Tradition
Buddhist
Buddhist philosophy is the body of thought that grew from the Buddha's teaching on suffering, impermanence, no-self and dependent arising.
It began in India with the Buddha, around the fifth century BCE, and developed through Abhidharma analysis, the Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna, the Yogacara of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, and the logic and epistemology of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. The dialogue between Nagasena and King Milinda discusses the self. In China Jizang, Xuanzang and Fazang developed Madhyamaka, Yogacara and Huayan, and Chan and Pure Land spread across East Asia, while Tibet kept the Indian schools alive. It answers questions on personal identity (1.3.2), perception, inference, causation, skepticism and how to end suffering.
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Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
This year I have been reading the Kyoto School slowly. The book that has helped me most this year is Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, read slowly in Japanese with the English translation beside it. Nishitani, who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg…
Started by Aiko Tanabe4 replies -
Is Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness the same as modern stage theory?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and have read about Buddhist philosophy for years, mostly in tea houses. Recently a friend showed me a chart of Western theories of persistence and pointed to one called exdurantism or stage theory: nothing strictly…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
Frankfurt’s unwilling addict and the men in my prison reading class
Last month my prison reading class read a summary of Harry Frankfurt's essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", and it landed harder than anything we've read. Frankfurt distinguishes first-order desires (I want a drink) from second-order desires…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
Nāgārjuna asked what proves the means of knowledge. Is that Agrippa’s trilemma in Sanskrit?
I have been translating parts of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī (often rendered "The Dispeller of Disputes"), and one argument keeps reminding me of the Agrippan problem people discuss under foundationalism and coherentism. The opponent is a realist of the Nyāya type who says objects…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here is my confusion. Buddhism teaches anattā, no self. Everything arises from causes and conditions; nothing is…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies -
If almost nothing the Cārvākas wrote survives, how do we know what they thought?
I've been reading about the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, the Indian materialists, and every introduction says something like "almost no Cārvāka text survives; the school is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote." As someone who studies texts, this worries me. If…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?
Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion.…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
One source of knowledge, two, four, five or six? Why Indian schools argued over the count
My working epistemology is Bayesian: there is one way to learn, which is to update on evidence. So I was surprised to find that classical Indian philosophers organised epistemology around a different question, how many sources of knowledge (pramāṇa) there are, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
What is apoha, and how can a word mean something by excluding everything else?
Please be gentle; I'm new to formal philosophy. In a seminar on translation someone mentioned that the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga held that the word “cow” means something like “not non-cow”. Everyone nodded. I laughed, because it sounded like a riddle, and then…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Why trekkers weep at the top of the Thorong La, and whether Kant would understand
Eight months a year I take groups over the Thorong La on the Annapurna circuit. At the top, a little over 5,400 metres, something happens to about one person in five. They cry. Strong people, bankers, soldiers. They are exhausted and the…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Functionalism is officially neutral, but in practice it is materialism with better manners
Functionalism says mental states are defined by their causal roles: pain is whatever state is caused by damage, causes distress and avoidance, and so on, regardless of what realises it. Putnam's argument from multiple realisability in the 1960s made it the default…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Is it fair to call Nāgārjuna or Śrīharṣa a sceptic at all?
In English books on Indian philosophy two names are regularly filed under "scepticism": Nāgārjuna, the Buddhist founder of Madhyamaka, and Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin whose Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (roughly "The Sweets of Refutation") takes apart the Nyāya definitions of valid cognition one after another.…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I came to philosophy from physics, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for forty years, so I came to Fazang's writings expecting to find something about parts and wholes I could recognise. Instead I found the dialogue about the rafter and the building, in which the claim is made…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Ageing is a disease, and medicine should treat it as one
I'll argue this as an outsider to medicine and expect to be corrected. Ageing is the largest single risk factor for most of what kills people in rich countries: cancers, heart disease, dementia. It involves the progressive failure of almost every bodily…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice. Consider…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo6 replies -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
There is one problem in Nāgārjuna I have been chewing on for a long time. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only attacks and never defends a position, so they risk nothing and cannot be wrong. That seems fair as…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Frege said logic is not psychology. A materialist would like a word
In the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege lays down as his first principle that the psychological must be sharply separated from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Husserl later made the anti-psychologism case at length in the Prolegomena…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Does general anaesthesia switch experience off, or only the memory of it?
Last month, a patient I was interpreting for asked before surgery whether she would "be there" during the operation and simply forget it, or whether she would not be there at all. I passed on the reassuring answer she was given. Afterwards…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I read Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
Is negative utilitarianism the most compassionate moral theory, or the most dangerous one?
On the trekking routes I meet a lot of young Westerners who have read a little philosophy and a little Buddhism, and lately some of them talk about negative utilitarianism: the view that morality is about minimising suffering, not maximising happiness. Karl…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
Here is a question I keep returning to on long evenings. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says the innermost self is identical with ultimate reality. Buddhism says there is no permanent self at all. Two traditions, the same region,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies