Tradition
Buddhist
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The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
A question from a materialist with a soft spot for Indian epistemology. In epistemic logic, positive introspection (the KK principle) says: if you know P, you know that you know P. Hintikka built it into his system. It's attractive: surely knowledge is…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies -
What are the Nyāya hetvābhāsas, and do they line up with the Western list of fallacies?
I've been reading about Nyāya logic on weekends. I keep meeting the word hetvābhāsa, usually translated "fallacy" or "pseudo-reason", and a list of five kinds. My questions, as a non-specialist: What are the five, in plain terms, with an example of each…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Two ways of holding no view: Nāgārjuna and Sextus Empiricus on suspending judgement
The Madhyamaka dialectician and the Pyrrhonist physician look like twins. Read closely, they are doing different things, and the difference is instructive.
Started by Meera KulkarniReply first (no replies yet) -
Nāgasena’s condition for talking with a king: argue as scholars do, not as kings do
Early in the Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, the king asks the monk Nāgasena to discuss with him. Nāgasena answers with a condition. He will talk if the king will talk as scholars do, not as kings do. What's the difference?…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
What are Udayana’s arguments for God, and whom was he arguing against?
I am an atheist, and I am tired of Western debates about God being treated as the only debates. India had a long, sophisticated argument about a creator, and I know far less about the theist side of it than I should.…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it. Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of scripture. Every rival school gave them the same knock-down reply: you reject…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
The Abhidharma was the most thorough reductionism ever attempted. Was it right?
I taught chemistry for years, and when I first studied the Abhidhamma I recognised something familiar: a periodic table of experience. The Abhidharma traditions analyse everything a person is into ultimate constituents, dhammas: momentary events of consciousness, mental factors, material qualities. In…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think the thinker of thinking,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Global scepticism refutes itself, and the famous escape routes do not work
The objection is old and short. If nothing can be known, then that nothing can be known cannot be known either. Global scepticism saws off the branch it sits on. Two escapes are usually offered, and I want to argue that neither…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
What is apoha, and does defining by exclusion help with the frog-and-fly problem?
I teach philosophy at an upper-secondary school in Lund, and my hobby is reading Sanskrit philosophers in translation and noticing where they reached our problems first. I would like a clear explanation of one idea I only half understand. Dignāga, the fifth-…
Started by Oskar Nyberg4 replies -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Nirmala JayasekaraReply first (no replies yet) -
What is epistemology? A beginner’s guide to the theory of knowledge
Four questions, two ways of asking them, and why a lucky guess is the best place to start.
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-hoReply first (no replies yet) -
Xuanzang
Xuanzang was a Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar and translator who travelled overland to India, studying at Nālandā before returning to Chang'an in 645 with…
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The Buddha
The Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, was a teacher from the Shakya clan of the northern Indian plain whose teaching became the foundation of Buddhism. His…
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Vasubandhu
Vasubandhu was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, traditionally from Gandhāra, who wrote one of the great summaries of Abhidharma thought and later became, with his…
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Nagasena
Nāgasena is the Buddhist monk who answers the questions of the Indo-Greek King Milinda (usually identified with Menander I) in the Milindapañha. Whether a…
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Jizang
Jizang was a Chinese Buddhist monk of the Sui and early Tang periods, of Parthian descent, who systematised the Sanlun ('Three Treatises') school, the…
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Fazang
Fazang was a Chinese Buddhist monk of the Tang dynasty, active in Chang'an and Luoyang, who is traditionally counted as the third patriarch of…
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Dharmottara
Dharmottara was an Indian Buddhist philosopher of around the eighth century, an influential commentator on Dharmakīrti's epistemology. He is now often cited for a…
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Dignāga
Dignāga was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, traditionally said to come from near Kāñcī in south India and to have studied under Vasubandhu's tradition. He…
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Dharmakīrti
Dharmakīrti was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, traditionally associated with Nalanda, who developed Dignāga's theory of the means of knowledge (pramāṇa) into a comprehensive system.…
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Asaṅga
Asaṅga was an Indian Buddhist monk of the fourth century CE, traditionally from Gandhāra and the elder brother of Vasubandhu. With his brother he…
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Nagarjuna
Indian Buddhist philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') school of Mahayana Buddhism. He argued that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature because…