Jay Garfield

Mindfulness is regarded by all scholars and practitioners of all Buddhist traditions as essential not only for the development of insight, but also for the cultivation and maintenance of ethical discipline. The English term denotes the joint operation of what are regarded in Buddhist philosophy of mind as two cognitive functions: sati/smṛti/dran pa, which we might translate as attention in this context (although the semantic range of these terms also encompasses memory or recollection) and sampajañña/samprajanya /shes bzhin , which I will render here as introspective vigilance. The first function involves the fixation of attention on an object, and the second the careful maintenance of that attention and of the attendant attitudes and motivations

For nearly two thousand years Buddhism has mystified and captivated both lay people and scholars alike. Seen alternately as a path to spiritual enlightenment, an system of ethical and moral rubrics, a cultural tradition, or simply a graceful philosophy of life, Buddhism has produced impassioned followers the world over. The Buddhist saint Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century CE, is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. His many works include texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and a set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises. His greatest philosophical work, the Mulamadhyamikakarika--read and studied by philosophers in all major Buddhist schools of Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea--is one of the most influential works in the history of Indian philosophy. Now, in The Foundations of the Philosophy of the Middle Way, Jay L. Garfield provides a clear and and eminently readable translation of Nagarjuna's seminal work, offering those with little of no prior knowledge of Buddhist philosophy a view into the profound logic of the Mulamadhyamikakarika. Translated from the Tibetan, the tradition through which Nagarjuna's philosophical influence has largely been transmitted, Garfield presents a superb translation of Mulamadhyamikakarika in its entirety. Illuminating the systematic character of Nagarjuna's reasoning, as well as the works profundity, Garfield shows how Nagarjuna develops his doctrine that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence and essenceless. But, he argues, phenomena nonetheless exist conventionaly, and that indeed conventional existence and ultimate emptiness are in fact the same thing. This represents the radical understanding of the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths, or two levels of reality. Nagarjuna reinterprets all of Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology through this analytical framework--"a systematic and beautifully elegant philosophical dissection of reality." In turn, Garfield goes on to offer the only verse-by-verse commentary based upon the Indo-Tibetan Prasangika-Madhyamika reading of Nagarjuna, the school most influential in the development of Mahayana philosophy in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. Written specifically for the Western reader, the commentary explains Nagarjuna's positions and arguments in the language of Western metaphysics and epistemology, and connects Nagarjuna's concerns tho those of Western philosophers such as Sextus, Hume, and Wittgenstein. A fascinating and accessible translation of the foundational text for all Mahayana Buddhism text, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way will enlighten all those in search of the essence of reality.

Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument.Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation.Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes.Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introduction and editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book.

‘Ju Mipham Rinpoche, (1846-1912) an important figure in the _Ris med_, or non- sectarian movement influential in Tibet in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, was an unusual scholar in that he was a prominent _Nying ma_ scholar and _rDzog_ _chen_ practitioner with a solid dGe lugs education. He took dGe lugs scholars like Tsong khapa and his followers seriously, appreciated their arguments and positions, but also sometimes took issue with them directly. In his commentary to Candrak¥rti’s _Madhyamakåvatåra, _Mi pham argues that Tsong khapa is wrong to take Candrak¥rti’s rejection of the reflexive character of consciousness to be a rejection of the _conventional _existence of reflexive awareness. Instead, he argues, Candrak¥rti only intends to reject the reflexivity of awareness _ultimately_, and, indeed, Mipham argues, it is simply _obvious _that conventionally, consciousness is reflexive

In conversation, in the lecture hall, in the Dharma centre and in the public teaching, Buddhists and students of Buddhism worry about authenticity. Is the doctrine defended in a particular text or is a particular textual interpretation authentic? Is a particular teacher authentic? Is a particular practice authentic? Is a phenomenon under examination in a scholarly research project authentically Buddhist? If the doctrine, teacher, practice or phenomenon is not authentically Buddhist, we worry that it is a fraud, that our scholarship, teaching or religious life is vacuous, or at least that it is not really Buddhist studies or Buddhist practice. It is hard for me to remember a conversation of any length with a Western or Tibetan colleague, or with a serious advanced student in which the term “authenticity” or a cognate did not arise, and in which that term did not function as a term of approbation.

Daya Krishna(Photo courtesy of Jay Garfield)Govind Chandra Pande(Photo courtesy of his daughter amita sharma)Daya Krishna was the public face of Indian philosophy in the first half-century after Indian independence. Nobody on the Indian scene in that period came close to him in influence or in contribution to the profession. Nobody else in the world thought as hard or as fruitfully about the relation of Indian philosophy to that of the rest of the world, and nobody else dared to think as creatively and even as heretically about the history of Indian philosophy itself. To be sure, the Indian philosophical scene during this period was always a vibrant and creative matrix of thought, and many contributed to that ..

Those of us who are involved as teachers, scholars or practitioners with Buddhism in the West are— whether we wish to be or not—involved in a complex process of interaction between two cultures. Just as in the West Socrates urged that the most important task set for us in life is to know ourselves in the Buddhist tradition we are admonished to know the nature of our own minds as the key to awakening. In every Buddhist tradition, to know the nature of the self and its objects is the fundamental prerequisite to cutting off the root of cyclic existence

This question—why did Bodhidharma come from the West?— is ubiquitous in Chinese Ch’an Buddhist literature. Though some see it as an arbitrary question intended merely as an opener to obscure puzzles, I think it represents a genuine intellectual puzzle: Why did Bodhidharma come from theWest—that is, fromIndia? Why couldn’tChina with its rich literary and philosophical tradition have given rise to Buddhism? We will approach that question, but I prefer to do so backwards. I want to ask instead, “why was it so fortuitous for the development of Buddhist philosophy that Bodhidharma wentEast? I will argue that by doing so he gave a trajectory to Buddhist thought about the mind and knowledge that allows certain issues that are obscure in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, despite their centrality to the Buddhist critique of Indian orthodoxy, to come into sharper relief, and hence to complete a project begun, but not completable, in that Indo-European context.

Contemporary semantic theory rests upon lively theoretical disputes about the meaning of words, the proper form of semantic theory, and, ultimately, on the very possibility of semantic theory itself. Jay L. Garfield and Murray Kiteley have collected, in Meaning and Truth, the definitive articles on the history of semantics and the primary voices debating the interpretation of description, the theory of truth intensionality, the structure of meaning, natural language, and the relation of semantics to pragmatics. The details, complexities, and charming eccentricities of language thus become visible against a background of abstract theory. Undergraduate and graduate students of semantics, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language will now be able to encounter all of the important theoretical debates of modern semantics in a single volume. Selections begin with the classic essay by Mill, "Of Names and Propositions," include such standards as "General Semantics" by Lewis and "Actualism" by Plantinga, and conclude with a chapter on "Linguistic Approaches to Semantics."

In the course of a careful and astute discussion of the difficulties facing a Buddhist account of the moral agency of a buddha, Bronwyn Finnigan develops a challenging critique of a proposal I made in a recent article (Garfield 2006). Much of what she says is dead on target, and I have learned much from her comment. But I have serious reservations about both the central thrust of her critique of my own thought and her proposal for a positive account of a buddha’s enlightened action. Curiously, in another fine essay (Finnigan andTanaka forthcoming), Finnigan and her co-author have anticipated much of what I will say in reply. I will rely in part on that second essay in my reply to the critique that appears in this ..

Language has often served both as a metaphor for thought. It is highly plausible that language serves as an epistemic entre into thought and that language structures adult human thought to a considerable degree. The language metaphor is, however, uncritically extended as a literal model of thought.This paper criticizes this extension, arguing that thought is not literally implemented in language and distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of language as a device for understanding thought.

This volume collects essays by philosophers and scholars working at the interface of Western philosophy and Buddhist Studies. Many have distinguished scholarly records in Western philosophy, with expertise in analytic philosophy and logic, as well as deep interest in Buddhist philosophy. Others have distinguished scholarly records in Buddhist Studies with strong interests in analytic philosophy and logic. All are committed to the enterprise of cross-cultural philosophy and to bringing the insights and techniques of each tradition to bear in order to illuminate problems and ideas of the other. These essays address a broad range of topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, and demonstrate the fecundity of the interaction between the Buddhist and Western philosophical and logical traditions.