Christopher Gowans

Buddhist thought flourished in India for well over a thousand years after the life of the Buddha around the fifth century BCE. During this time there were many diverse developments, but for the purpose of the overview in this chapter, two central traditions will be featured. The first centers on the original teaching of the Buddha as represented in a set of texts written in Pāli called the “Three Baskets”. The second tradition is rooted in a set of texts written in Sanskrit called the “Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras” that began to emerge a few centuries later, around the beginning of the new millennium. These texts constitute the historical heart of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This chapter demonstrates that in both traditions Buddhist thought in India was fundamentally concerned with ethical values.

I argue that the Buddha did not discuss the free will and determinism problem because he only considered issues relating to overcoming suffering and his teaching about this did not raise the problem. As represented in the Nikāyas, the heart of his teaching was an empirically based account of the causes of suffering and how to modify these to end suffering. It was primarily a practical teaching about how to achieve this goal, more a craft knowledge than a philosophical theory of causality. Similarly, the no-self teaching was more about living selflessly than about developing a theoretical analysis of agency.

The topic of the dissertation is C. I. Lewis' theory of empirical knowledge in Chapters VII and VIII of An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. I begin by discussing Lewis' purpose in developing this theory. I argue, positively, that his principal aim was to explain the role of sense-experience in our knowledge of the physical world, and negatively, that his aim was not primarily either to clarify the meaning of our epistemic concepts or to refute skepticism . ;Lewis' theory is plainly foundationalist in orientation, and it is clear that his argument for foundationalism is based upon regress considerations. But there are two interpretations of Lewis' regress argument. They were first suggested by Reichenbach and Goodman respectively. I argue that Goodman's interpretation is the more adequate of the two. I then formalize Lewis' argument. This makes it clear that the argument is valid, and that its soundness depends upon only two questionable premises: that a non-inferentially warranted belief must be certain, and that the series of warranting grounds for a belief must come to an end. I then consider the reasons Lewis had, or might have had, for accepting these premises. ;Lewis' regress argument establishes that the warrant for an inferentially warranted belief must include a belief that is non-inferentially warranted and certain. Lewis' foundationalism is essentially an attempt to apply this conclusion to our warranted beliefs about physical objects. His defense of foundationalism has two parts. ;The first part is the doctrine of "the given." After clarifying ambiguities in this doctrine, I argue that what is essential to it is the claim that there are beliefs about how things appear--what I call sensory beliefs--and that these beliefs may be non-inferentially warranted and certain. I then consider the central objections to this claim. I begin with an objection based upon the idea that sensory beliefs are "comparative." Though I argue against this idea, I grant that sensory beliefs cannot be non-inferentially warranted because in various ways they presuppose inferential knowledge about the physical world, and second, to the effect that sensory beliefs cannot be certain because, for a variety of reasons, they can always be mistaken. I argue that all of these objections are inconclusive at best. ;The second part of Lewis' defense of foundationalism is his account of how sensory beliefs confirm physical object beliefs. Lewis believed this is possible only if physical object propositions can be "translated" into complex sensory propositions. But his account both of the nature of the relationship between physical object propositions and sensory propositions, and of how this relationship makes it possible for the latter to confirm the former, is extremely ambiguous and problematic. I thus propose a reconstruction of Lewis' position which I call statical phenomenalism. This reconstructed position seems to accomplish what Lewis was trying to do, and it seems to circumvent Chisholm's objection to phenomenalism based upon the facts of perceptual relativity. But I suggest that statistical phenomenalism nonetheless suffers from an apparently fatal defect. I conclude by arguing that Lewis did not need to defend phenomenalism in order to defend his foundationalism