Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

A book addressed to Western philosophers, arguing that Buddhist philosophy is a resource for their own questions and not merely an object of historical study. Garfield begins with basic Buddhist ideas, such as duḥkha, the unsatisfactoriness of ordinary life, and a sketch of the tradition's history. He then works through topics in turn: metaphysics and dependent origination; emptiness in the Madhyamaka tradition, which he argues commits its thinkers to some true contradictions; the denial of a substantial self, compared with Western theories of personal identity; the long Indian and Tibetan debate over reflexive awareness, where he sides with the Madhyamaka critics; phenomenology, including a phenomenological reading of Yogācāra; epistemology, largely through Tsongkhapa; paradox and language, with Nāgārjuna's philosophy of language; and ethics, which he reads as centred on moral phenomenology, the transformation of how we experience the world, rather than as consequentialism or virtue ethics. Throughout, he argues that philosophers who ignore this tradition limit their own work.

It is a clear case for bringing Buddhist philosophy into mainstream discussions of mind, self, knowledge and ethics, and a good way into Madhyamaka and Yogācāra for readers trained in Western philosophy.