It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

In _Buddhism As Philosophy_, Mark Siderits makes the Buddhist philosophical tradition accessible to a Western audience. Offering generous selections from the canonical Buddhist texts and providing an engaging, analytical introduction to the fundamental tenets of Buddhist thought, this revised, expanded, and updated edition builds on the success of the first edition in clarifying the basic concepts and arguments of the Buddhist philosophers.

In this clear, concise account, Siderits makes the Buddhist tradition accessible to a Western audience, offering generous selections from the canonical Buddhist texts and providing an engaging, analytical introduction to the basic tenets of Buddhist thought.

"This work is designed to introduce some of the more important fruits of Indian Buddhist metaphysical theorizing to philosophers with little or no prior knowledge of classical Indian philosophy. It is widely known among non-specialists that Buddhists deny the existence of a self. Less widely appreciated among philosophers currently working in metaphysics is the fact that the Indian Buddhist tradition contains a wealth of material on a broad assortment of other issues that have also been foci of recent debate. Indian (...) Buddhist philosophers have argued for a variety of interesting claims about the nature of the causal relation, about persistence, about abstract objects, about the consequences of presentism, about the prospects for a viable ontological emergentism. They engaged in a spirited debate over illusionism in the philosophy of consciousness. Some espoused global anti-realism while others called its coherence into question. And so on. This work is meant to introduce the views of such major Buddhist philosophers as Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti and Nāgārjuna on these and other issues. And it presents their arguments and analyses in a manner meant to make them accessible to students of philosophy who lack specialist knowledge of the Indian tradition. Analytic metaphysicians who are interested in moving beyond the common strategy of appealing to the intuitions of "the folk" should find much of interest here"--. (shrink)

This book initiates a conversation between the two traditions showing how concepts and tools drawn from one philosophical tradition can help solve problems ...

Writing from the vantage points of history, philosophy, and cognitive science, the contributors to this volume clarify the nominalist apoha theory and explore the relationship between apoha and the scientific study of human cognition.

Paleo-compatibilism is the view that the freedom required for moral responsibility is not incompatible with determinism about the factors relevant to moral assessment, since the claim that we are free and the claim that the psychophysical elements are causally determined are true in distinct and incommensurable ways. This is to be accounted for by appealing to the distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth developed by Buddhist Reductionists. Paleo-compatibilists hold that the illusion of incompatibilism only arises when we illegitimately mix (...) two distinct vocabularies, one concerned with persons, the other concerned with the parts to which persons are reducible. I explore the view, its roots in Buddhist Reductionism, and its prospects. (shrink)

This volume brings together nineteen of Mark Siderits's most important essays on Buddhist philosophy. Together they cover a wide range of topics, from metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, to the specific discussions of the interaction between Buddhist and classical Indian philosophy. Each of the essays is followed by a postscript written by Mark Siderits specifically for this volume, which connect the essays with each other, show thematic interrelations, and bring the discussion up to (...) date by addressing developments in the field since the publication of the essays. (shrink)

This systematic introduction to Buddhist ethics is aimed at anyone interested in Buddhism, including students, scholars and general readers. Peter Harvey is the author of the acclaimed Introduction to Buddhism, and his new book is written in a clear style, assuming no prior knowledge. At the same time it develops a careful, probing analysis of the nature and practical dynamics of Buddhist ethics in both its unifying themes and in the particularities of different Buddhist traditions. The book applies Buddhist ethics (...) to a range of issues of contemporary concern: humanity's relationship with the rest of nature; economics; war and peace; euthanasia; abortion; the status of women; and homosexuality. Professor Harvey draws on texts of the main Buddhist traditions, and on historical and contemporary accounts of the behaviour of Buddhists, to describe existing Buddhist ethics, to assess different views within it, and to extend its application into new areas. (shrink)

While Derek Parfit is aware that his reductionism about persons is anticipated in early Buddhism and Abhidharma, he has not explored that tradition for any clues it might yield concerning the consequences of adopting the position. In this essay, the tradition is used to construct a taxonomy of possible views about persons, and then examine the meta-physical commitments that Buddhist reductionists claim are entailed by their view. While these turn out to be significant, it is argued here that this is (...) a price a reductionist should be prepared to pay. (shrink)

One strategy Mādhyamikas use to support their claim that nothing has intrinsic nature (svabhāva) is to argue that things with intrinsic nature could not enter into causal relations. But it is not clear that there is a good Madhyamaka argument against ultimate causation that understands causation in ‘Humean’ terms and understands dharmas as tropes. After exploring the rationale behind the intrinsic-nature criterion of dharma-hood, I survey the arguments Mādhyamikas actually give for their claim that anything dependently originated must be devoid (...) of intrinsic nature, and suggest that none actually succeeds in ruling out this hypothesis about how ultimate causation might work. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Giuseppe Ferraro mounted a sustained attack on the semantic interpretation of the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness, an interpretation that has been championed by the authors. The present paper is their reply to that attack.

Madhyamaka claims that while everything is in fact empty, the use of concepts invariably leads to the error known as prapañca or hypostatisation, in the form of the supposition that there are things with intrinsic nature. This may be put as the claim that all conceptualisation falsifies. But this claim is paradoxical in that its truth would entail its falsity. While Mādhyamikas have not directly addressed this problem, a solution might be found utilizing the resources of contextualist semantics. This paper (...) explores the origins of the paradox by tracing the history of the notion of prapañca, and then examines how a contextualist approach might resolve the difficulty. (shrink)

In this short reply to Levine's critique, I defend the enterprise of 'fusion philosophy.' I agree that the sort of careful scholarly examination of Asian philosophical traditions that is often done under the banner of 'comparative philosophy' is of great importance. But it is a separate question whether those traditions have resources that would help us solve philosophical problems of current interest. This is the question fusion philosophy tries to answer.

_Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness_ explores a variety of different approaches to the study of consciousness developed by Buddhist philosophers in classical India and China. It addresses questions that are still being investigated in cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Certain Buddhist texts contain statements that are prima facie contradictions. The scholarly consensus has been that such statements are meant to serve a rhetorical function that depends on the apparent contradictions being resolvable. But recently it has been claimed that such statements are meant to be taken literally: their authors assert as true statements that are of the form ‘p and not p’. This claim has ramifications for our understanding of the role played by the principle of non-contradiction in Buddhist (...) argumentation. I argue that these make the claim less plausible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Perceiving Particulars:A Buddhist DefenseMark SideritsIn a recent article in this journal, Monima Chadha claimed that the position of certain Buddhist philosophers concerning the perception of particulars is incoherent.1 Her defense of what she calls a "Nyāya-Kantian" position raises interesting questions concerning how we have knowledge of mind-independent reality. While the view that she subscribes to may well be right, I shall try to show that her arguments against the (...) views of the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika Buddhists fail to undermine their position. But some of the issues involved here intersect with underlying themes in the recent debate between Arindam Chakrabarti and Stephen Phillips over the status of indeterminate perception in Nyāya,2 so I shall have something to say about that as well.The basic position I shall seek to defend has the form of a conditional: if we wish to maintain anything like the broadly metaphysical-realist stance that is fundamental to both Yogācāra-Sautrāntika and Nyāya (as well as to Kant), then we need to hold that in at least some cases of perception it is individuals as such that are the objects of our cognitive states. Chadha's discussion leads her to the conclusion that we never perceive particulars as such. Instead, she says, what are cognized in perception are always universal features, so that what are ordinarily thought of as the particulars [End Page 367] that figure in perception are such only relative to a context. Now, I am sympathetic to such a view, since it may be compatible with the sort of antirealism advocated by the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism.3 But this should tell us that something has gone awry here, since the "Nyāya-Kantian" and the Mādhyamika make for uneasy bedfellows. My diagnosis will be that Chadha has misconstrued those realist intuitions that stand behind the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika position. A proper appreciation of these will also turn out to play a role in the defense of indeterminate perception in classical Nyāya.1Let me begin by attending to some terminological matters. In the preceding paragraph I applied the label "metaphysical realist" to the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika school of Buddhism, to Nyāya, and to Kant. Few will question my calling Nyāya realist in any sense of that term, but eyebrows may well go up over my calling Yogāca ¯ra Sautrāntika (or at least the Yogācāra wing of this syncretic school) by the same name in the same breath. Yogācāra is, after all, aptly called a species of subjective idealism, for it denies the existence of physical objects. Metaphysical realism is usually understood as the view that truth is determined by the nature of mind-independent reality (by "what is there anyway"), and do not subjective idealists deny the existence of all mind-independent entities? But "mind independence" here does not mean being independent of cognition, but rather being independent of the concepts that we happen to employ. The metaphysical realist is thus one who holds that there is a quite determinate way that things ultimately are apart from any and all schemes of conceptualization. Understood in this way, metaphysical realism is something that is subscribed to by such subjective idealists as the Yogācārins and Berkeley.4 While they maintain that nothing exists apart from mind or the mental,5 they also hold that this fact is quite independent of the ways in which we or any other cognizers conceptualize reality. Subjective idealism is but one of a large number of ontological views that might properly be called realist in the present sense.But, then, what of Kant? Surely Kant is rightly thought of as maintaining that all of the phenomenal world is in some sense the result of processes of conceptual construction, so how can he be called a metaphysical realist? It is true that much of what is currently called antirealism has a distinctively Kantian pedigree. But to read Kant himself in this way, one must either disregard or else reinterpret much of what he has to say concerning the thing-in... (shrink)

Recent developments in technology and material culture suggest that physicalism may come to be accepted as the commonsense view of the constitution of persons. Like many other spiritual practices, Buddhism has traditionally relied on a dualist understanding of human nature, according to which persons are made up of both physical and nonphysical entities and events. Would anything central to the Buddhist project be lost if that were replaced by physicalism? Clearly the Yogācāra doctrine of consciousness-only would be undermined. But it (...) is claimed that apart from this there is little that is crucial to Buddhism that would be threatened by the development of a thoroughly physicalist culture. (shrink)

Given how much the issue of the self and diachronic personal identity has been discussed in recent decades, one might wonder why something like Benovsky's pluralist-self view has not already been proposed and critically examined. It does, after all, look promising as a way to negotiate a settlement between the partisans of self and of nonself. For it gives the first party what it says it wants—ontological commitment to selves—while also granting the nonself theorists their core claim that there is (...) no single entity that is the referent of "I." But I doubt that any such settlement can last.Benovsky claims to have some sympathy for the view that I call Buddhist Reductionism, and his pluralist-self view does at first... (shrink)

Buddhism is sometimes said to hold a pragmatic conception of truth, according to which a statement is true just in case it leads to the attainment of one’s goals. Since a true utterance would then be one that is likely to lead to the attainment of the interlocutor’s goals, this would show that the Buddha was not inconsistent when he said seemingly incompatible things on different occasions: to assess the truth of an utterance one must consider the context, which includes (...) the goals and the capacities and dispositions of one’s interlocutor. Today, there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of consensus concerning the nature of the good life; the liberal state is widely seen as the ideal political formation precisely because it leaves room for individual variation in conceptions of the good. In such a context, adopting a pragmatic conception of truth would have the result that truth was whatever worked for the individual given the goals they happen to hold. Presumably, a Buddhist would reject this idea of true belief as belief that leads to individual gratification. In order to support this rejection, they would need to claim that certain goals are intrinsically more worthy of attainment than others. The question could then be raised whether such a claim is compatible with a pragmatic conception of truth. Various possible responses to this question are explored, the aim being not only to determine what a Buddhist ought to say about truth, but also to find out something about the nature of truth as a value. (shrink)

A shorter and less technical treatment of its subject than the author’s acclaimed _Buddhism As Philosophy_ (second edition, Hackett, 2021), Mark Siderits's _The Buddha’s Teachings As Philosophy_ explores three different systems of thought that arose from core claims of the Buddha. By detailing and critically examining key arguments made by the Buddha and developed by later Buddhist philosophers, Siderits investigates the Buddha's teachings as philosophy: a set of claims—in this case, claims about the nature of the world (...) and our place in it—supported by rational argumentation and, here, developed with a variety of systematic results. _The Buddha’s Teachings As Philosophy_ will be especially useful to students of philosophy, religious studies, and comparative religion—to anyone, in fact, encountering Buddhist philosophy for the first time. (shrink)

A Response to Karsten Struhl’s “What Kind of an Illusion is the Illusion of Self”.

Ever since Dignāga drew his bright line between conceptually mediated inference and concept-free perception, there have been efforts to erase it and make cross-border traffic in concepts perfectly legitimate.1 If we understand conceptualization as a mental operation of abstraction that yields knowledge of general, repeatable features or commonalities and facilitates such cognitive operations as categorization, inference, and analogical thought, then we can add Kant to the list of prominent critics of Dignāga's border wall. Here I shall first describe how this (...) wall was built, then present some of the cracks that soon appeared. I then explore some ways of resolving the tension between... (shrink)