Jay Garfield

In 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 that it is a fraud, that our scholarship, teaching or religious life is vacuous, or at least that it is not really Buddhist studies or Buddhist practice. It is hard for me to remember a conversation of any length with a Western or Tibetan colleague, or with a serious advanced student in which the term “authenticity” or a cognate did not arise, and in which that term did not function as a term of approbation.

"'Buddhist Ethics' presents an outline of Buddhist ethical thought. It is not a defense of Buddhist approaches to ethics as opposed to any other, nor is it a critique of the Western tradition. Garfield presents a broad overview of a range of Buddhist approaches to the question of moral philosophy. He argues that while there are important points of contact with these Western frameworks, Buddhist ethics is distinctive, and is a kind of moral phenomenology that is concerned with the ways in which we experience ourselves as agents and others as moral fellows"--

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...

The relation between Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka accounts of time and contemporary physical accounts of time are considered. Caution is urged in assimilating them too quickly, and caution that there are many differences in detail. Nonetheless, it is shown that if we follow carefully a philosophical arc from Nāgārjuna through Tsongkhapa and Dōgen, we encounter a relational account of time and of our experience of temporality that can inform thought about the ontological status of time in contemporary physical theory, about the anisotropy of time, and about the observer-relativity of time. There is room for dialogue, but only if we are clear about what Madhyamaka does and does not bring to the table.

Those 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 prerequisite to cutting off the root of cyclic existence

De 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 that pretence is crucially involved in the acquisition of ToM. We demonstrate that successful understanding of pretence discourse, including the syntactic and semantic properties of sentential complements in the context of verbs of pretence, develops well before ToM as measured by standard tests of false belief understanding. We argue that pretence plays a crucial role in cognitive development, allowing children to gain familiarity with mental representations that fail to accord with reality, and allowing them to learn the syntax and semantics of verbs taking sentential complements, thus enabling conversational exchange involving embedded complement clauses and the acquisition of ToM. We also demonstrate that the developmental track of pretence and ToM allows us to see how social, conceptual and linguistic development work together to scaffold the development of the understanding of mind. We conclude that children’s early involvement in pretend play and conversation paves the way both for their subsequent development of a ToM-based understanding of the mind as a guiding network of propositional attitudes, and for their further development of syntactic competence with complementation for doxastic and epistemic verbs.

In this paper we argue that the phenomenon of evidentiality, the grammatical marking in some languages of the source of one's knowledge, gives us a revealing window into the developmental processes in middle childhood that subserve the achievement of narrative competence. First, we argue that the mastery of evidentiality is connected to the development of an understanding of inference, and of the ability to mobilize this understanding in the construction of human narratives. Second, we examine the role that parent-child discourse plays in clarifying the contrastive uses of sources of knowledge. Finally, we discuss the difference between first person and third person narratives, and suggest that evidentials might reveal something of the sources of evidence for persistence of self as the protagonist in one's own life story

In Tibetan discussions of the two truths—and in particular in Geluk discussions, inflected as they are by both Dharmakīrti's and Candrakīrti's epistemologies, which, however different they are, agree on the necessity of epistemic warrant for genuine knowledge, and on the appropriateness of particular epistemic warrants or instruments to their respective objects of knowledge—the nature of our knowledge of the ultimate truth leads to interesting epistemological and ontological problems. Given that the ultimate truth must be a possible object of knowledge, there must be a pramāṇa by means of which it is known. But only buddhas or bodhisattvas on the path of seeing or above are capable of directly perceiving the...

India has been independent for 70 years now, and it is a good time to reflect on the political philosophy that underwrote the movement that gained that independence. When we do so, we discover the origins of a political vocabulary that is still in use today, although sadly not used with the same rigor and precision with which it was used then. We also find that those who recur to Indian political thought from the pre-independence period tend to return to a single strand of that thought—the theorization of ahimsa by Mohandas K. Gandhi, as for instance in the recent essay on Indian political thought in The New York Times by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (Gandhi won’t leave India 2017). In this discussion, we hope to draw attention to some of the less well-known resources offered by pre-independence Indian philosophy and in particular the political thought of the Arya samaji Congressman, philosopher and political activist, Lajpat Rai. His political philosophy is important for understanding the theorization of and debates within the Indian independence movement; we think that it also suggests ways to think about contemporary political and revolutionary movements and merits consideration in current debates in political philosophy.

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 problem with the False Photographs task. The fact that the content of representations makes a difference while the structure remains constant casts doubt upon their claim.

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 insights and techniques of each tradition to bear in order to illuminate problems and ideas of the other. These essays address a broad range of topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, and demonstrate the fecundity of the interaction between the Buddhist and Western philosophical and logical traditions.

Investigation of the Percept is a short work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014.This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text.This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception.

The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: a philosophical journey into the brain, Paul M. Churchland. Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1995 ISBN: 0–262–03244–4Cognition in the wild, Edwin Hutchins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 0–262–08231–4Dimensions of creativity, Margaret A. Boden, (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–02368–7Contemplating minds: a forum for Artificial Intelligence, William J. Clancey, Stephen W. Smoliar & Mark J. Stefik (Eds) Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–53119–4Passion and reason: making sense of our emotions, Richard S. Lazarus & Bernice N. Lazarus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–508757–7Mental reality, Galen Strawson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–19352–3The body and the self, Jose Luis Bermudez, Anthony Marcel & Naomi Eilan (Eds) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0–262–02386–5.

The notion of modularity, introduced by Noam Chomsky and developed with special emphasis on perceptual and linguistic processes by Jerry Fodor in his important book The Modularity of Mind, has provided a significant stimulus to research in cognitive science. This book presents essays in which a diverse group of philosophers, linguists, psycholinguists, and neuroscientists - including both proponents and critics of the modularity hypothesis - address general questions and specific problems related to modularity. Jay L. Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College.

Daya Krishna 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.

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 thought.

This paper examines the work of the unsung modern Indian Philosopher A. C. Mukerji, in his major works Self, Thought and Reality (1933) and The Nature of Self (1938). Mukerji constructs a skeptical challenge that emerges from the union of ideas drawn from early modern Europe, neo-Hegelian philosophy, and classical Buddhism and Vedānta. Mukerji’s worries about skepticism are important in part because they illustrate many of the creative tensions within the modern, synthetic period of Indian philosophy, and in part because they are truly profound, anticipating in interesting ways the worries that Feyerabend was to raise a few decades later. Arguing that Humean, Kantian, neo-Hegelian, and Buddhist philosophy each fail to provide an adequate account of self-knowledge, Mukerji leverages this finding to further argue that these systems fail to offer a proper account of knowledge more generally. His solution to skepticism centers on a distinctively modern interpretation of Śaṅkara’s Vedānta.

Madhyamaka and Yogacara are the two principal schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. While Madhyamaka asserts the ultimate emptiness and conventional reality of all phenomena, Yogacara is usually considered to be idealistic. This collection of essays addresses the degree to which these philosophical approaches are consistent or complementary. Indian and Tibetan doxographies often take these two schools to be philosophical rivals. They are grounded in distinct bodies of sutra literature and adopt what appear to be very different positions regarding the analysis of emptiness and the status of mind. Madhyamaka-Yogacara polemics abound in Indian Buddhist literature, and Tibetan doxographies regard them as distinct systems. Nonetheless, scholars have tried to synthesize the two positions for centuries. This volume offers new essays by prominent experts on both these traditions, who address the question of the degree to which these philosophical approaches should be seen as rivals or as allies. In answering the question of whether Madhyamaka and Yogacara can be considered compatible, contributors engage with a broad range of canonical literature, and relate the texts to contemporary philosophical problems.