Status Updates From Empty Words: Buddhist Philo...

‘Contemporary Western philosophy, despite its roots as old as classical Greece, derives much of its contemporary problematic and professional profile from the European Enlightenment.’

‘Among Gadamer’s great achievements, he demonstrated that...in coming to understand our lives as meaningful, we apply the same hermeneutical considerations to ourselves that we apply to understanding texts.‘

More on hermeneutics:

‘A strictly Gadamerian-Heideggerian account of the circular and temporal structure of understanding and of writing presupposes the integrity and the unidimensionality of a tradition.

and...’Interrogating a text is always interrogation with interest. A decontextualized text is impossible to read.’

On hermeneutics:
‘We need nothing transcendent, just a useful guide to productive interchange between persons of good will.
This remark about talking- about conversation between persons- as opposed to the interrogation of text, is self-conscious and is central to my project here.’

‘Madhyamika’s silence reflects the impossibility of expressing the truth about the conventional world. Yogācāra’s silence reflects the intuition that there is none.’

‘So while the mādhyamika’s emptiness is itself empty, and leaves things bereft of nature, even the nature of being empty, the Yogācārin’s emptiness is precisely the nature of things.’

‘There was a time when one could simply take it for granted that the Cittamāttra...is the school of Buddhist idealism. However academic fashions and imperatives are such that once a position is regarded as obvious, attacking it becomes mandatory. And so now we must defend the obvious.’

...and one that reveals this episode in the history of our tradition as a progressive approximation of Vasubandhu’s own analysis.’

‘I will argue that when we examine Western idealism (or this slice of it [Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer]) from this classical Indian vantage point [Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhavanirdesa, the doctrine of the Three Natures that came to be called Cittamātra], we can discern a definite and somewhat surprising progressivity in the Western tradition, a progressivity invisible without that lens,...

On Vasubhandu’s Treatise on the Three Natures- ‘There certainly are briefer as well as, more detailed expositions of this system in the classical literature, but perhaps none so elegant and perspicuous.’

‘While Trisvabhānirdeśa is arguably the most philosophically detailed and comprehensive of the three short works on this topic composed by Vasubandhu, as well as the clearest, it is almost never read or taught in traditional Buddhist cultures or centres of learning...a great pity. It is a beautiful and deep philosophical essay and an unparalleled introduction to the Cittamātra system.’

‘Nagarjuna’s enterprise is one of fundamental ontology, and his conclusion is that fundamental ontology is impossible. But that is a fundamentally ontological conclusion-and that is the paradox.’

‘A mere “I” does no metaphysical work-it serves as a conventionally posited imputation with no convention-independent identity condition, and no explanatory value.’

...any causal powers or for any substantial basis for causal chains.’

‘...Gyalshab [must think] that causation requires a substantial basis, something in which causal powers inhere. That basis, for Gyalshab, would be the mental continuum or subtle consciousness that continues across rebirths.
...Is that consistent with Nāgārjuna’s account of causation...No, of course not. For Nāgārjuna, insistence on the emptiness of causation in turn insists precisely on the absence of the need for..

...by the lights of the tradition itself, should be rejected. That claim is, the cultivation of bodhicitta -the altruistic aspiration for buddhahood for the sake of the liberation of all sentient beings from samsara -requires the belief in rebirth.’

‘I will argue that a claim about the preconditions for the cultivation of bodhicitta, the most ethically and soteriologically significant motivational state in Mahayana Buddhist ethics, that is taken as well established in the Gelugpa tradition, is in fact inconsistent with Nāgārjuna’s account of dependent arising, involves a subtle form of self-grasping, and so, by the lights of the tradition itself...

‘The dominant view of the nature of meaningful assertion (the one that Nāgārjuna questions) is one of that from our perspective can best be described as a version of Fregean realism: Meaningful assertions are meaningful because they denote or express independently existent proposition. A proposition is the pervasion of an individual entity or groups of entities by a real universal or sequence of universals.’

‘...common sense neither posits nor requires intrinsic reality in phenomena or a real causal nexus. Common sense holds the world to be a network of dependently arisen phenomena. So common sense holds the world to be empty.’

‘The addition of causation or a causal power in the “cause” or of effectual potential in the “effect” is unwarranted, unnecessary, and explanatorily impotent’

...of one of the more epidemic dogmatic ills-that of causal realism-by a judicious application of the sceptical physic. My hope is that this cure will serve as a model, and that its ease will inspire much self-treatment.’

After undertaking a cross-cultural expository defense of skepticism as a moderate solution to the problems posed by metaphysical extremism, I will undertake a bit of therapy. For much of contemporary philosophy, I would argue, is seriously and dogmatically ill. One physician on one house call can cure only one patient. I will endeavour to cure a prominently diseased dogmatist, Jerry Fodor....