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9Review of Boden ed, Dimensions of Creativity (review)Philosophical Psychology 9 (3): 395-397. 1996.
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2Review of V Hardcastle, How to Build a Theory in Cognitive Science (review)Philosophical Psychology 11 (1): 89-91. 1998.
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35The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (edited book)Oup Usa. 2011.The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy provides the advanced student or scholar a set of introductions to each of the world's major non-European philosophical traditions.
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8Review of KC Chakrabarti, Definition and Induction: A Historical and Comparative Study (review)Metascience 6 (1): 134-138. 1997.
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121Moonshadows. Conventional Truth in Buddhist PhilosophyOxford University Press. 2011.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 o…Read more
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152The myth of Jones and the mirror of nature: Reflections on introspectionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (September): 1-26. 1989.
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75Just What Is Cognitive Science Anyway?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (4): 1075-1082. 1999.
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18This is not a general essay on the craft and institution of translation, though some of the claims and arguments I proffer here might generalize. I am concerned in particular with the activity of the translation of Asian Buddhist texts into English in the context of the current extensive transmission of Buddhism to the West, in the context of the absorption of cultural influences of the West by Asian Buddhist cultures, and in the context of the increased interaction between Buddhist practitioner…Read more
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24Erratum to: Max Charlesworth’s Sophia: The First Half-Century and the Next (review)Sophia 52 (1): 217-217. 2013.
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47As a critic, I am in the unenviable position of agreeing with nearly all of what Mark does in this lucid, erudite and creative book. My comments will hence not be aimed at showing what he got wrong, as much as an attempt from a Madhyamaka point of view to suggest another way of seeing things, in particular another way of seeing how one might think of how Madhyamaka philosophers, such as Någårjuna and Candrak¥rti, see conventional truth, our engagement with conventional truth, and the status of p…Read more
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445Dependent arising and the emptiness of emptiness: Why did nāgārjuna start with causation?Philosophy East and West 44 (2): 219-250. 1994.
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3Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (fundamental verses of the middle way): Chapter 24: Examination of the Four Noble TruthsIn Jay Garfield & William Edelgass (eds.), Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, Oup Usa. pp. 26--34. 2009.
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30Coherence as an explanation for theory of mind task failure in autismMind and Language 17 (3). 2002.O’Loughlin and Thagard (2000) present a specific computational implementation of the idea that the problems encountered by a child with autism in classic False Belief tasks derive from a failure to maintain coherence among multiple propositions. They argue that this failure can be explained as a structural feature of a connectionist network attempting to maintain coherence. The current paper criticizes this implementation because it falsely predicts that the same children will have a parallel pr…Read more
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38Mmountains are just mountainsIn Mario D'Amato, Jay L. Garfield & Tom J. F. Tillemans (eds.), Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 71--82. 2009.four ancestry, is that there are . A proposition may be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, neither true nor false , ,.
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155Vasubandhu's treatise on the three natures translated from the tibetan edition with a commentaryAsian Philosophy 7 (2). 1997.Trisvabh vanirdeśa (Treatise on the Three Natures) is Vasubandhu's most mature and explicit exposition of the Yogc c ra doctrine of the three natures and their relation to the Buddhist idealism Vasubandhu articulates. Nonetheless there are no extent commentaries on this important short test. The present work provides an introduction to the text, its context and principal philosophical theses; a new translation of the text itself; and a close, verse-by-verse commentary on the text explaining the …Read more
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2Madhyamaka and Classical Greek SkepticismIn Georges Dreyfus, Bronwyn Finnigan, Jay Garfield, Guy Newland, Graham Priest, Mark Siderits, Koji Tanaka, Sonam Thakchoe, Tom Tillemans & Jan Westerhoff (eds.), Moonshadows. Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 115--130. 2011.
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392The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika: Nagarjuna's MulamadhyamakakarikaOxford University Press. 1995.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…Read more
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50Hey, Buddha! Don't think! Just act!—A response to Bronwyn finniganPhilosophy East and West 61 (1): 174-183. 2011.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, i…Read more
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36Sellarsian Synopsis: Integrating the ImagesHumana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 21. 2012.Most discussion of Sellars’ deployment of the distinct images of “man-in-the-world” in "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" focus entirely on the manifest and the scientific images. But the original image is important as well. In this essay I explore the importance of the original image to the Sellarsian project of naturalizing epistemology, connecting Sellars’ insights regarding this image to recent work in cognitive development.
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8Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral KnowledgeIn Brad Hooker & Margaret Olivia Little (eds.), Moral particularism, Oxford University Press. 2000.
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59Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (edited book)Columbia University Press. 2010.In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument. _Fate, Time, and Language_ presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction …Read more
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9Macnamara John. A border dispute. The place of logic in psychology. Bradford books. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1986, xv + 212 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 (1): 314-317. 1988.
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Smith CollegeDepartment of Philosophy
Buddhist Studies
Harvard Divinity SchoolDistinguished Professor
Northampton, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Asian Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |