Madhyamaka and Modern Western Philosophy
A Report
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.29617Keywords:
Madhyamaka, philosophy, metaphysics, logic, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, ethicsAbstract
In the past the study of Asian philosophical traditions has often been approached by asking how the theories developed within these nonWestern cultures would help us to solve problems in contemporary Western philosophy. The present account, which summarizes results of a research project funded by the John Templeton foundation in 2015, attempts to reverse this way of studying Asian philosophy by investigating which theories, approaches and models from contemporary Western philosophy can be used to support, analyse, refine and advance insights into key questions discussed by Indian Buddhist Madhyamaka. Our discussion concentrates on six key philosophical areas that can contribute in important ways to the analysis and development of Madhyamaka thought: metaphysics, logic, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, and ethics.
References
Aczel, Peter. 1988. Non-well-founded sets. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information: http://standish.stanford.edu/pdf/00000056.pdf
Bitbol, Michel. 2010. De l’intérieur du Monde. Pour une philosophie et une science des relations. Paris: Flammarion.
Burton, David. 1999. Emptiness Appraised: A Critical Study of Nagarjuna’s Philosophy. Richmond: Curzon Press.
Cabello, Adán. 1999a. ‘Quantum correlations are not local elements of reality’. Physical Review A 59(1): 1113–1115. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.59.113
———. 1999b. ‘Quantum correlations are not contained in the initial state’. Physical Review A 60(2): 877–880. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.60.877
Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2011. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us. London: Harper.
The Cowherds. 2015. Moonpaths. Ethics and Emptiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dixon, Norman. 1971. Subliminal Perception: The Nature of a Controversy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Esfeld, Michael. 2002. Holismus in der Philosophie des Geistes und in der Philosophie der Physik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 2004. ‘Quantum entanglement and a metaphysics of relations’. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 35: 601–617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2004.04.008
Esfeld, Michael and Vincent Lam. 2008. ‘Moderate structural realism about space-time’. Synthese 160(1): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9076-2
French, Steven. 2014. The Structure of the World: Metaphysics and Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684847.001.0001
Garfield, Jay. 2010–2011. ‘What is it like to be a bodhisattva? Moral phenomenology in Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara’. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33(1–2): 327–351.
Garfield, Jay and Graham Priest. 2009. ‘Mountains are just mountains’. In Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy, edited by Mario D’Amato, Jay Garfield and Tom Tillemans, 71–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381559.003.0006
Goodman, Charles. 2009. Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Gregory, R. L. and E. H. Gombrich, eds. 1980. Illusion in Nature and Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Grim, Patrick. 1991. The Incomplete Universe: Totality, Knowledge, and Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keown, Damien. 2001. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Klein, Peter. 1998. ‘Foundationalism and the infinite regress of reasons’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 919–926. https://doi.org/10.2307/2653735
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ladyman, James and Don Ross. 2007. Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, George and Rafael Núñez. 2000. Where Mathematics Come from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.
Lewis, David. 2002. Convention. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470693711
Metzinger, Thomas. 2003. ‘Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2: 353–393. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PHEN.0000007366.42918.eb
Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Priest, Graham. 2001. Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2009. ‘The structure of emptiness’. Philosophy East and West 59: 467–480. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.0.0069
———. 2014. One. Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199688258.001.0001
Priest, Graham and Jay Garfield. 2002. ‘Nagarjuna and the limits of thought’. In Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought, 249–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199254057.003.0018
Priest, Graham and Richard Routley. 1989. ‘First historical introduction: A preliminary history of paraconsistent and dialetheic approaches’. In Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent, edited by Graham Priest, Richard Routley and Jean Norman, 3–75. Munich: Philosophia Verlag.
Quine, W. V. O. 1981. ‘Things and their place in theories’. In his Theories and Things. 1–24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rayo, Augustín, and Gabriel Uzquiano, eds. 2006. Absolute Generality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Recanati, Francois. 2005. ‘Literalism and contextualism: some varieties’. In Contextualism in Philosophy, edited by Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter, 171–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1994. ‘Does academic freedom have philosophical presuppositions: Academic freedom and the future of the university’. Academe 80(6): 52–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/40251372
Ruegg, David Seyfort. 2010. ‘The uses of the four positions of the catuskoti and the problem of the description of reality in Mahayana Buddhism’. In his The Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle: Essays on Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka, 37–112. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd; New York: The Humanities Press.
Siderits, Mark. 2004. ‘Perceiving particulars: A Buddhist defence’. Philosophy East and West 54(3): 367–382. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2004.0022
———. 2016a.‘Madhyamaka on naturalized epistemology’. In his Studies in Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Jan Westerhoff, 237–248. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198754862.001.0001
———. 2016b, forthcoming ‘The Prapañca Paradox’.
Siderits, Mark and Shoryu Katsura. 2013. Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: The Mulamadhyamakakarika. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.
Simons, Daniel and Daniel Levin. 1998. ‘Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction’. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5(4): 644–649. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208840
Tegmark, Max. 2014. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. London: Penguin.
Tillemans, Tom. 2009. ‘How do Madhyamikas think? Notes on Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and paraconsistency’. In Pointing at the Moon. Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy, edited by Mario D’Amato, Jay Garfield and Tom Tillemans, 83–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381559.003.0007
Tolman, Edward C. 1938. ‘Physiology, psychology, and sociology’. Psychological Review 45(3): 228–241. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0060722
Turri, John, and Peter Klein, eds. 2014. Ad Infinitum: New Essays on Epistemological Infinitism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jan Westerhoff. 2006. ‘Nagarjuna’s catuskoti’. Journal of Indian Philosophy 34: 367–395. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-005-6172-4
———. 2010a.The Dispeller of Disputes. Nagarjuna’s Vigrahavyavartani. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732692.001.0001
———. 2010b.Twelve Examples of Illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. ‘The merely conventional existence of the world’. In The Cowherds: Moonshadows. Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy, 189–212. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. ‘The incompleteness of the world and its consequences’. Metaphysica 14(1): 79–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-012-0113-y
Williams, Paul. 1998. Altruism and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryavatara. Richmond: Curzon Press.
———. 2000. ‘Response to Mark Siderits’ review of Altruism and Reality’. Philosophy East and West 50(3): 424–453.
Willis, Janice. 1979. On Knowing Reality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Zelazo, Philip, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology, vol 1: Body and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
