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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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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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393The 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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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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78Buddhism and DemocracyThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 12 157-172. 2001.What is the relation between Buddhism and liberal democracy? Are they compatible frameworks for social value that can somehow be joined to one another to gain a consistent whole? Or, are they antagonistic, forcing those who would be Buddhist democrats into an uncomfortable choice between individually attractive but jointly unsatisfiable values? Another possibility is that they operate at entirely different levels of discourse so that questions regarding their relationship simply do not arise. I …Read more
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Just What is Cognitive Science Anyway?Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (4): 1075-1082. 1999.
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238Problems With the Argument From Fine TuningSynthese 145 (3): 325-338. 2005.The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe is improbable, thus no explan…Read more
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175Empty words: Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretationOxford University Press. 2002.This volume collects Jay Garfield 's essays on Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Buddhist ethics and cross-cultural hermeneutics. The first part addresses Madhyamaka, supplementing Garfield 's translation of Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, a foundational philosophical text by the Buddhist saint Nagarjuna. Garfield then considers the work of philosophical rivals, and sheds important light on the relation of Nagarjuna's views to other Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophical positions
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277The conventional status of reflexive awareness: What's at stake in a tibetan debate?Philosophy East and West 56 (2): 201-228. 2006.‘Ju Mipham Rinpoche, (1846-1912) an important figure in the _Ris med_, or non- sectarian movement influential in Tibet in the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> 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…Read more
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41Remembering Daya Krishna and G. C. Pande: Two Giants of Post-Independence Indian PhilosophyPhilosophy East and West 63 (4): 458-464. 2013.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 creativ…Read more
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Nub phyogs paʼi sems gtsoʼi grub mthaʼ daṅ der rgol ba rnams kyi lugs =Central University of Tibetan Studies. 2011.
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1913 Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist ResponsesIn and D. Shier M. O'Rourke J. K. Campbell (ed.), Freedom and Determinism, Mit Press. 2004.
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84Belief in Psychology: A Study in the Ontology of MindMIT Press. 1988.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 …Read more
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9Meaning and truth: essential readings in modern semantics (edited book)Paragon House. 1991.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 semantic…Read more
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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 |