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81Belief 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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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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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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70Defending the Semantic Interpretation: A Reply to FerraroJournal of Indian Philosophy 41 (6): 655-664. 2013.In a recent article in this journal, Giuseppe Ferraro mounted a sustained attack on the semantic interpretation of the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness, an interpretation that has been championed by the authors. The present paper is their reply to that attack
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70Just What Is Cognitive Science Anyway?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (4): 1075-1082. 1999.
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64A Mountain by Any Other Name: A Response to Koji TanakaPhilosophy East and West 63 (3): 335-343. 2013.
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62Second Persons and the Constitution of the First PersonHumana Mente 12 (36). 2019.Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists have become accustomed to distinguishing the first person perspective from the third person perspective on reality or experience. This is sometimes meant to mark the distinction between the “objective” or “intersubjective” attitude towards things and the “subjective” or “personal” attitude. Sometimes, it is meant to mark the distinction between knowledge and mere opinion. Sometimes it is meant to mark the distinction between an essentially private and privil…Read more
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60There 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 …Read more
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59Those Concepts Proliferate Everywhere: A Response to Constance KassorPhilosophy East and West 63 (3): 411-416. 2013.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 i…Read more
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58Fate, 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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56Mindfulness 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 sampa…Read more
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55Two Plus One Equals One: A Response to Brook ZiporynPhilosophy East and West 63 (3): 353-358. 2013.
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54Does a Table Have Buddha-Nature?: A Moment of Yes and No. Answer! But Not in Words or Signs! A Response to Mark SideritsPhilosophy East and West 63 (3): 387-398. 2013.
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51What Can't Be Said: Paradox and Contradiction in East Asian ThoughtOxford University Press. 2021."Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers-bot…Read more
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49Hey, 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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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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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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47The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance, by Jonardon Ganeri: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, xii + 374, £40 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1): 186-190. 2014.No abstract
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45Studies in Buddhist Philosophy, by Mark SideritsMind 128 (509): 271-282. 2019.Studies in Buddhist Philosophy, by SideritsMark, ed. Jan Westerhoff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 313.
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43Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a SelfPrinceton University Press. 2022.Why you don’t have a self—and why that’s a good thing In Losing Ourselves, Jay Garfield, a leading expert on Buddhist philosophy, offers a brief and radically clear account of an idea that at first might seem frightening but that promises to liberate us and improve our lives, our relationships, and the world. Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self—and why it actually ma…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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41Madhyamaka, Ultimate Reality, and IneffabilityIn Christian Coseru (ed.), Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits, Springer. pp. 247-258. 2023.Mark Siderits’ contributions to Buddhist philosophy, and to the enterprise he likes to call “fusion philosophy,” are legion. We write this essay in celebration and warm appreciation of his career and his impact on the area.
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40Finnigan, in the course of a careful and astute discussion of the difficulties facing a Buddhist account of the moral agency of a buddha, develops a challenging critique of a proposal I made in Garfield. Much of what she says is dead on target, and I have learned much from her paper. But I have serious reservations about the central thrust both of her critique of my own thought and about her proposal for a positive account of a buddha’s enlightened action. Curiously, in another fine paper, Finni…Read more
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40The 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 fert…Read more
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39Remembering 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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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 |