Mark Siderits

While Buddhists famously deny the existence of a self, they distinguish between selves and persons, and allow for the existence of persons as entities having a sort of derived reality. By “self” they understand whatever counts as the essence of the psychophysical complex, while by “person” they understand the psychophysical complex as a whole. This essay explores the arguments whereby Buddhists sought to establish their claim that strictly speaking neither self nor person exists, but that persons are nonetheless useful posits of a scheme that is meant to accommodate our everyday interests and cognitive limitations. This yields a way of understanding the connection between reductionism about persons and consequentialism in ethics, as well as why it might be that puzzle cases have loomed so large in recent discussions of diachronic personal identity.

While some Buddhist philosophers maintain that consciousness is necessarily reflexive in nature, others deny this. Here it is maintained that there are good philosophical reasons to deny that consciousness is reflexive. The consequences of such a denial must then be explored, given the general Buddhist commitment to the position that consciousness is ownerless. Such a view would have to claim that a cognition can only be cognized by a distinct cognition. This other-illumination thesis took several distinct forms in the Indian tradition. The one form that would be both compatible with the Buddhist non-self view and philosophically defensible has the surprising consequence that consciousness is reducible to non-conscious states. Some of the ramifications of the resulting reductionism about the mental are discussed.

This book is a collection of essays by Mark Siderits on topics in Indian Buddhist philosophy. The essays are divided into six main systematic sections, dealing with realism and anti-realism, further problems in metaphysics and logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, and specific discussions of the interaction between Buddhist and classical Indian philosophy. Each of the essays is followed by a postscript Mark Siderits has written specifically for this volume. The postscripts make it possible to connect essays of the volume with each other, showing thematic interrelations, or locating them relative to the development of Siderits’s thought. In addition, they allow Siderits to discuss which arguments or interpretations in an essay he no longer endorses. Even though the central point of all of the papers included in this collection is still accepted by Siderits, in various cases he has changed his mind about certain details. The postscripts identify these changes and discuss their motivations and further implications. Finally, they provide the opportunity of addressing the fact that for most of these essays, the discussion has moved on since the time of publication. New works have been published, new translations have come out, and additional connections have been discovered. The postscripts make it possible to acquaint the reader with the most important of these developments.

Mādhyamikas frequently claim that the emptiness of all dharmas follows from the fact that they originate. This claim is in some tension with Madhyamaka’s alleged thesislessness, a stance that seems to entail that there can be no master argument for emptiness—that Madhyamaka can only refute specific formulations of realism about dharmas and cannot offer a definitive refutation of all possible realist positions. It is thus worth investigating whether the argument from origination actually succeeds in establishing emptiness. A crucial part of the argument seeks to show that origination from distinct cause and conditions is incoherent. The argument typically deploys the three-times strategy, relying on the point that effect succeeds cause, and pointing out that the entity h that is alleged to bring about the origination of the entity in question p cannot be said to be a cause—to perform the function of originating—when p does not yet exist, nor when p does exist, and that there is no third time that is somehow intermediate between the two. I assess this and other arguments deployed by Candrakīrti in his defense of the view (MAv 6.103) that all things lack intrinsic nature. In doing so, I try to respond to Westerhoff’s recent criticisms of a regularity theory of causation, a conception meant to evade the difficulties of the ‘power’ conception of causes.

Fully revised and updated, and drawing on developments in the author's own thinking, Siderits's second edition explores the conversation between Buddhist and Western Philosophy showing how concepts and tools drawn from one philosophical tradition can help solve problems arising in another. Siderits discusses afresh areas involved in the philosophical investigation of persons, including recent attempts by scholars of Buddhist philosophy to defend the attribution of an emergentist account of personhood to at least some Buddhists, and whether a distinctively Buddhist antirealism can avoid problems that beset other forms of ontological anti-foundationalism.

Buddhism is sometimes said to hold a pragmatic conception of truth, according to which a statement is true just in case it leads to the attainment of one’s goals. Since a true utterance would then be one that is likely to lead to the attainment of the interlocutor’s goals, this would show that the Buddha was not inconsistent when he said seemingly incompatible things on different occasions: to assess the truth of an utterance one must consider the context, which includes the goals and the capacities and dispositions of one’s interlocutor. Today, there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of consensus concerning the nature of the good life; the liberal state is widely seen as the ideal political formation precisely because it leaves room for individual variation in conceptions of the good. In such a context, adopting a pragmatic conception of truth would have the result that truth was whatever worked for the individual given the goals they happen to hold. Presumably, a Buddhist would reject this idea of true belief as belief that leads to individual gratification. In order to support this rejection, they would need to claim that certain goals are intrinsically more worthy of attainment than others. The question could then be raised whether such a claim is compatible with a pragmatic conception of truth. Various possible responses to this question are explored, the aim being not only to determine what a Buddhist ought to say about truth, but also to find out something about the nature of truth as a value.

"This work is designed to introduce some of the more important fruits of Indian Buddhist metaphysical theorizing to philosophers with little or no prior knowledge of classical Indian philosophy. It is widely known among non-specialists that Buddhists deny the existence of a self. Less widely appreciated among philosophers currently working in metaphysics is the fact that the Indian Buddhist tradition contains a wealth of material on a broad assortment of other issues that have also been foci of recent debate. Indian Buddhist philosophers have argued for a variety of interesting claims about the nature of the causal relation, about persistence, about abstract objects, about the consequences of presentism, about the prospects for a viable ontological emergentism. They engaged in a spirited debate over illusionism in the philosophy of consciousness. Some espoused global anti-realism while others called its coherence into question. And so on. This work is meant to introduce the views of such major Buddhist philosophers as Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti and Nāgārjuna on these and other issues. And it presents their arguments and analyses in a manner meant to make them accessible to students of philosophy who lack specialist knowledge of the Indian tradition. Analytic metaphysicians who are interested in moving beyond the common strategy of appealing to the intuitions of "the folk" should find much of interest here"--

I must begin by expressing my deep appreciation to Nilanjan Das and P. K. Sen for the care they have clearly taken in their thorough examinations of Empty Persons.1 There is quite a lot going on in the work, and even after the revisions made in preparing the second edition, what I wish to say is not always as clear as it might be. The penetrating questions raised in Das’s and Sen’s reviews are just the sort that any author of a philosophical work would welcome.Before coming to these questions, though, I should say a word about my stance toward the matters I discuss in the book. The work divides roughly into two parts. Chapters 1–5 discuss the reductionist view of persons that I think can be developed out of debates...

A shorter and less technical treatment of its subject than the author’s acclaimed _Buddhism As Philosophy_ (second edition, Hackett, 2021), Mark Siderits's _The Buddha’s Teachings As Philosophy_ explores three different systems of thought that arose from core claims of the Buddha. By detailing and critically examining key arguments made by the Buddha and developed by later Buddhist philosophers, Siderits investigates the Buddha's teachings as philosophy: a set of claims—in this case, claims about the nature of the world and our place in it—supported by rational argumentation and, here, developed with a variety of systematic results. _The Buddha’s Teachings As Philosophy_ will be especially useful to students of philosophy, religious studies, and comparative religion—to anyone, in fact, encountering Buddhist philosophy for the first time.

This volume is a noble effort to present the fruits of recent research in classical Indian philosophy of language. It is now well known that Indian philosophers had very important things to say in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology. That they also had interesting insights into the nature and uses of language is not as widely appreciated, and the present work seeks to rectify the situation. It is organized into four topical sections on, respectively, the units of speech, word meanings, sentence meanings, and figurative meaning. Each section contains essays discussing important theories and arguments in the area, arranged roughly chronologically. The volume begins with a general introduction, and there are...

Ever since Dignāga drew his bright line between conceptually mediated inference and concept-free perception, there have been efforts to erase it and make cross-border traffic in concepts perfectly legitimate.1 If we understand conceptualization as a mental operation of abstraction that yields knowledge of general, repeatable features or commonalities and facilitates such cognitive operations as categorization, inference, and analogical thought, then we can add Kant to the list of prominent critics of Dignāga's border wall. Here I shall first describe how this wall was built, then present some of the cracks that soon appeared. I then explore some ways of resolving the tension between...