Mark Siderits

Madhyamaka claims that while everything is in fact empty, the use of concepts invariably leads to the error known as prapañca or hypostatisation, in the form of the supposition that there are things with intrinsic nature. This may be put as the claim that all conceptualisation falsifies. But this claim is paradoxical in that its truth would entail its falsity. While Mādhyamikas have not directly addressed this problem, a solution might be found utilizing the resources of contextualist semantics. This paper explores the origins of the paradox by tracing the history of the notion of prapañca, and then examines how a contextualist approach might resolve the difficulty.

This work is a translation of selected sutras of the Nyāya-sūtra, together with relevant extracts from three commentaries: Nyāya-sūtra-bhāṣya of Vātsyāyana; Nyāya-vārttika of Uddyotakara; and Nyāya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā of Vācaspatimiśra. The translators' introduction gives a general overview of the Nyāya school, its overall aims, and its place within classical Indian philosophy. Each of the nine chapters covers a particular topic in the Nyāya scheme: knowledge sources, philosophical method, the Nyāya defense of metaphysical realism, the self, substance and causation, God, theory of meaning, value theory, and debate. For a given topic there will be sūtras...

This article examines the Buddhist versions of the no-self conception of the self. It defines the self as one part of the psychophysical complex and the person as the whole of the psychophysical complex. It suggests that the Buddhist anti-realist or reductionist position denies that the self exists and considers the person to be a conceptual fiction. It argues that there are some Buddhist personalists who hold something close to an emergentist view, which suggests that, although the self does not have real existence, the person does.

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 of the most influential interpretations of Nagarjuna's difficult doctrine derives from the commentary of Candrakirti (6th ct CE). In view of its special soteriological role, much attention has been devoted to explaining the nature of the ultimate truth; less, however, has been paid to understanding the nature of conventional truth, which is often described as "deceptive," "illusion," or "truth for fools." But because of the close relation between the two truths in Madhyamaka, conventional truth also demands analysis. Moonshadows, the product of years of collaboration by ten cowherds engaged in Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, provides this analysis. The book asks, "what is true about conventional truth?" and "what are the implications of an understanding of conventional truth for our lives?" Moonshadows begins with a philosophical exploration of classical Indian and Tibetan texts articulating Candrakati's view, and uses this textual exploration as a basis for a more systematic philosophical consideration of the issues raised by his account.

Given how much the issue of the self and diachronic personal identity has been discussed in recent decades, one might wonder why something like Benovsky's pluralist-self view has not already been proposed and critically examined. It does, after all, look promising as a way to negotiate a settlement between the partisans of self and of nonself. For it gives the first party what it says it wants—ontological commitment to selves—while also granting the nonself theorists their core claim that there is no single entity that is the referent of "I." But I doubt that any such settlement can last.Benovsky claims to have some sympathy for the view that I call Buddhist Reductionism, and his pluralist-self view does at first...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist ThoughtMark SideritsThe Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. By William S. Waldron. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Pp. xvi + 269. $90.00.The Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought by William S. Waldron is an examination of the origins of the Yogācāra concept of ālaya-vijñāna, or "storehouse-consciousness." Where orthodox Buddhist psychology speaks of six types of consciousness (one for each external sense modality, plus one for "inner sense" or manas), the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism posits an additional kind of consciousness to serve as the substratum of the seeds thought to be engendered by karma. This is sometimes seen as tantamount to admitting a self, a criticism the author seeks to rebut. His chief concern, however, is to show how this posit grew out of a set of problems inherited from pre-Yogācāra Abhidharma. He discusses the conception of consciousness that is to be found in early Buddhist sources, describes how orthodox Abhidharma sought to deal with a variety of mental continuities, and then traces the development of the notion of ālaya-vijñāna through the early Yogācāra texts Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra, Yogācārabhūmi and Mahāyānasaṃgraha.The story that the author tells is basically this. Early Buddhism explains suffering as derived from false belief in an enduring subject, the "I," where there is really just a multiplicity of ephemeral psychophysical factors in causal succession. Actions based [End Page 358] on this false belief lead to a further strengthening of those factors that perpetuate the belief, resulting in the round of rebirth. Abhidharma set about trying to catalog these factors and their multifarious causal connections. But it encountered a seemingly insuperable difficulty in trying to account for a variety of psychological continuities in terms of a model that lacks mental continuants. The Yogācāra posit of ālaya-vijñāna solves this difficulty by supplying a mental continuum that is not (ordinarily) accessible to introspection.Yogācāra is best known, of course, for its denial of external objects (cittamātra), but that claim is largely ignored here. Instead the author focuses on continuities with earlier Abhidharma thought concerning the nature of the mental continuum. Waldron is no doubt correct to see the Yogācāra enterprise as itself a (Mahāyāna) form of Abhidharma. But while the concept of ālaya-vijñāna might perhaps be seen as growing out of Abhidharma controversies concerning how best to explain continuities in mental dispositions and karma, it at least facilitates an account of sensory experience that renders the external object superfluous and thus paves the way for subjective idealism. For ālaya-vijñāna becomes the receptacle for the seeds deposited by prior action the ripening of which results in sensory cognitions. Since the author claims (p. xiii) to be writing for a nonspecialist audience, it might have been useful to make this point at the outset rather than near the end of the study (p. 161 ). There is also some tension between Waldron's reading of the concept's origins and that of Schmithausen, and more might have been said on that score.Waldron seems to take a sympathetic stance toward the defense of ālaya-vijñāna that he discerns in the texts. This is only to be expected given that the best hermeneutical strategy should involve substantial doses of interpretive charity. Still, greater critical distance might have led to a more useful discussion of the topic. For instance, a more probing investigation of the claim that only ālaya-vijñāna can explain karmic and mental-dispositional continuities might have yielded a deeper understanding of the overall view. The problem faced by Abhidharma theories is clear. One phenomenon that any theory of persons must accommodate is the intermittent recurrence of similar behaviors all of which seem traceable to an event at some remove in the past: having learned in my early childhood that fire is hot, from time to time I intentionally avoid...

When we understand that something is a pot, is it because of one property that all pots share? This seems unlikely, but without this common essence, it is difficult to see how we could teach someone to use the word "pot" or to see something as _a_ pot. The Buddhist apoha theory tries to resolve this dilemma, first, by rejecting properties such as "potness" and, then, by claiming that the element uniting all pots is their very difference from all non-pots. In other words, when we seek out a pot, we select an object that is not a non-pot, and we repeat this practice with all other items and expressions. Writing from the vantage points of history, philosophy, and cognitive science, the contributors to this volume clarify the nominalist apoha theory and explore the relationship between apoha and the scientific study of human cognition. They engage throughout in a lively debate over the theory's legitimacy. Classical Indian philosophers challenged the apoha theory's legitimacy, believing instead in the existence of enduring essences. Seeking to settle this controversy, essays explore whether apoha offers new and workable solutions to problems in the scientific study of human cognition. They show that the work of generations of Indian philosophers can add much toward the resolution of persistent conundrums in analytic philosophy and cognitive science.