Jay Garfield

In this issue, Constance Kassor describes Gorampa's attitude to contradictions as they occur in various contexts of Buddhist pursuit. We agree with much of what she says; with some things we do not.First, some preliminary comments, and a fundamental disagreement. Kassor says:Based on... [the assumption that Nāgārjuna has a coherent system of thought] one must resolve apparent contradictions in Nāgārjuna's texts in order to maintain the coherency of his logic. The problem with contradictions is that if they are introduced into a classical logical system, that entire system can break down. This is because of the law of explosion—the principle that everything can follow [DGP: does follow] from a contradiction.One..

In his article in this issue, " 'How do Mādhyamikas Think?' Revisited," Tom Tillemans reflects on his earlier article "How do Mādhyamikas Think?" (2009), itself a response to earlier work of ours (Deguchi et al. 2008; Garfield and Priest 2003). There is much we agree with in these non-dogmatic and open-minded essays. Still, we have some disagreements. We begin with a response to Tillemans' first thoughts, and then turn to his second thoughts.Tillemans (2009) maintains that it is wrong to attribute to Nāgārjuna or to his Mādhyamika followers a strong dialetheism, according to which some contradictions of the form p ∧ ¬p are to be accepted. He argues that, nonetheless, a weak dialetheism may be implicit in the..

The period of British colonial rule in India is typically regarded as philosophically sterile. Indian philosophy written in English during the British colonial period is often ignored in histories of Indian philosophy, or, when considered explicitly, dismissed either as uncreative or as inauthentic. The late Daya Krishna thought hard about this at the end of his life, and we have been thinking about this in conversation with him. We show that this dismissal is unjustified and that this is a fertile period for Indian philosophy in which traditional Indian philosophical ideas were brought into dialogue with the West and advanced with great acumen. In this paper, we present one case study to illustrate this point.

It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self. This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations. Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.

Minds Without Fear is an intellectual and cultural history of India during the period of British occupation. It demonstrates that this was a period of renaissance in India in which philosophy--both in the public sphere and in the Indian universities--played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively Indian modernity. The book is also a history of Indian philosophy. It demonstrates how the development of a secular philosophical voice facilitated the construction of modern Indian society and the consolidation of the nationalist movement.

Daya Krishna (1924-2007) was easily the most creative and original Indian philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. His thought and philosophical energy dominated academic Indian philosophy and determined the nature of the engagement of Indian philosophy with Western philosophy during that period. He passed away recently, leaving behind an enormous corpus of published work on a wide range of philosophical topics, as well as a great deal of incomplete, nearly-complete and complete-but-as-yet-unpublished work. Daya Krishna's thought and publications address a broad range of philosophical issues, including issues of global philosophical importance that transcend considerations of particular traditions; issues particular to Indian philosophy; and issues at the intersection of Indian and Western philosophy, especially questions about the philosophy of language and ontology that emerge in the context of his Samvada project that brought together Western philosophers and Nyaya pandits to discuss questions in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. The volume editors have organized the volume as a set of ten couplets and triplets. Each draws together papers from different periods in Daya Krishna's life: some take different approaches to the same problem or text; in some cases, the second paper references and takes issue with arguments developed in the first; in still others, Daya Krishna addresses very different topics, but using the same distinctive philosophical methodology. Each set is introduced by one of the editors. These couplets are framed by two of Daya Krishna's finest metaphilosophical essays, one that introduces his approach, and one that draws some of his grand morals about the discipline. Daya Krishna's daughter, Professor Shail Mayaram of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies contributes a preface, and Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, a longtime colleague of Daya Krisha and a collaborator on some of his most important philosophical ventures has written the introduction.

This is a critical examination of the ontological and methodological commitments of contemporary cognitive science, and more generally, of the relation between the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world. A preliminary characterization is offered of the relationship between these images, and of the nature of intertheoretic reduction in science, followed by an account of the structure of theory, explanation, and account of the psychophysical relation embodied by contemporary cognitive psychology as practiced within the computational framework. It is argued that the relational and intentional character of propositional attitudes poses a prima facie problem for any cognitive psychology which treats of them, viz., that any purely computational account of psychological phenomena is ontologically individualistic in character. Four standard approaches to resolving this problem are considered: Methodological Solipsism; Naturalistic Individualism; Eliminative Computationalism; and Eliminative Materialism. The first two are characterized as attempts to reconcile the propositional attitudes with the demands of computational psychology, and the latter two as proposals for the elimination of the attitudes from psychology. It is argued that the first approach founders on the essentially relational character of the attitudes, and the second as a result of a misconstrual of the necessity of the manifest image for the intelligibility of science, and of the location of the attitudes within the manifest image. Finally, a proposal is offered for a Sellarsian reconceptualization of the nature of cognitive theory and of the nature of propositional representation according to which cognitive psychology is more naturalistic and socially based than is generally thought, and according to which the attitudes can be accommodated as broadly supervenient, relational states of their subjects.

The doctrine of the two truths - a conventional truth and an ultimate truth - is central to Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology. The two truths (or two realities), the distinction between them, and the relation between them is understood variously in different Buddhist schools; it is of special importance to the Madhyamaka school. One theory is articulated with particular force by Nagarjuna (2nd ct CE) who famously claims that the two truths are identical to one another and yet distinct. One of the most influential interpretations of Nagarjuna's difficult doctrine derives from the commentary of Candrakirti (6th ct CE). In view of its special soteriological role, much attention has been devoted to explaining the nature of the ultimate truth; less, however, has been paid to understanding the nature of conventional truth, which is often described as "deceptive," "illusion," or "truth for fools." But because of the close relation between the two truths in Madhyamaka, conventional truth also demands analysis. Moonshadows, the product of years of collaboration by ten cowherds engaged in Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, provides this analysis. The book asks, "what is true about conventional truth?" and "what are the implications of an understanding of conventional truth for our lives?" Moonshadows begins with a philosophical exploration of classical Indian and Tibetan texts articulating Candrakati's view, and uses this textual exploration as a basis for a more systematic philosophical consideration of the issues raised by his account.

Evan Thompson has written a marvelous book. Waking, Dreaming, Being blends intellectual autobiography, phenomenology, cognitive science, studies in Buddhist and Vedānta philosophy, and creative metaphilosophy in an exploration of what it is to be a person, of the nature of consciousness, and of the relation of contemplative to scientific method in the understanding of human life. I have learned a great deal from it, and the community of philosophers and cognitive scientists will be reading and discussing it for some time. But I have come to criticize Thompson, not to praise him. Here I raise a few issues regarding Thompson’s treatment of the self and the connections between his own account and the Madhyamaka and...

We often think of trust as an interpersonal relation, and of the distinction between trust and reliance as a distinction between kinds of interpersonal relations. Indeed this is often the case. I may trust one colleague but not find her reliable; rely on another but find him untrustworthy; both trust and rely on my best friend; neither trust nor rely on my dean. One of us has discussed the nature of such relations and distinctions at length. But trust is not only an interpersonal matter. Human society comprises not only individuals but also institutions, and indeed individuals who occupy crucial institutional roles. We often individually or collectively trust, distrust, rely on, or fail or refuse to rely on such institutions or institutional players qua players. In this essay we explore the structure, scope and value of such institutional trust and distrust, which we call “public trust.” Public trust, we will argue, plays a central role in constituting the public sphere and in structuring societies in which it is worth living.

There are two temptations to be resisted when approaching Buddhist moral theory. The first is to assimilate Buddhist ethics to some system of Western ethics, usually either some form of Utilitarianism or some form of virtue ethics. The second is to portray Buddhist ethical thought as constituting some grand system resembling those that populate Western metaethics. The first temptation, of course, can be avoided simply by avoiding the second. In Buddhist philosophical and religious literature we find many texts that address moral topics, and a great deal of attention devoted to accounts of virtuous and vicious actions, virtuous and vicious states of character and of virtuous and vicious lives. However, we find very little direct attention to the articulation of sets of principles that determine which actions, states of character or motives are virtuous or vicious, and no articulation of sets of obligations or rights.

Nāgārjuna argues for the fundamental importance of causality, and dependence more generally, to our understanding of reality and of human life: his account of these matters is generally correct. First, his account of interdependence shows how we can clearly understand the nature of scientific explanation, the relationship between distinct levels of theoretical analysis in the sciences (with particular attention to cognitive science), and how we can sidestep difficulties in understanding the relations between apparently competing ontologies induced by levels of description or explanation supervening on one another. Then rGyal tshab's exposition of Dharmakīrti's account, in the pramānasiddhi chapter of the "Pramāṇavarttika", of the necessity of a belief in rebirth for the cultivation of bodhicitta is examined. This account is accepted in the dGe lugs tradition both as an accurate representation of Dharmakīrti's views and as authoritative regarding bodhicitta and the mahākarunā that is its necessary condition. But Dharmakīrti, rGyal tshab, and their followers, by virtue of accepting this argument, neglect Nāgārjuna's account of dependent arising and in consequence are implicated in what might be seen from a proper Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka point of view as the very subtlest form of self-grasping