Arbitrary Marks

When faced with a particular species, whose days seem to be numbered, regardless of any effort humans can muster, could a Buddhist response be to let the being slip into extinction and not to induce suffering by keeping a few representative beings cooped up in zoos?

As the school year starts (in two days), I’ve been reading a few books and articles on the subject of Indian philosophy as well as India in general. The first book is Jonardon Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India, which is an overview of some of the major strands of thought, with a particular focus on [...]

In my last post, I asked a roughly formed question about connecting experience and ontological claims. I recognize that many of these posts need to be more carefully exposited in light of actual Buddhist texts and specific traditions–but while I’m in a bit of a summer holding pattern and reading mostly Western analytic philosophy, I [...]

Assume it is the case that there is no privileged ontological way to “carve the world at its joints” and so some form of mereological ontological nihilism is correct.
Also assume that the sense of oneness that meditating persons receive can be explained in terms of neurobiology.
Is there any connection, logical or causal between the two [...]

This post wasn’t originally intended to be a two-parter, but I realized that it was getting pretty long, so I’ve split it up. In the first post, I gave a brief overview of W.V.O. Quine’s argument for indeterminacy of meaning (aimed at the larger question of whether there is a distinction between analytic/synthetic meanings). Then [...]

No time for a detailed post, but I want to draw your attention to this podcast from Buddhist Geeks. In it, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says, in response to questions about the need for Westerners to believe in rebirth, that the concept isn’t necessary for practice, but it doesn’t hurt to assume it’s true. It makes for good living now.

In connection, I recommend Jay Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane,” Philosophy East and West, Vol 51, No 4, 507-524. The article discusses just to what extent belief in rebirth is necessary, particularly for bodhicittas. The abstract is below:

I’ve left Nagarjuna aside for long enough; let’s return to the Vigrahavyavartani to look at some of the problems with his skeptical position. The Paideia Project has collected some papers from the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, and one of those is “Illocution, No-Theory and Practice in Nagarjuna’s Skepticism: Reflections on the Vigrahavyavartani” by Douglas [...]

[contemplative science] In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.

Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.

In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.

Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.

Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:

I think that this has a lot to do with problems in contemporary philosophy of mind regarding mental causation, reduction, etc. For now, the quote will stand on its own, but later I’ll continue with Kim and try to tie them together:
If one reifies phenomena–including such things as one’s own self, characteristics (prominently one’s own), [...]

As I write this, an article on Buddhism, atheism and neuroscience is the top emailed article on the NY Times website.
In it, he makes a couple of interesting claims about the so-called “New Atheism” debates and where they’re probably headed. First, he thinks that “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith [...]