Arbitrary Marks

“If an intrinsic nature of the things, whatever they may be, exists nowhere, your statement must be devoid of an intrinsic nature. It is not, therefore, in a position to deny the intrinsic nature [of the things].” - Translation by Bhattacharya

This is the opening charge, quoted by Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī.

How do you distinguish the gender of these two individuals on the cover of April’s J Crew catalog? What visual cues differentiate “masculine” and “feminine”, despite the similar dress style (tie, khakis, blue shirt, etc)?
In 1978, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna wrote a book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach that attempted to answer this [...]

My Motilal copy of the Vigrahavyāvartinī by Nāgārjuna arrived just a few minutes ago. I can’t justify diving into it right now, since I’m in the midst of some interesting lesson planning (Jonathan Edwards and John Locke on the role of sensations in knowledge). However, I am incredibly excited to start translating the text. This relatively short text is the only existing prose work by Nāgārjuna and focuses upon sūnyatā and svabhāva, two very important concepts for the Madhyamaka.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, a transman named Thomas Beatie is pregnant. I read about the news first in The Advocate, but it seems the story has spread to mainstream media, including Oprah. I’ve watched some clips from MSNBC and other news sources where anchors have made fun of the situation, remarking [...]

Since Arbitrary Marks generally acts as my reading journal, where I bounce my own thoughts off the fully-formed arguments of others, here’s a peek at what you may expect over the next few months:
Buddhist Philosophy
I’ll be trying my hand at translating Nagarjuna’s Vigrahavyavartini and reading commentaries along the way. I’m currently reading Harsh Narain’s The [...]

A week later, here’s the second part of my two-part series on Strawson. His major thesis is that we have cognitive experience, as well as sensory experience. The puzzle about intentionality (where to find the dividing line between humans, thermostats and artificial intelligence) can be resolved by asserting that “all mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena.”