them across disciplinary as well as regional and temporal boundaries. This introduction is designed to highlight, very schematically, some points of interest and recurring concerns with respect to Aśvaghoṣa works; to point out how the set of articles address these concerns, and to suggest a particular order in which they can be profitably read. (shrink)

Drawing on a rich variety of Indian texts across multiple traditions, including Vedanta, Buddhist, Yoga and Jain, this collection explores how emotional experience is framed, evoked and theorized in order to offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of leading Indian philosophers showcase the unique literary texture, philosophical reflections and theoretical paradigms that classical Indian sources provide in their own right. From solitude in the Saundarananda and psychosomatic theories of (...) disease in the Yogavasistha to female lament in Greek, Sinhala Buddhist and Sanskrit epic tales, their chapters reveal the range and diversity of the phenomena encompassing the English term 'emotion'. In doing so, they contribute towards a more cosmopolitan, comparative and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the field beyond the Western tradition. (shrink)

Indian philosophy has a history of sophisticated linguistic analysis (Pāṇini's grammar being the usual example), which includes theories of reference, polysemy, ellipsis, sentential unity, figurative language, and more. Roy Tzohar's A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor is a sustained argument for attending both to the intertextual nature of Indian philosophy and to the philosophical importance of topics such as metaphor and figurative language. Tzohar's central thesis is that Sthiramati, a fifth- or sixth-century CE Indian Buddhist thinker, has a (...) theory of metaphor ("metaphor" being Tzohar's preferred translation of the Sanskrit upacāra) which can be understood more broadly as a theory of meaning. (shrink)

This is a reply to the essays by Catherin Prueitt, Sonam Kachru, and Roy Tzohar on the problem of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, from a panel at the American Academy of Religion. I argue that the problem of explaining genuine intersubjectivity, as opposed to parallel subjectivity remains unsolved.

In this book, Roy Bhaskar sets out to revindicate ontology, critiquing the reduction of being in favor of knowledge, which he calls the "epistemic fallacy".

Introduction: Critical realism, hegelian dialectic and the problems of philosophy preliminary considerations -- Objectives of the book -- Dialectic : an initial orientation -- Negation -- Four degrees of critical realism -- Prima facie objections to critical realism -- On the sources and general character of the hegelian dialectic -- On the immanent critique and limitations of the hegelian dialectic -- The fine structure of the hegelian dialectic -- Dialectic : the logic of absence, arguments, themes, perspectives, configurations -- Absence (...) -- Emergence -- Contradiction I : Hegel and Marx -- Contradiction II : misunderstandings -- On the materialist diffraction of dialectic -- Dialectical arguments and the unholy trinity -- Dialectical motifs : tina formation, mediation, concrete universality, etc -- On the generalized theory of the dialectical remark, the failure of detachment, and the presence of the past -- Dialectical critical naturalism -- Towards a real definition of dialectic -- Dialectical critical realism and the dialectic of freedom -- Ontology -- The dialectic of truth -- On the emergence and derivability of dialecticized transcendental realism -- 1m realism : non-identity -- 2e realism : negativity -- Space, time and tense -- Social science, explanatory critique, emancipatory axiology -- 3l realism : totality -- 4d realism : agency -- The dialectic of desire to freedom -- Dialectical critical realism and the dialectics of critical realism -- Metacritical dialectics : irrealism and its consequences -- Irrealism -- The problems of philosophy and their resolution -- Contradictions of the critical philosophy -- Dilemmas of the beautiful soul and the unhappy consciousness -- Master and slave : from dialectics of reconciliation to dialectics of liberation -- The metacritique of the hegelian dialectic -- Marxian dialectic i: the rational kernel in the mystical shell -- Marxian dialectic ii: the mystical shell in the rational kernel -- Metacritical dialectics : philosophical ideologies, their sublation and explanation -- The consequences of irrealism -- Diffracted and retotalized dialectics -- Dialectic as the pulse of freedom. (shrink)

The eclipse riddle -- Seeing surfaces -- The disappearing act -- Spinning shadows -- Berkeley's shadow -- Para-reflections -- Para-refractions : shadowgrams and the black drop -- Goethe's colored shadows -- Filtows -- Holes in the light -- Black and blue -- Seeing in black and white -- We see in the dark -- Hearing silence.

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one formal logic that correctly (or best, or legitimately) codifies the logical consequence relation in natural language. This essay provides a taxonomy of different variations on the logical pluralist theme based on a five-part structure, and then identifies an unoccupied position in this taxonomy: perspectival logical pluralism. Perspectival pluralism provides an attractive position from which to formulate a philosophy of logic from a feminist perspective (and from other, identity-based perspectives, such (...) as critical race theory). An example of how such an account might be developed is sketched. The essay concludes by defusing an obvious objection to the perspectival approach: the claim that the correct logic (or logics), in virtue of the formal nature of logic, should be independent of considerations regarding the identity of the reasoner. (shrink)

Is philosophy worth it? -- Explanation and the laws of nature -- Reference, truth, and meaning -- Causality, change, and emergence -- Making it happen (social agency) -- Dialectic -- Living well -- Dialectic critical realism -- Socrates and so on? -- Philosophy and the dialectic of emancipation -- Appendix: explaining philosophies.

Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums--for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before (...) He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor. (shrink)

This book examines the intricate dynamics of when individuals adhere to laws, taking into account the context in which laws attempt to shape human behavior. While existing literature touches upon various reasons why people comply with laws, the book focuses on a critical question which has been missing from the discussion: when do people obey laws? By treating law as a form of social communication, it develops an integrated framework to answer this question. It explores how social, psychological, and institutional (...) conditions shape compliance decisions of individuals. What does a law signify? When does the compulsion to obey arise? When do individuals comply out of a fear for legal sanctions or social repercussions? Why do some laws have high symbolic values and others fail despite harsh punishments? The book unveils the contextual intricacies that underlie obedience to law. It challenges conventional wisdom and offers a fresh perspective on the power and limitations of law in shaping human behavior. For scholars and academics seeking a deeper understanding of legal compliance and role of law in shaping behaviors, this book will be an indispensable resource. (shrink)

The Vedanta of conciousness : transcendence, enlightenment and everyday life -- The alienated self and the Kabbala of transformation -- The Zen of creativity and the critique of the discursive intellect -- The Tao of love and unconditionality in commitment -- The yoga of action and effortless efficiency -- The nous of perception and the re-enchantment of the tree of life -- The gnosis of freedom and the Fana of fulfilment.

An entertaining history of the idea of nothing - including absences, omissions, and shadows - from the Ancient Greeks through the 20th century How can nothing cause something? The absence of something might seem to indicate a null or a void, an emptiness as ineffectual as a shadow. In fact, 'nothing' is one of the most powerful ideas the human mind has ever conceived. This short and entertaining book by Roy Sorensen is a lively tour of the history and philosophy (...) of nothing, explaining how various thinkers throughout history have conceived and grappled with the mysterious power of absence -- and how these ideas about shadows, gaps, and holes have in turned played a very positive role in the development of some of humankind's most important ideas. Filled with Sorensen's characteristically entertaining mix of anecdotes, puzzles, curiosities, and philosophical speculation, the book is ordered chronologically, starting with the Taoists, the Buddhists, and the ancient Greeks, moving forward to the middle ages and the early modern period, then up to the existentialists and present day philosophy. The result is a diverting tour through the history of human thought as seen from a novel and unusual perspective. (shrink)

Using labelled formulae, a cut-free sequent calculus for intuitionistic propositional logic is presented, together with an easy cut-admissibility proof; both extend to cover, in a uniform fashion, all intermediate logics characterised by frames satisfying conditions expressible by one or more geometric implications. Each of these logics is embedded by the Gödel–McKinsey–Tarski translation into an extension of S4. Faithfulness of the embedding is proved in a simple and general way by constructive proof-theoretic methods, without appeal to semantics other than in the (...) explanation of the rules. (shrink)

Paradoxes are arguments that lead from apparently true premises, via apparently uncontroversial reasoning, to a false or even contradictory conclusion. Paradoxes threaten our basic understanding of central concepts such as space, time, motion, infinity, truth, knowledge, and belief. In this volume Roy T Cook provides a sophisticated, yet accessible and entertaining, introduction to the study of paradoxes, one that includes a detailed examination of a wide variety of paradoxes. The book is organized around four important types of paradox: the semantic (...) paradoxes involving truth, the set-theoretic paradoxes involving arbitrary collections of objects, the Soritical paradoxes involving vague concepts, and the epistemic paradoxes involving knowledge and belief. In each of these cases, Cook frames the discussion in terms of four different approaches one might take towards solving such paradoxes. Each chapter concludes with a number of exercises that illustrate the philosophical arguments and logical concepts involved in the paradoxes. _Paradoxes_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students in a wide variety of disciplines who wish to understand the important role that paradoxes have played, and continue to play, in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The No-No Paradox consists of a pair of statements, each of which ?says? the other is false. Roy Sorensen claims that the No-No Paradox provides an example of a true statement that has no truthmaker: Given the relevant instances of the T-schema, one of the two statements comprising the ?paradox? must be true (and the other false), but symmetry constraints prevent us from determining which, and thus prevent there being a truthmaker grounding the relevant assignment of truth values. Sorensen's view (...) is mistaken: situated within an appropriate background theory of truth, the statements comprising the No-No Paradox are genuinely paradoxical in the same sense as is the Liar (and thus, on Sorensen's view, must fail to have truth values). This result has consequences beyond Sorensen's semantic framework. In particular, the No-No Paradox, properly understood, is not only a new paradox, but also provides us with a new type of paradox, one which depends upon a general background theory of the truth predicate in a way that the Liar Paradox and similar constructions do not. (shrink)

This introduction reflects on the themes of viscosity, death and the Other in three essays, written by John Milbank, Julia Hell, and Martin Jay, which provide a response — respectively — to three of Professor Zygmunt Bauman’s key works: Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust, and Liquid Modernity.

In ‘A New Route to the Necessity of Origin’, Rohbraugh and deRosset offer an argument for the Necessity of Origin appealing neither to Suffciency of Origin nor to a branching-times model of necessity. What is doing the crucial work in their argument is instead the thesis they name ‘Locality of Prevention’. In this response, we object that their argument is question-begging by showing, first, that the locality of prevention thesis is not strong enough to satisfactorily derive from it the intended (...) conclusion, and, second, that the argument is not sound unless the Necessity of Origin is operating as an implicit premiss. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1979, The Possibility of Naturalism has been one of the most influential works in contemporary philosophy of science and social science. It is a cornerstone of the critical realist position, which is now widely seen as offering a viable alternative to move positivism and postmodernism. This revised edition includes a new foreword.

Following on from Roy Bhaskarâe(tm)s first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, establishes the conception of social science as explanatoryâe"and thence emancipatoryâe"critique. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation starts from an assessment of the impasse of contemporary accounts of science as stemming from an incomplete critique of positivism. It then proceeds to a systematic exposition of scientific realism in the form of transcendental realism, highlighting a conception of science as explanatory (...) of a structured, differentiated and changing world. Turning to the social domain, the book argues for a view of the social order as conditioned by, and emergent from, nature. Advocating a critical naturalism, the author shows how the transformational model of social activity together with the conception of social science as explanatory critique which it entails, resolves the divisions and dualisms besetting orthodox social and normative theory: between society and the individual, structure and agency, meaning and behavior, mind and body, reason and cause, fact and value, and theory and practice. The book then goes on to discuss the emancipatory implications of social science and sketches the nature of the depth investigation characteristically entailed. In the highly innovative third part of the book Roy Bhaskar completes his critique of positivism by developing a theory of philosophical discourse and ideology, on the basis of the transcendental realism and critical naturalism already developed, showing how positivism functions as a restrictive ideology of and for science and other social practices. (shrink)

Offering a Canadian perspective on the emotional health of servicemen and women, Military Operations and the Mind brings together researchers and practitioners from across the country to consider the impact that ethical issues have on the well-being of those who serve. Stemming from an initiative to enhance the lives of serving members by providing them with the best education and training in military ethics before and after deployments, this volume will better inform politics and public policies and enhance the welfare (...) of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women who serve in singular, often harsh, and sometimes dangerous conditions. By integrating into the analysis the critical issue of well-being, this emerging field demonstrates a more holistic approach and is distinct from other fields in military, historical, philosophical, and behavioural studies. The first study of its kind, Military Operations and the Mind presents a new and helpful way to focus on the life of soldiers not only in operations overseas, but also once they return home. (shrink)

Ethics in the West too often equates morality with universal moral principles, thus imposing lifestyles and moral criteria that do not respect differences and local histories. Even Christianity proposes ethics that is based on eternal, absolute and universal truths or principles, independent of sociocultural and historical contexts. The problem is that these universal moral laws become a means of social control to exclude those who are different: non-Christian religions, nonwhite races, non-Western cultures, and poor and marginalized social classes everywhere. To (...) these can be added minorities marginalized because of sexual orientation, physical handicaps, and women of all sectors and cultures. Another kind of ethics is urgent. For these reasons, Christians in Latin America and other parts are seeking innovative ways of envisioning ethics from their marginalized and discriminated social locations in order to find another possible ethics, an ethics that is not universal and not based on eternal truths or principles, but rather is contextual and historical and that takes into account real-life realities. Only an ethics that does this will be liberative. Important steps toward this other possible ethics have been taken by the theology of liberation by developing a contextual and intercultural morality. (shrink)

The history of contemporary metaphysics shows there are two schools of thought. One for whom the analysis of categories assumes primarily an epistemological character and on the other hand some believe that the field to be investigated is rather to be approached in primarily ontological terms. Strawson's conception of descriptive metaphysics is a clear example of this approach.

Since its inception in the 1970's, critical realism has grown to address a broad range of subjects, including economics, philosophy, science, and religion. It has also gone through a number of key evolutions that have changed its direction, and seen it develop into a complex and mature branch of philosophy. Critical Realism: A Brief Introduction, is the first book to look back over the entire field of critical realism in one concise and accessible volume. As the originator and chief exponent (...) of CR, Roy Bhaskar draws from his experience of countless introductory lectures, seminars, workshops and courses to give a definitive and compelling account of this increasingly influential, international and multi-disciplinary approach. Its eight chapters examine the following topics: Transcendental Realism and the Philosophy of Science Critical Naturalism and the Philosophy of Social Science Explanatory Critique and Ethics Language and Critical Discourse Analysis The Development of Critical Realism Interdisciplinarity and Applied Critical Realism Modernity, Theories of Science and Metacritique The Advantages of Critical Realism Everything from the definition of CR and its applicability to the social sciences, to explanations of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of meta-reality are addressed in detail, making this the essential introduction for students of CR at all levels. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse the mathematical practices leading to Rafael Bombelli’s L’algebra (1572). The context for the analysis is the Italian algebra practiced by abbacus masters and Renaissance mathematicians of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. We will focus here on the semiotic aspects of algebraic practices and on the organisation of knowledge. Our purpose is to show how symbols that stand for underdetermined meanings combine with shifting principles of organisation to change the character of algebra.