Nicholaos Jones

I present and evaluate three interpretations of methodological naturalism (MN), the principle that scientific explanations may only appeal to natural phenomena: as an essential feature of science, as a provisional guideline grounded in the historical failure of supernatural hypotheses, and as a synthesis of these two approaches. In doing so, I provide both a synoptic overview of current scholarship on MN, as well a contribution to that discussion by arguing in favor of a restricted version of MN, placing it on a firmer theoretical foundation than that supplied by previous studies, and replying to recent objections.

The not-self teaching is one of the defining doctrines of Buddhist philosophical thought. It states that no phenomenon is an abiding self. The not-self doctrine is central to discussions in contemporary Buddhist philosophy and to how Buddhism understood itself in relation to its Brahmanical opponents in classical Indian philosophy. In the Pāli suttas, the Buddha is presented as making statements that seem to entail that there is no self. At the same time, in these texts, the Buddha is never presented as saying explicitly that there is no self. Indeed, in the one discourse in which he is asked point blank whether there is a self, he refuses to answer. Thus, the suttas present us with a fundamental philosophical and interpretive problem: if the Buddha denies the existence of the self, why does he not state this denial explicitly? This paper resolves the problem by explaining why and how the Buddha can argue in a way that entails metaphysical anti-realism about the self while also refusing to state explicitly that there is no self.

A common‐sense view of mammalian pregnancy treats the fetus as (a) an organism and (b) co‐extensive with the approximately baby‐shaped entity developing in the uterus. In this paper, I draw on metabolic accounts of the organism to show that (a) and (b) cannot both be correct: either the fetus is not an organism, or it is considerably more extensive than we tend to think, overlapping considerably—perhaps completely—with its mother. Although other accounts of organisms may have different consequences, I argue that they are all likely to put pressure on the idea that the fetus is a roughly baby‐shaped organism. I show that this has consequences for understanding the metaphysics of birth, our nature and persistence, and the ethical dynamics of pregnancy.

ABSTRACT Few are persuaded by Schopenhauer’s argument that ours is the worst of all possible worlds. In this paper, I propose and defend an alternative reading of Schopenhauer’s argument. According to my reading, the argument has considerable polemical force against Leibnizian optimism independently of its positive success. Its force lies in its implicit proposal of worldly sustainability as a measure of worldly perfection. Worldly sustainability is the degree by which a possible world can tolerate alterations for the worse without ending. There is a natural connection between this measure of worldly perfection, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of the world, on the other, insofar as these inhabitants have an indirect interest in the global degree of worldly sustainability through their own will to exist. Measuring worldly perfection by the degree of existential sustainability is consistent with Schopenhauer’s general tendency to adopt the perspective of beings in the world when making evaluations of the world, always to the detriment of optimism. Regardless of whether Schopenhauer’s argument successfully inverts the thesis of Leibnizian optimism, therefore, it poses a serious and substantial challenge to the worldly values on which such optimism is based.

Huayan Buddhism is famous for three doctrines: holism – the view that the whole of reality is contained in every single thing and that all things interpenetrate each other; idealism – the view that reality is mind; and finally, pantheism (or rather, panbuddhism) – the view that all of reality is contained within the one Buddha-Mind. While the doctrine of holism and the idea of an interpenetration of all things have received quite some attention from contemporary philosophers, they have largely ignored Huayan’s idealist side. In this paper, however, I will argue that these doctrines cannot be understood separately. According to Huayan’s holistic concept of emptiness, all things are empty insofar as their nature depends on the nature of other things, and vice versa. It has been claimed that this position collapses into either of two undesirable alternatives: metaphysical nihilism or relativism. Against this, I will argue that the only way to make sense of Huayan’s apparently paradoxical holism is an idealist metaphysics, which regards phenomenal things as mental objects and claims that reality is identical with the one absolute Buddha-Mind.

This article examines the usage of zhou 周 in the Book of Mozi 墨子 and its interpretations in Classical Chinese, arguing that zhou functions as a universal quantifier when placed before verb–object constructions. We contend that the concluding statement “yi zhou er yi bu zhou” 一周而一不周 clarifies the validity of the case “shi er ran” 是而然 and the invalidity of “shi er bu ran” 是而不然 by using zhou as a summary term referring to previous discussions. Our analysis of zhou as a universal quantifier and you 有 as an existential quantifier provides a foundation for employing the monotonicity reasoning approach to study mou 侔 reasoning. This insight may shed light on other reasoning patterns in Mohist logic and beyond.

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition and its relation to the world that allows for an articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology is a form of what we call ‘a priori activity’: it transcendentally conditions the intelligibility of thought and practice. But we draw from strands of post-Kantian philosophy of science and social philosophy in repudiating Kant’s view that the a priori is necessary and fixed. Instead, we relativize the a priori: we argue that it is contingent, and therefore revisable. More precisely, it is conditioned materially, in that it is enmeshed with and shaped by material social practice. We conclude with some remarks about the possibility of agency over the relativized, materially conditioned a priori—that is, about the possibility of critique.

Interpenetration, a central idea in Huayan Buddhist metaphysics, is commonly understood as the mutual dependence of all things. However, in Religion and Nothingness, Keiji Nishitani proposes that while everything is interdependent, each entity is also absolutely independent. Furthermore, Nishitani attributes a "non-objective" mode of being to entities in interpenetration. These tensions between dependence and independence, and objecthood and non-objecthood, reveal the uniqueness of Nishitani’s view and the limitations in the traditional understanding of interpenetration. This paper explores these tensions within Nishitani, contrasts Nishitani’s approach to interpenetration with both the common view and Fazang’s view, addresses Nishitani’s treatment of contradictory utterances, and reflects on the relation between metahpysics and ethics in Buddhist philosophy.