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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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3The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, translation and commentaryPhilosophy East and West 49 88-91. 1999.
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16Mental representation is a metaphor. It has perhaps become so entrenched that it appears to have been frozen, and it is easy to lose sight of its metaphorical character. Literally, a representation is a re-presentation, a symbol that stands for something else because that thing canÂ’t be with us. I send my parents photos of the grandchildren because e-mail is cheaper than air tickets. I consult a map of Adelaide to find the shortest route to the philosophy department because wandering throug…Read more
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22Thought as language: A metaphor too farProtoSociology 14 85-101. 2000.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 though…Read more
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103Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to PhilosophyOxford University Press USA. 2015.This is a book for scholars of Western philosophy who wish to engage with Buddhist philosophy, or who simply want to extend their philosophical horizons. It is also a book for scholars of Buddhist studies who want to see how Buddhist theory articulates with contemporary philosophy. Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy articulates the basic metaphysical framework common to Buddhist traditions. It then explores questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, epistemolog…Read more
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35In 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 tha…Read more
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11Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy (edited book)Oup Usa. 2009.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 insigh…Read more
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30Those 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 p…Read more
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92Mentalese not spoken here: Computation, cognition and causationPhilosophical Psychology 10 (4): 413-35. 1997.Classical computational modellers of mind urge that the mind is something like a von Neumann computer operating over a system of symbols constituting a language of thought. Such an architecture, they argue, presents us with the best explanation of the compositionality, systematicity and productivity of thought. The language of thought hypothesis is supported by additional independent arguments made popular by Jerry Fodor. Paul Smolensky has developed a connectionist architecture he claims adequa…Read more
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6To Pee and not to Pee? Could That Be the Question? (Further Reflections of the Dog)In Graham Priest, Jc Beall & Bradley P. Armour-Garb (eds.), The law of non-contradiction : new philosophical essays, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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29Pointing at the moon: Buddhism, logic, analytic philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2009.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 insigh…Read more
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30De Villiers and de Villiers (2000) propose that the acquisition of the syntactic device of sentential complementation is a necessary condition for the acquisition of theory of mind (ToM). It might be argued that ToM mastery is simply a consequence of grammatical development. On the other hand, there is also good evidence (Garfield, Peterson & Perry 2001) that social learning is involved in ToM acquisition. We investigate the connection between linguistic and social-cognitive development, arguing…Read more
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59Taking Conventional Truth Seriously: Authority Regarding Deceptive RealityPhilosophy East and West 60 (3): 341-354. 2010.Mädhyamika philosophers in India and Tibet distinguish between two truths: the conventional and the ultimate. It is difficult, however, to say in what sense conventional truth is indeed a truth, as opposed to falsehood. Indeed, many passages in prominent texts suggest that it is entirely false. It is explained here in the sense in which, for Candrakïrti and Tsong khapa, conventional truth is truth
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32Reflections on Reflectivity: Comments on Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, BeingPhilosophy East and West 66 (3): 943-951. 2016.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 d…Read more
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Belief in psychology. A study in the ontology of mindRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 181 (3): 346-347. 1991.
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150Nagarjuna's theory of causality: Implications sacred and profanePhilosophy East and West 51 (4): 507-524. 2001.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 rela…Read more
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106Why did Bodhidharma go to the east? Buddhism’s struggle with the mind in the worldSophia 45 (2): 61-80. 2006.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, “wh…Read more
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15Enthusiasts for the scientific character of Buddhism wax eloquent regarding the insights that the Buddhist tradition can deliver to cognitive science, and the contributions that meditative technique can make to understanding cognitive and affective processes. To be sure, there are contributions in this direction, though their significance may be overestimated. Less attention is paid to the value of cognitive theory for developing Buddhist insights in the 21 st Century, and the role of science in…Read more
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42Max Charlesworth’s Sophia: The First Half-Century and the Next (review)Sophia 51 (4): 419-421. 2012.
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86The meanings of "meaning" and "meaning": Dimensions of the sciences of mindPhilosophical Psychology 13 (4): 421-440. 2000.The naturalization of intentionality requires explaining the supervenience of the normative upon the descriptive. Proper function theory provides an account of the semantics of natural representations, but not of that of signs that require the observance of norms. I therefore distinguish two senses of "meaning" and two correlative senses of "representation" and explain their relationship to one another. I distinguish between indicative signs and semiotic devices. The former are indicators of the…Read more
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76Just Another Word for Nothing Left to LoseIn Matthew R. Dasti & Edwin F. Bryant (eds.), Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 164. 2014.
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103Turning a madhyamaka trick: Reply to Huntington (review)Journal of Indian Philosophy 36 (4): 507-527. 2008.Huntington ; argues that recent commentators err in attributing to Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti a commitment to rationality and to the use of argument, and that these commentators do violence to the Madhyamaka project by using rational reconstruction in their interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s and Candrakīrti’s texts. Huntington argues instead that mādhyamikas reject reasoning, distrust logic and do not offer arguments. He also argues that interpreters ought to recuse themselves from argument in order t…Read more
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530Educating for virtuoso living: Papers from the ninth east-west philosophers' conferencePhilosophy East and West 57 (3): 285-289. 2007.None
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1Choosing coercion and subordination—a preliminary moral study of academic lifeIn Sirkku Hellsten, Marjaana Kopperi & Olli Loukola (eds.), Taking the Liberal Challenge Seriously: Essays on Contemporary Liberalism at the Turn of the 21st Century, Ashgate. pp. 305. 1997.
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49Pain deproblematizedPhilosophical Psychology 14 (1): 103-7. 2001.In this paper I demonstrate that the "pain problem" Dartnall claims to have discovered is in fact no problem at all. Dartnall's construction of the apparent problem, I argue, relies on an erroneous assumption of the unity of consciousness, an erroneous assumption of the simplicity of pain as a phenomenon ignoring crucial neurophysiological and neuroanatomical information, a mistaken account of introspective knowledge according to which introspection gives us inner episodes veridically and in the…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 |