In Part One, I discussed Sonam Kachru’s criticisms (Kachru 2021) of some of my earlier work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Mills 2017).

I ended the previous post with a question: what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say?

This attitude toward the text can challenge understandings of Western categories. Whereas most pragmatists, phenomenologists, and a certain type of analytic philosopher diagnose external-world skepticism as a metaphysical failure to appreciate the entanglement of mind and world, I think Vasubandhu suggests that entangled though mind and world may be (and it’s hard to imagine them being more entangled than in Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism!), the cognitive failure of regular human experience is a failure to appreciate how fundamentally mistaken we are in our regular cognitive lives—in light of the fact this very entanglement.

It may be that Vasubandhu shows us something about skeptical inquiries into perception, broadly construed: such epistemological inquiries do not rely on any particular metaphysical framework. (I personally have long thought the anti-skeptical strategy of trying to reduce the epistemological problem of skepticism about the external world to a metaphysical problem of mind and world is a huge mistake, but that’s somewhat besides Vasubandhu’s point as he seems to be doing something more like working out the epistemological consequences of the metaphysics of non-dualism).

I think some contemporary interpreters fail to understand how thoroughly revisionary and revolutionary Vasubandhu’s philosophy is; whereas most contemporary anti-skeptical strategies seek to preserve regular human experience against a philosophical abstraction, Vasubandhu wants to challenge the dogmatic attachment inherent in the regular human experience of thinking our way of seeing things is the right way or the only way (a point I think Kachru and others could make better without appeals to contemporary anti-skeptical strategies!).

So, am I saying, after all this, that Vasubandhu really is a skeptic, just not as we know it? (“We” here means, I guess, 21^st century academics writing in English). Maybe. I don’t know.

My own attempts in the past to argue for skeptical interpretations of classical Indian philosophers (e.g., Mills 2018) have often met with resistance precisely because most contemporary philosophers have a (dare I say it?) dogmatic attachment to a specific version of external-world skepticism inculcated in them by contemporary interpretations of Descartes and in contemporary analytic epistemology (this modern view of skepticism is in my opinion also deeply at odds with ancient “Western” skepticisms like Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism).

At this point I’m willing to cede the label “skepticism.” I no longer care whether Vasubandhu or any other classical Indian philosopher is a “skeptic,” partly due to the unwillingness of my academic colleagues to rethink their own definition of skepticism as a category, but mostly because whatever Vasubandhu and others are doing is philosophically interesting no matter what Western categories we apply to them.

It’s time to stop pretending that classical Indian philosophers have to be subjected to the procrustean bed of Western categories to be interesting or worthy of study or respect in the discipline. I study Indian philosophy because it’s philosophically interesting in its own terms, not because it can glom on to whatever’s popular in mainstream analytic or continental philosophy this month.

While I’ve moved more in the direction of the type of textual work that prevails in Indology or Area Studies, I’m not quite there, either (I never make things easy for myself!). While understanding texts in their historical context is important, at times this approach can leave one a bit too limited by linguistic history or the traditions of interpretation that came before and after a text, leaving little room for innovative philosophical understandings of individual texts (European Indology has its own problematic Orientalist history to contend with as well).

Vasubandhu was obviously responding to the Buddhist traditions before him and he has been taken up in certain ways by centuries of Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars that have come after him, but I also think Vasubandhu has something unique to say that is not captured by Buddhism in general or even Yogācāra in general. At least if we bother to listen to him carefully.

Nor am I denying that all interpretation today takes place in a postcolonial political context or that each reader doesn’t bring their own preconceptions (in a Gadamerian sense) to the text (my own philosophical preconceptions have been shaped by Buddhism as much as anything else; I learned about the Four Noble Truths long before I learned about semantic realism). I’m not saying we should assume we 21^st century scholars have a transparent insight into the one true nature of a text for all times. Such would be hopelessly naïve, and in any case goes against the very spirit of what Vasubandhu is telling us about normal human experience!

Going forward, maybe I’ll say Vasubandhu was working out the epistemology of non-dualism, or maybe we can just call it early Yogācāra and let it speak for itself (even if later Yogācāra philosophers do come close to the Western category of “idealism,” I think reducing Vasubandhu to “idealism” is just as problematic as reducing him to “skepticism” or “phenomenalism” or “phenomenology”). I don’t know where I will go next, but I will keep trying to think with Vasubandhu as best I can.

Helpful though comparative philosophy can be at times, sometimes it can be yet another problematic causal factor in our experience of ancient texts. I thank Sonam Kachru for his part in inciting me to think more deeply about my own previous scholarly experience of Vasubandhu and other classical Indian philosophers, moving instead toward listening carefully to what these texts have to say for themselves.

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Works Cited

Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.

——. 2018.  Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

 Deadline: 1 February 2023

We invite proposals for papers to be given at an online conference on varieties of ineffability in ancient philosophy (spanning ancient Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian thought), on 18th-21st September 2023. The conference is expected to take place in the afternoon (British Summer Time) over the course of the four days.

Confirmed participants:
​
Lea Cantor (Oxford)
Amber Carpenter (Yale-NUS)
Ursula Coope (Oxford)
Nilanjan Das (Toronto)
Chris Fraser (Toronto)
Dirk Meyer (Oxford)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
Parimal Patil (Harvard) 
​Shaul Tor (KCL)

This conference will examine notions of philosophical ineffability in ancient Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian texts, dating up to the 9th century CE. By philosophical ineffability we mean the idea that the object of one’s philosophical inquiry, or some aspects of that inquiry itself, are wholly or to some extent beyond the reach of articulation through words. The conference will seek to explore the variety of reasons (sometimes congruent) that might lead a philosopher to adopt some version of an ineffability attitude (e.g. a particular conception of the limits of one’s capacities for knowledge, thought or linguistic expression; a particular ontological stance; secrecy in relation to the uninitiated; a conception of silence as somehow spiritually formative; reverential inhibitions, etc.) as well as the variety of reactions a philosopher might then have in the light of their ineffability attitude (e.g. a qualified or non-committal approach towards the status of one’s own speech; an appeal to metaphors, analogies or periphrasis; some version of the via negativa; silence, etc.). We are interested in how these sorts of motivations and reactions might relate to one another, as well as to wider cultural models on which they sometimes draw. Our aim is not to attempt or approximate comprehensive coverage, nor to offer a survey. Instead, the conference will seek to explore case-studies stemming from the three traditions that, in conjunction, will show something of the variety and richness of the phenomenon of ineffability in ancient philosophy. We welcome both papers that take a fresh look at famous examples and papers that examine cases that are less often discussed. It is hoped that the consideration of a diverse range of ineffability attitudes, as well as the adoption of a comparative, cross-cultural perspective, will throw into sharp relief different patterns of philosophical preoccupations and strategies, and indeed will offer one particular and productive angle from which to think about the scope and orientation of some central aspects of ancient philosophy.

CfA Eligibility & submission guidelines 

We invite abstracts of 300-500 words from researchers at all levels (abstracts from graduate students and ECRs are particularly welcome),  suitable for 30- to 35-minute presentations.

We welcome abstracts which address the themes of the conference in relation to one or more of the following ancient traditions: Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian. Comparative, cross-cultural and/or ‘connected’ approaches are welcome, but not necessary.
​
Please submit abstracts as an email attachment to ineffabilitiesconference[at]gmail.com by 1 February 2023. Abstracts should be submitted as .pdf files and should not exceed 500 words.

Please write ‘Conference Abstract Submission’ in the subject line of your email and include your name, departmental affiliation (if relevant), email address, and the title of your paper (as well as the year in which your PhD was awarded in the case of ECRs) in your email. Abstracts should be prepared for blind review, so please ensure that your abstract is free from any identifying personal details (i.e. including title and abstract, but no information about author or institutional affiliation).

Decisions will be communicated by 15 February 2023. 

Organizers

Lea Cantor (Oxford)
Ursula Coope (Oxford)
Nilanjan Das (Toronto)
Shaul Tor (KCL) 

Contact

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website. If you wish to be kept informed about the conference (and how to attend), please register your interest here.  

For any inquiries, please contact one of the conference organizers directly.

In this duology of posts I’m going to respond to Sonam Kachru’s friendly criticism of my own work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Vimśikākārikā). But instead of the usual academic practice of arguing against Kachru’s criticisms, I’m going to suggest that Kachru may be right. Or maybe half-right. In any case, his work has helped my own thinking move toward a new insight: I have come to suspect that I made some mistakes in my own earlier work—and maybe these errors are iterations of deeper mistakes that often occur under the banner of “comparative philosophy.”

In this first post, I’ll discuss my own previous work and Kachru’s criticisms of it, and in part two I’ll say more about what I think all this has to do with comparative philosophy and how we 21^st century scholars approach classical Indian texts like the Twenty Verses.

In my 2017 article, “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu,” I laid out the debate about whether Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses should be understood as advocating a form of metaphysical idealism or a kind of epistemological phenomenalism, and I came to the (appropriately cagey) conclusion that in either case, Vasubandhu might be read as providing an invitation to consider something like the issue of external-world skepticism.

In his excellent 2021 study of Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, Sonam Kachru develops a novel account of the text that moves away from the contemporary debate about whether Vasubandhu is defending a form of idealism. Even though I myself have been quite engrossed in this debate in the past, I now think Kachru has a superb point.

His main criticism of my 2017 article is that I argued that Vasubandhu’s claim is that we are aware of something like a “phenomenal object” (Kachru 2021, 44), and indeed at that time I was translating viṣaya as “sense-object” in a phenomenalist sense similar to Bruce Hall (1986). Kachru also does not see the opening statement as a formal anumāna: “This world is just cognition-only, because of the appearance of non-existent objects” (Viṃśikakārikā 1, my translation). Instead, dreams are employed as one of many kinds of experience for human and non-human life-forms.

(While I maybe overstated my case in the 2017 article, I don’t actually think much rests on whether Vasubandhu is presenting a formal anumāna, and I will set aside that issue here. But I would quickly note that the anumāna could be non-fallacious if one takes seriously what some have called the Phenomenal Principle, according to which we are directly aware of the same thing in both veridical and erroneous cognitions—on this interpretation, Vasubandhu’s point is that there is a core similarity between veridical and erroneous experience, and not the “howler” that we should infer “all cognitions are erroneous” because “some cognitions are erroneous”).

Although Kachru criticizes my earlier article, I found myself quite convinced by a lot of his book, far more convinced than I would have thought! Like Kachru, I see Vasubandhu’s fundamental message to be that we should aim for “a certain way of being open to the world” (Kachru 2021, 161) in a way that normal human experience is not. This makes sense when you consider that, in line with Vasubandhu’s Buddhist motivations, our normally closed-minded experience is one major cause of suffering.

This also makes sense of Vasubandhu’s comments about the non-dual experience of the Buddhas at the end of the text in Viṃśikakārikā 21-22 (this is also why I do not think Vasubandhu could be making any arguments meant to clinch the case for metaphysical idealism; in a moment of epistemic humility, he admits he has done the best he can in a dualistic framework, while only the Buddhas know the whole truth).

While my 2017 article was filled with all the typical academic hedges and caveats, I did claim that Vasubandhu, whether taken as a metaphysical idealist or epistemological phenomenalist, gives an invitation to consider the problem of external-world skepticism (Mills 2017, 162-164). And reading Kachru has convinced me that I was wrong to try to push Vasubandhu into a type of phenomenalism about the direct objects of cognition akin to the types of Western phenomenalism developed in recent centuries.

Although I still think Vasubandhu would have a dim view of what one might call direct realism (of either classical Indian or contemporary Western varieties), Kachru’s book gives me a way to make sense of what I see as the general thrust of Vasubandhu’s arguments (“don’t take your experience too seriously”) without contorting Vasubandhu’s philosophical brilliance to fit the preoccupations of Western philosophers from the 17^th-21^st centuries.

But more fundamentally, I think my earlier project was misguided.

One could, I suppose, wonder what Vasubandhu would say about external-world skepticism as it is understood in contemporary Western philosophy, just as one could wonder what he would say about Berkeleyan or Hegelian idealism. But reading Kachru’s book (especially his careful attention to Buddhist cosmology) made me wonder why we would do so. Why, after all, when Vasubandhu has so many fascinating things of his own to say?

Vasubandhu’s problems are not those of early modern Europe, American pragmatism, phenomenology, or contemporary analytic philosophy. Nor do these Western problems comprise the entire conceptual space of all possible philosophical problems; it would be hubristic racism to suggest that white Europeans alone invented all possible philosophical problems! There is no good reason to let Western philosophy set all possible agendas for all other traditions.

Vasubandhu has his own issues and insights. If we were to learn from them, we might find a philosophical challenge much more interesting that the project of slotting Vasubandhu into pre-existing Western categories.

In fact, my only real criticism of Kachru’s book is that he is occasionally a bit too interested in pairing Vasubandhu with contemporary philosophers immersed in phenomenology, pragmatism, and anti-skeptical analytic epistemology.

But what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say? I’ll explore some possible answers to this question in part two.

……………………………………….

Works Cited

Hall, Bruce Cameron. 1986. “The Meaning of Vijñapti in Vasubandhu’s Concept of Mind.”  Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 9 (1):  7-23.

Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.

How do Sanskrit philosophers deal with solipsism?

Some Buddhist epistemologists just accepted it, as a necessary consequence of their idealism. The example of Ratnakīrti’s “Rejection of the existence of other continuous sequences [of causes and effects leading to the illusion of a separate mind]” comes to mind. In my opinion, Ratnakīrti has a specially strong argument in favour of his view, namely: The Buddhist epistemological school denies the ultimate mind-independent existence of external objects. But once one accepts that, and thus accepts idealism, how can one safeguard intersubjectivity? If there is no reality other than our representations, how comes we can understand each other? Would it not be much more economical to imagine that there is only one representation?

Others rejected it based on analogy (basically: I am a mind, i.e., a continuous sequence of causes and effects; other people behaving similarly must be a mind too). The first and main example of this reasoning is Dharmakīrti’s “Establishment of the existence of other continuous sequences” (santānāntarasiddhi).

The Pratyabhijñā and the Advaita Vedānta schools are ultimately forms of solipsism. In the former case, there is only Śiva’s mind, and the appearance of other minds is part of his līlā ‘playful activity’. In the latter (at least after Śaṅkara), there is only brahman, and the appearance of other minds is due to māyā. What is the different explanatory power of līlā vs māyā? That māyā’s ontology is hard to explain, whereas once one has committed to the existence of a personal God, with Their likes and dislikes, then līlā is a perfectly acceptable solution. Thus, AV is light on the Absolute’s ontology, but implies a leap of faith as for māyā, whereas the opposite is the case for the Pratyabhijñā school.

What about the realist schools? Some of them established the existence of the self based on aham-pratyaya, i.e., our own perception of ourselves as an ‘I’ (so the Mīmāṃsā school). Some thinkers within Nyāya (like Jayanta) used inference to establish the existence of the self.

Is this enough to establish the existence of other selves?

Yes, in the case of Mīmāṃsā, because other minds seem prima facie to exist and due to svataḥ prāmāṇya (intrinsic validity) such prima facie view should be held unless and until the opposite is proven.

Yes, according to Jayanta, because other selves can be inferred just like the own self is.

Realistic Vedāntic schools will rely on either the Mīmāṃsā or the Nyāya paradigm. Thus, the question at this point will rather be: What is consciousness like, if one subscribes to this or the other school?

Some schools (like Pratyabhijñā, Yoga…) claim that we can have direct access to other minds, through yogipratyakṣa or intellectual intuition. However, yogipratyakṣa is possible only to some exceptional individuals. Moreover, Pratyabhijñā thinkers like Utpaladeva think that even this is not an evidence of the existence of separate other minds.

Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not always as eager to remind you that King studied at the School of Theology – and clearly learned his lessons there well, for he was not merely a great activist but a great philosopher.

I have come to know King’s thought through the courses I have taught in BU’s philosophy department – even though the courses were on Indian philosophy. I have nevertheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with guest speakers introducing him to the students, because I wanted to show students the contemporary relevance of Indian philosophy. Specifically, King drew a great deal of his ideas from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in turn drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It seems to me on reflection, though, that the student surpassed the pupil: that what King said and wrote with Gandhi’s influence was profounder and more valuable than Gandhi’s own thought was in itself.

The core idea that King drew from Gandhi, of course, was nonviolence – which Gandhi used to translate the Jain vow of ahiṃsā. Ahiṃsā more literally means “non-harm”, which is not exactly the same thing. Gandhi’s major achievement is to turn ahiṃsā into the idea of nonviolent action: changing unjust social conditions by means of peaceful mass protests that call attention to them. This idea was not in traditional Jainism, which like its sister tradition of Buddhism, was not politically active; nor was it in the Gītā, a more political text whose explicitly stated message is the opposite of nonviolence. But Gandhi put it to powerful effect, drawing enormous sympathy for the cause of Indian independence, which eventually became successful.

King learned from Gandhi and used the same tactics, similarly successful, to end the official régime of racial segregation in the American South. In their activism – deploying nonviolent resistance to end an unjust situation – they were very similar. Where they really differed was in their political thought. King had philosophical training where Gandhi didn’t – and it shows.

Gandhi pushed his theory of nonviolence much further than King, into a sort of anarcho-libertarianism that considered state action an unacceptable form of violence. He proclaimed that “I shall be no party to dispossessing the propertied classes of their private property without just cause” – and providing food and livelihood to the poor and hungry did not count, for him, as just cause. Instead he encouraged a voluntary redistribution, where “the rich should regard themselves as trustees for the whole of society rather than as owners of the wealth they might possess.” Gandhi’s followers, like Vinoba Bhave, made a sincere effort to convince the rich to share their land and wealth with the poor – but it didn’t work. A few noble souls were convinced, but not enough to make any meaningful dent in the poverty of the villages where it was tried. And on a more fundamental level, Gandhi never seemed to object to the state violence involved in keeping property in its current hands, through laws against theft.

King had a much more realistic view. Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr – coiner of the Serenity Prayer – King learned to reject a “false optimism”. Niebuhr, drawing in turn on Augustine, knew that the darkness in human nature runs deep. Voluntary changes of heart benefit everyone and they are to be celebrated. But they are not sufficient to bring about social change. Thus King’s Poor People’s Campaign demanded a more standard form of social democracy, where the government would tax the rich to fund housing and income for the poor.

I greatly admire King’s political vision because it forms an admirable synthesis of two crucial political currents. I think that James Doull is right to bemoan a politics of “division” in which the interests of different human groups and individuals are fundamentally set against each other, with no larger picture of a common good. Such a division got much worse in the decades after Doull’s death: my Facebook feed in the mid-2010s (pre-Trump) was full of feminist advice not to say that patriarchy hurts men too (even though it absolutely does), because the fight against patriarchy should only be for women and not men. Such views of intrinsic antagonism set in motion what Hobbes called a war of all against all – and in a war of all against all, all will lose.

Doull regularly criticized Marx as one responsible for promoting that division. But Marx, I think, saw what Doull and Gandhi did not: that power structures tend to be captured and serve the interests of the powerful. Public shaming can end such obvious injustices as colonialism and segregation – but even there, it does so through a change in the state and its apparatus of coercion. Moreover the powerful are often blinded to the unjust operations of their power. One can see that blinding just by reading Doull’s own heroes, Aristotle and Hegel: one cannot imagine Aristotle writing of “natural slaves”, or Hegel writing that slavery “causes the increase of human feeling among the Negroes”, had they ever been slaves themselves. Appeals to the common good can all too easily become appeals to the good of the powerful.

And I cannot name any thinker from any era who navigated this problem better than Martin Luther King. King refused the naïveté that trusted the rich to give up their land voluntarily. And yet he never stopped believing in the common good. Segregation did hurt white people as it hurt black people; it’s just all too difficult for white people to see that. When the powerful wield power unjustly, one must take some of that power from them by force – but in a way that ultimately makes a better world for everyone.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

A brief summary of where the debate itself went: the Charles calls Śāntideva a utilitarian because Śāntideva is a universalist consequentialist; that means that he is concerned with bringing about the best overall consequences for all beings. I dispute that “utilitarian” is the right term because I think it has misleading connotations: Charles agreed in the debate that his equation of Śāntideva and Peter Singer doesn’t work, and I think that calling Śāntideva “utilitarian” leads to similar misinterpretations, even though (as Charles noted) analytic philosophers often deploy the term in that way.

As for eudaimonism: Charles repeatedly defines eudaimonism as asserting “a very close connection between virtuous actions and the agent’s own well-being”, or something similar to that. I think it’s inarguable that there is such a close connection for Śāntideva in practice: virtuous actions always, or at least nearly always, do in fact improve the agent’s well-being. Charles clarified during the debate, though, that he did not mean a close connection in practice but a close conceptual connection: that is, on his account of eudaimonism, virtuous actions are defined in terms of the agent’s well-being, as they are for Aristotle and are not for Śāntideva. I agreed that by that standard Śāntideva would not be a eudaimonist.

There is probably more that could be said on the use of both these terms at issue, utilitarianism and eudaimonism. But Charles and I agreed that there’s not that much value in trying to say it. He and I agree on a large number of matters; we picked the topic of utilitarianism and eudaimonism as a point of disagreement in our interpretations of Śāntideva. But the helpful thing we saw in the debate was that our bigger disagreement runs in a more interesting and important direction – a constructive direction. That is: we actually disagree very little, if at all, about what Śāntideva thinks. We disagree on the words we use to characterize him, but much more importantly, we disagree on whether he’s right, about one particular issue.

That issue is an argument that Charles refers to as the Ownerless Suffering Argument. The Ownerless Suffering Argument is probably Śāntideva’s most famous argument, the one excerpted in introductory ethics texts: in a nutshell, Śāntideva argues that because the self is unreal, it makes no sense for us to treat ourselves, or those dear to us, better than any other sentient beings in our actions. In Charles’s terms, the view that Śāntideva argues for is agent-neutral: all people, all moral agents, should have the exact same aim as all the other moral agents, namely the well-being of all sentient beings. We shouldn’t be partial to our friends or families or neighbours, let alone ourselves.

I agree with Charles that Śāntideva holds this view. Contra Charles, I also believe that Śāntideva is wrong. I don’t think this argument works.

And when the disagreement moves to this terrain, we are no longer dealing with small questions of terminology. At issue now, among many other things, is what kind of Buddhists we each are. Charles, I think, is committed to Śāntideva’s Mahāyāna as interpreted by the Tibetans. But while I’ve drawn more from Śāntideva than from any other Buddhist author, and still pray to Mañjuśrī, I learned my own Buddhism in a Theravāda place, and at heart I’m still a Theravādin. I take very seriously the Dhammapāda’s advice that one should not neglect one’s own welfare for the sake of another.

Now I’ve also noted that Śāntideva’s view is not necessarily as far from the Dhammapāda’s as it might look. And Śāntideva makes an entirely different argument for altruism, one that I largely accept. This is that beautiful paradox in Bodhicaryāvatāra VIII.129: “All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others.” Egocentrism, in practice, is self-defeating: cultivating other-regarding virtues of generosity and gentleness and honesty improves one’s own well-being.

I suspect that, overall, Charles and I are likely to agree on Śāntideva’s paradox too. in the debate (just after the one-hour mark), on one aspect of the question of whether egocentrism harms one’s well-being, he said “I think that might be true, I think there might be some evidence for that, but that’s an empirical question for the psychologists to talk about.” That quote may identify another source of disagreement between us, a methodological one: with John Doris, I refuse to identify philosophy as an a priori field of inquiry; I think any philosophy that refuses to talk about empirical questions isn’t worthy of the name philosophy. Aristotle was wrong about a great many empirical questions, of course, but he would never have dreamed of excluding such questions from his purview. There is no room for NOMA in my philosophy: many of the most important philosophical claims are subject to empirical confirmation or refutation, including this one. Having said that, I think Charles and I (and Śāntideva!) would likely agree that the weight of evidence does point to egocentrism harming the agent’s well-being, so that in itself is not where our great disagreement lies.

However, important substantive disagreement remains. When one’s focus is turned to the way other-regarding virtue helps one’s own flourishing, it likely leads to partiality: one pays more concern to one’s friends and family and neighbours and colleagues than to strangers one doesn’t know. That partial view, which I accept, is not agent-neutral. An agent-neutral view like Śāntideva’s regards everybody equally, which is one of the reasons he praises the monk’s life so highly: it is difficult if not impossible to live an agent-neutral life when one runs a family household.

It is on that point of agent-neutrality where there is agreement between Śāntideva and the otherwise very different philosopher Peter Singer. Charles noted in our followup conversation that he agrees with Singer’s claim that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” It seems to me that Singer’s philosophy and life are a reductio ad absurdum of this statement: by Singer’s own standard, Singer himself is a murderer. For Śāntideva, unlike for Singer, that sort of universal altruism is not an obligation – but it is still the best course of action to take. One should be giving money to starving children halfway around the world, not buying toys for one’s own children. For Śāntideva the monk, it would not be so hard to live up to that philosophy; for a father like Charles, I think, it is a bigger challenge. (It is relevant here that the Buddha named his son with the word for “fetter”.)

You may have noticed – I am sure Charles has – that I have not actually refuted the Ownerless Suffering Argument itself here (as, say, Paul Williams attempts to do). That’s by design: this post is not intended to establish my view against Charles’s. For one other point of agreement that he and I reached in our post-debate discussions was that we should have a followup debate on this very topic. Where and when are to be determined – but I hope this post sets the context.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

The Faculty of Philosophy is seeking to appoint an Associate Professor (or Professor) in Indian Philosophy, in association with a Tutorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. This post is available from 1 September 2023, or as soon as possible thereafter. This is a permanent appointment (subject to an initial probation).
Further particulars for the post, and information on how to apply, are available here.
The closing date for applications is 12 noon on Monday 16 January 2023

You’ve no doubt heard about the train wreck that is Twitter’s current state under Elon Musk. Even if you would prefer a Twitter with less content moderation, as Musk had said he wished to create, it’s hard to be optimistic about Twitter’s future amid Musk’s wave of haphazard sackings. So many of us are now starting to ask: what does the world after Twitter look like?

And, well, do you remember the world before Twitter? It was full of blogs! A Substack post from Brad DeLong today linked to John Scalzi, who I remember best sixteen years ago for taping bacon to the cat. (I miss the ’00s in a number of ways. Something I never expected I’d say.) Scalzi, like me, did not stop blogging even when it stopped being cool, and he suggests that in the post-Twitter world “everyone should start blogging again.”

Will the post-Twitter world be a blogosphere again? Perhaps that’s just the wishful thinking of us bloggers. But we can at least take some steps to make it happen. And one of the things Scalzi reminds us – something I admit being delinquent about in the past few years – is to visit other bloggers’ sites. Now, as was already the case in blogs’ heyday fifteen years ago, few of us have the mental space to remember to regularly visit multiple weekly or biweekly updated sites. But there are ways to make the task easier. With some blogs, like this one, you can subscribe by email. For others: blogs suffered a major blow when Google killed Google Reader, but its functions are still available through Feedly and The Old Reader: tools that will deliver new content from multiple blogs to you.

The most important thing I can do in this post is to name other philosophy blogs that, like mine, have continued chugging along during the Twitter era. Because Scalzi and I are not the only ones who’ve kept it up. This blog’s co-founders each have our own blogs: I have Love of All Wisdom and Elisa Freschi has her own blog. The IPB’s sister blog in Chinese Philosophy, Warp Weft and Way, remains lively. My exchange with Justin Whitaker earlier this year was notable in that his half of it took place on his own blog at Buddhistdoor.

And some of the older blogs in Western philosophy remain too. The Speculative Realist movement, in many ways born of blogs, keeps on going at Larval Subjects and Ecology Without Nature. Front Porch Republic carries on the same brand of intellectual conservatism that intrigued me a decade ago, through a very different political era. And the larger-scale blogs at Daily Nous and New APPS continue as well. Blogs were a great place for stimulating philosophical ideas before there was Twitter – and they look well poised to remain so after Twitter.

Cross-posted with minor modifications at Love of All Wisdom.

I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.

The Visuddhimagga and the Cloud both describe, in Smart’s words, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” Neither text’s author ever claims to have done this themselves, successfully or otherwise. Smart seems to assume that they did, and my essay makes a lot of that unjustified assumption. But I think I went too far when I said this:

Similarities in actual experience lead us to believe that perhaps there is something perennial in human nature, or in the reality of the universe, that is conducive to such an experience across cultural boundaries. Similarities in textual prescription, if they do not reflect actual experiences, are mere curiosities, of mostly antiquarian interest.

That last line, I think, is wrong in a couple of ways. Similarities in prescription can easily be of more than antiquarian interest – prescription is what ethics is about, after all, and such similarities could provide common ground for ethical dialogue. But beyond that, I don’t think it’s true, or even likely, that similarities in textual prescription do not reflect actual experiences!

Indeed, we can’t assume that either Buddhaghosa or the Cloud of Unknowing author had the experiences they describe, when nothing in their respective texts says that they did. Yet they did feel the need to record a description of these experiences anyway. And that strongly suggests to me that someone must have had or claimed to have these experiences and recounted them, even if we now only hear it second- or third- or fourth-hand. I can’t really think of a reason why someone would go to such length to make such an experience up and recount it in such detail from scratch – especially if they’re not claiming to have had it themselves, since they wouldn’t get the prestige that might come from impressing people with their own experience.

So it seems to me likely that, indeed, the Visuddhimagga and the Cloud are respectively each describing experiences that someone in Sri Lanka and medieval England actually had, whether or not that someone was the author. And so they do “lead us to believe that perhaps there is something perennial in human nature, or in the reality of the universe, that is conducive to such an experience across cultural boundaries.” Not every “mystical experience” is like what either of these texts describe, but the described experience seems to be something available to humans in multiple and very different cultural contexts – and yes, it could also be that some drugs may give us quick access to such an experience.

There is a place where I think the essay, and the critics of universal mystical experience, still have a point. And that is on the question of significance. The Cloud author speaks of the state in question as an experience of God; Buddhaghosa obviously does not. Smart says that whether the experience is of God “depends on a much wider set of conditions than can be drawn from the mystical experience itself, but it is a wider set that could be put on one side by Buddhaghosa.” And I asked: “Buddhaghosa could put the language of God on one side in order to compare ‘the experience itself’. The question is, why would he want to?”

The latter question doesn’t have to be rhetorical. It does remain rhetorical in the context of Smart’s article, which never actually asks it. As I understand them, the Cloud author prescribes a path to experience God; Buddhaghosa prescribes a path to clear away the mental hindrances that keep us in suffering. These are different things. For neither thinker is it the experience itself that matters most; the experience is for something, and that purpose is what really matters. Smart’s “could be put on one side” neglects those questions of purpose and significance – in line with a Wilberian or Theosophical approach that says, against all historical evidence, that the core of the world’s great traditions is in replicable experience.

All that said, though, it’s not so hard to imagine Buddhaghosa encountering a text like the Cloud and indeed “putting the language of God on one side.” (Since to imagine such an encounter is already science-fictional, let’s further assume for this thought experiment that Buddhaghosa was one person, rather than a committee, as Maria Heim has argued.) Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions in India drew from each other’s practices and theories. It’s not so hard to imagine Buddhaghosa saying, for example: “you mlecchas have strange and false beliefs about your big deva. Yet the practices you describe take you to a jhāna. Perhaps then you have other practices that could be helpful for us on our path.”

A comparative philosopher like myself strives to be more open to other traditions than would a stricter Buddhist like Buddhaghosa. So I as a Buddhist have even more reason to say something like that than Buddhaghosa would have: it is at least possible that the different experiences are illuminating a common reality. For that reason, I no longer think similarities between the Visuddhimagga and the Cloud are “mere curiosities, of mostly antiquarian interest.” My old essay closes as follows:

Smart has succeeded at the very modest task he set himself at the beginning of his chapter: to establish “that there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.” But we might well ask: who cares?

Who cares? Twenty years later, it turns out that I do.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

There are likely a number of religious-studies scholars who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical experience. I haven’t gone into their literature in a while, but I think it would be easy for them to say Griffiths is setting the study of mysticism back many decades. Because Griffiths’s stated conception of mystical experience is one that many religionists would already have considered very dated – even when I was studying them twenty years ago.

I say this because Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical experience using a questionnaire based on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960. And when I was in grad school twenty years ago, Stace’s work was often considered impossibly backward.

Stace had many critics – Steven Katz, Wayne Proudfoot, my teacher Robert Gimello – who savaged Stace for ignoring the cultural context of mysticism, for being too hasty in proclaiming “mystical experience” is one thing everywhere. And clearly, Arjuna’s vision of Krishna is not God calling to Moses from the burning bush is not Teresa penetrated by the angel, and none of these is the nondual state of consciousness described in the Maṇḍukya Upaniṣad – the latter being central to Stace’s account of mystical experience. Gimello pointed out in class that the category of “mystical experience” grew out of élite nineteenth-century movements like Theosophy: these movements viewed themselves as having a truer understanding of the world’s “religious” traditions than those traditions themselves did, because (they thought) the heart of those traditions was a mystical core that they had access to, with the rest being mere accretion.

The force of Gimello’s critiques were not lost on me. It’s easy to see that Theosophical influence in Ken Wilber’s work: as my article on him notes, it is a remarkably confident move to say that you understand the world’s traditions better than their practitioners understand themselves; to go there, one had best provide evidence for it, which Wilber effectively does not. A while ago I posted here a paper I’d written for Gimello where I noted how even a noted scholar like Ninian Smart would jump to conclusions about experiences that noted philosophers described, assuming that those philosophers themselves must have had those experiences even when they do not themselves claim to have had them.

But it’s possible that that critique went too far. Stace himself did not go to the extremes of the Theosophists: when Stace spoke of a universal core to mystical experience, he had excluded “visions and voices” from the category. He knew that nobody has a vision of Jesus who has not already heard of Jesus, and likewise for Krishna; you’re likely going to look silly if you strive to identify a common core in all these experiences. We could question Stace’s definition, but even if we still wanted to categorize visionary experiences of divine beings as mystical experiences (which I think is a reasonable thing to do), it’s not hard to make a division within them between “hot” mystical or visionary experiences like Arjuna’s and Teresa’s, and “cool” mystical experiences of the sort Stace describes. And the latter may yet turn out to have more cross-cultural commonality.

Such “cool” experiences are impersonal, usually wordless and often nondual. They often take the form of what Stace’s defender Robert Forman calls a “Pure Consciousness Event” (PCE), “defined as a wakeful though contentless (nonintentional) consciousness.” (8) I think it would be difficult if not impossible to establish that PCEs are universally present across humanity, but it seems quite plausible that they occur in multiple cultural contexts, not always in contact with one another. Essays in Forman’s book highlight several places that seem to describe such an event: The Yoga Sūtras describe a samādhi (meditative or trancelike) state in which mental fluctuations (cittavṛtti) cease and there is “unity among the grasper, the grasping, and grasped.” The German medieval mystic Meister Eckhart describes a state called gezucken (rapture), where “a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself.” The Ukrainian Hasidic preacher Dov Baer says that one must “forget oneself totally”; thereby “one comes to the state of ayin [nothingness], which is the state of humility.”

Obviously the interpretations of the experiences described in such texts are different; Eckhart and Baer identify this state of consciousness as a unity with God, as the Yoga Sūtras would not. But is the experience itself the same? That’s a trickier question, and in order to answer it Yes we’d need to dive deeper into their descriptions than the capsule presentation I’ve just given. But without such deeper investigation I also don’t think we can answer it No – which is often what the critics seem to do. Katz’s claim seems to be not merely that these experiences are not the same, but that they could not be. And there I think he is on shaky ground.

Katz’s famous chapter says: “let me state the single epistemological assumption that has exercised my thinking and which has forced me to undertake the present investigation: There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences.” The emphasis is in the original, and the combination of italics and capitals suggests one who doth protest too much – especially when this strong claim is taken as an assumption, rather than the conclusion to be proved. Katz, his critics note, doesn’t even define “mediated” or “unmediated”!

Indeed the claim seems suspect to begin with: what about a newborn human infant who has not yet encountered language of any kind? Surely it has something that can be called experience, and surely this experience cannot be linguistically mediated, at least – and if Katz means by “mediated” something other than that, he doesn’t tell us what it is. In identifying states that might count as Pure Consciousness Events, some mystical thinkers (like Baer) urge a “forgetting”, a dropping away of the things one has learned – suggesting a possible return to the newborn’s state. And if the newborn can have an unmediated experience, why can’t we?

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Within TV ad 1.3.4, (Mimamsadarsana 1929-34, pp. 192–193), Kumārila discusses a seeming deontic conflict and solves it by appealing to the different responsibilities (adhikāra) of the various addressees. He explains that the prescription to learn the Vedas for 48 years does not conflict (virodhābhāva) with the duty to get married and have children, because it addresses people who suffer of disabilities and who therefore cannot become householders. This is a further evidence of how O(x/a) implies that a is actually able to perform x. If a is unable to perform x, the obligation is not incumbent upon them (the background, ableist, assumption is that a blind or lame person cannot support a family.

Kumārila also discusses the prescription to learn the Veda by heart in order to get svarga (heaven/happiness) and explains it would clash against the ones prescribing complicated sacrifices for the same result, since no one would engage in them, if learning the Veda by heart were enough. Here, we see several principles at work:

1. No prescription can remain idle.
2. Translative (?) property of duties: If x implies z and O(x), then O(z). In fact, performing sacrifices \emph{presupposes} learning the Veda by heart, so that O(sacrifices)—>O(learning Veda by heart).

Because of 1., it is clear that the former prescription necessarily only applies to people who cannot perform the latter. Thus: If there are two seemingly contradictory obligations (both aiming at the same result), that is:

(i) O(x/in order to reach s) and
(ii) O (x3/in order to reach s),
then one needs to postulate for the former an additional condition that states something like “Unless you can perform (ii).

(This post is cross-posted from Love of All Wisdom. If you regularly read the IPB but not that blog, you likely know me as Amod Lele. I explained there a little while ago.)

I was recently invited to a recent Buddhist-ethics conference featuring a workshop discussion on gender. I decided to attend the workshop en femme – as Sandhya – because I thought it might be relevant, though I wasn’t sure how. It turned out it was.

The workshop, hosted by Amy Langenberg and Antoinette DeNapoli, showcased the pair’s work on the welcome South Asian phenomenon of female renouncers. DeNapoli studied Mataji, a guru in Madhya Pradesh who declared herself a Shankaracharya (a monastic leader in Śaṅkara’s lineage). Langenberg studied the Peace Grove Institute, a community of female Theravāda Buddhist renouncers in Nepal. Having introduced Mataji and the Peace Grove, the two asked some discussion questions relating to the two, and broke us into small groups to discuss them. I forget the exact wording of the question that proved most fruitful, but it was something along the lines of “What do these female renouncers teach us about gender ethics?” And one of my group’s participants asked a most insightful question: “What do we mean by gender ethics?”

That question led me to the thoughts that I shared with the group then and which I’ll share with you here. I said: gender ethics seems to mean the role (or lack thereof) that we think gender should play in a good life. Once I said that, I was immediately struck by the difference in gender ethics between Mataji and Peace Grove. And my previous reflections on my own gender journey helped me think that difference through.

Mataji proclaims the essential sacredness of biological femaleness, in a Śākta way that would at times suggest female superiority. In DeNapoli’s words from her article:

Mataji understands that her biological female sex “naturally” connects her to the transformative divinity of the Goddess…. She stresses that women more so than men embody the great goddess Shakti, who creates, sustains, and destroys the universe. But Shakti is more than a divine feminine life-force to Mataji. She is also a divine female who menstruates like human women. Without Shakti’s menstruation, Mataji says that the world could not exist. She emphasizes that “Blood comes out of our bodies because it came out of Mother’s body first.”

A student associated with Peace Grove, on the other hand, says something very different: “We girls just want to live our lives as freely and as happily as boys. Girls and boys are creatures of the same nature and we all have the same desires, but only boys are allowed to fulfill those desires. It is time for us to create a world where girls can enjoy their lives too.” For this Peace Grove student, boys and girls are the same in the relevant respects, even having the same desires; everyone should just be treated equally. Whereas for Mataji, female biological features like menstruation are essential to the divine functioning of the universe.

I don’t see how there could be room for transgender in Mataji’s biologically essentialist ideas. I don’t menstruate, never have, and never will; I’m not going to count as a woman by her standards. (And it’s important to remember that such essentialist ideas of gender, disagree with them as we might, are still considerably more widespread around the world than are views of gender as self-expression like mine.) For the Peace Grove student, on the other hand, people are people; biology should not be destiny, not even in a way that elevates female biology.

Mataji’s views derive deeply from her non-Buddhist Indian Śākta context, informed by Assamese tantra. By contrast, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to me if the Peace Grove student’s non-normative view of gender is tied to her Buddhism! This is where my previous thoughts on the matter came in: in Confucianism or the Abrahamic traditions, as in Mataji’s Śāktism, there’s a normativity or even sacredness attached to biological nature, including the nature of the reproductive system. In Buddhism there is no such thing! Reproduction just puts more beings on the wheel of saṃsāra; there’s nothing sacred about it. And so there is nothing sacred about biological maleness or femaleness either. (Tantric Buddhism could be an exception here, especially given its close connection to the Śākta tradition that Mataji draws from – but then it tends to be an exception in a lot of ways.)

Now premodern Buddhism was both sexist and cissexist (a term I prefer to “transphobic”) – not surprisingly given the patriarchal society it belonged to. The thing is, I don’t think that either of those flaws go deep into Buddhism’s theory. If you get rid of the suttas’ disparaging views of women and the Vinaya’s prohibitions on paṇḍakas entering the monkhood, not that much else has to change; gender doesn’t play a strong part in the path to liberation from suffering. (Since the rationale for monastic rules in the Vinaya often has to do with public perceptions of the monkhood, I think there’s a good case that the sexist and cissexist rules should be dropped today by the Vinaya’s own reasoning.)

All of that is very different from Confucianism, where husband and wife are one of the Five Relationships with their own teleology. It’s also very different from a view where the masculine and feminine principles of Śiva and Śākti are fundamental to the universe. In those systems, if you want to deemphasize biological sex, a lot more has to go out with it. With a Confucian or Śaivite cosmology, it’s a lot harder to get rid of biological essentialism in ethics, and so feminism is more likely to take an essentialist form like Mataji’s. I respect Mataji’s approach, but all the same it makes me glad I’m a Buddhist.

I recently heard from Malcolm Keating, South Asia Book Review Editor for Philosophy East & West. He said they have the following books available to review. The journal can’t always promise complimentary hard copies, but free e-copies are certain. Please note that authors are welcome to have their publishers get in touch with the journal, too. For more information, contact Malcolm Keating at malcolm.keating@yale-nus.edu.sg.

Assistant Professor- Position in South Asian Religions, School of Religious Studies 

The School of Religious Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) invites applications for a tenure-­track faculty position in the area of South Asian Religions, with a focus on gender and/or sexuality, at the rank of Assistant Professor. Exceptionally qualified candidates may be considered at the rank of Associate.  

Position Description:
We seek a dynamic colleague capable of expanding and enriching an already strong program in Asian Religions at McGill who is prepared to teach at undergraduate and graduate levels. 

The appointment begins August 1, 2023.  

Job Duties: 

The candidate will also be expected to teach at undergraduate and graduate levels; to contribute to graduate seminars in theory and method offered by the School of Religious Studies.  

Qualifications and Education Requirements:
The candidate is expected to have received the PhD prior to appointment.  

This position calls for specialization in the study of South Asian Religions alongside substantive engagement with the wider fields of Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, and Gender Studies, including relevant theoretical and methodological approaches.   

Preference will be given to candidates who have an excellent overall research profile; research competence in at least two South Asian languages, ideally, one modern and one classical; and the ability to teach broad courses that cover South Asian religious traditions in interreligious and regional perspectives.

Faculty/Department/Unit:
School of Religious Studies 

For further information about the School of Religious Studies, visit: http://www.mcgill.ca/religiousstudies.   

For more information on the study of Asian Religions at the School of Religious Studies, visit:  

Job Type:
Tenure-track

Rank:
Assistant Professor

Salary:
Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Posting Period: 

Applications should be received by November 1, 2022 to guarantee full consideration, but will be accepted until the position is filled.   

Applications must be submitted online through Workday, McGill’s employment portal    

(https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/mcgill_careers).  

Required Documents: 

Applicants should submit the following:  

a letter of application (addressing qualifications, research, and teaching interests);  

a Curriculum Vitae; relevant teaching materials;  

and one representative writing sample or scholarly publication.  

Shortlisted candidates will be asked to submit three letters of recommendation at the relevant stage of review. 

Inquiries: 

Inquiries may be addressed to Ms. F. Maniaci, Administrative Officer, School of Religious Studies (francesca.maniaci@mcgill.ca), or to the chair of the search committee, Prof. Hamsa Stainton (hamsa.stainton@mcgill.ca). 

McGill University is committed to equity and diversity within its community and values academic rigour and excellence. We welcome and encourage applications from racialized persons/visible minorities, women, Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as from all qualified candidates with the skills and knowledge to engage productively with diverse communities. 

At McGill, research that reflects diverse intellectual traditions, methodologies, and modes of dissemination and translation is valued and encouraged. Candidates are invited to demonstrate their research impact both within and across academic disciplines and in other sectors, such as government, communities, or industry. 

McGill further recognizes and fairly considers the impact of leaves (e.g., family care or health-related) that may contribute to career interruptions or slowdowns. Candidates are encouraged to signal any leave that affected productivity, or that may have had an effect on their career path. This information will be considered to ensure the equitable assessment of the candidate’s record. 

McGill implements an employment equity program and encourages members of designated equity groups to self-identify. It further seeks to ensure the equitable treatment and full inclusion of persons with disabilities by striving for the implementation of universal design principles transversally, across all facets of the University community, and through accommodation policies and procedures. Persons with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations for any part of the application process may contact, in confidence, accessibilityrequest.hr@mcgill.ca. 

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. 

Further information on this application: https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/mcgill_careers/details/Assistant-Professor–Position-in-South-Asian-Religions–School-of-Religious-Studies_JR0000031192

The Department of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY, is seeking applicants for an Assistant Professor position, tenure track. The position will involve teaching introductory-level undergraduate courses as well as elective courses in the applicant’s area of expertise. We are seeking a philosopher with a strong research profile.

Area of Specialization: Non-Western Philosophy OR Value Theory
Area of Competence: Philosophy of Mind & Psychology (preferred)

Baruch College, located in the historic Gramercy Park/Flatiron district of Manhattan, is one of eleven senior colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY). We are proud to serve a diverse and engaged student body of over 18,000. Our students represent a wealth of racial, ethnic, economic, religious, linguistic, and national origin backgrounds, and include many recent immigrants as well as individuals who are the first in their family to attend college. Baruch is ranked among the top institutions of higher education in the nation by The Chronicle of Higher Education for promoting student social mobility. Baruch is also listed among the nation’s top public colleges for academic excellence. Baruch seeks staff and faculty members who thrive in multicultural academic environments and are committed to access and excellence in higher education. Visit us at https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/.

Qualifications: Qualified candidates will have a PhD in philosophy, and demonstrated teaching excellence at the post-secondary level. 

Compensation and Benefits: CUNY offers faculty a competitive compensation and benefits package covering health insurance, pension and retirement benefits, paid parental leave, and savings programs.  We also provide mentoring and support for research, scholarship, and publication as part of our commitment to ongoing faculty professional development.

Further details, including instructions on how to apply, can be found at the Philjobs listing.

Thanks to Hagop Sarkissian for sharing this ad with us.

I only recently became aware that Michael Jerryson passed away last year – far too young, barely older than myself. I would like to offer my tribute to him here.

I knew Michael personally because of a wonderful biannual invite-only conference that brings together scholars of Buddhist ethics. He and I certainly clashed, for he would claim that scholars – even in ethics! – should not themselves be taking normative positions. I am not exactly friendly to that view. But the debates themselves were friendly and warm, as they should be – and as Michael himself was.

I know why Michael took the position he did, that Buddhism scholars should only describe and not evaluate. His work was in a genre with the works of Stephen Jenkins and Brian Victoria: providing a much-needed corrective to the too-often-held view that Buddhism is a necessarily peaceful and pacifist tradition. As it turns out, there has been violence aplenty committed in its name. And when we focus on the nonviolent Buddhist ideals that we ourselves admire, we must not blind ourselves to that.

Michael’s work was particulary poignant for me because it explored Buddhist violence in Thailand, where I’d had my life-changing epiphany. That epiphany was in the north and northeast of the country (along with neighbouring Laos), whereas Michael’s work focused on the south. Now to most Western visitors like me, southern Thailand and its sunny beaches typically play the role of a vacation getaway. But proceed further south than most Westerners go, near the Malaysian border, and one finds a different, more violent world. The southern Thai situation is not the situation in Burma where there are clear-cut good guys and bad guys: impoverished Muslim refugees and Buddhist monks urging their butchering. It is a more standard situation of ethnic conflict, where a dominant political majority group treats a minority in ways that make them chafe, the minority wants to split off politically and violence ensues. But since the groups are marked as Muslim and Buddhist, Buddhists commit violent acts in the name of Buddhism.

So while I do agree with Sallie King that violent extremism is “not a valid expression of the dharma”, I think King and I have to be clear that when we say this, we are speaking as theologians, engaging in the proper academic activity of developing normative philosophical positions grounded in our faith commitments. We are not providing a sociological description of those extremists, who see themselves as expressing the dharma perfectly validly. We think they’re wrong about that, just as academic Christian theologians might think creationists are wrong about evolution – but those theologians need to be clear that those creationists see themselves as Christian.

The descriptive and the normative get especially conflated in discussions of engaged Buddhism. There has never been real agreement about what “engaged Buddhism” means. Is it a specific modern movement, progressive in a broad sense, starting with Dharmapala and Taixu? Or is it an older and more general tendency within Buddhism toward political action, Steven Collins’s non-disengaged “mode”, including classical works on kingship? (Such as the Mahāvaṃsa, which urges the killing of unbelievers?)

Engaged Buddhist scholars tend to confuse the two: collapsing Buddhist political engagement in general into the views of the modern progressive left. In so doing, it makes invisible the people who Michael Jerryson studied: people who do things that we leftists find bad, and do so in the name of Buddhism. Michael studied people who call themselves Buddhists and who are politically engaged, but are rarely considered “engaged Buddhists”. His work was a much needed corrective.

I’ll close with my personal memory of Michael that most stands out: of his preparedness. The accommodation provided by the conference in its first year was in a campus residence; the organizers had noted that this arrangement meant shared rooms, but not that it meant there would be no toiletries! I was left fecklessly without any soap or shampoo. Michael, however, had brought so much of these that he could not merely lend me his own supply, but lend me additional bottles to last me through the conference while he used his own. I owed my comfort there to him.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Submission deadline: August 15, 2022

Conference dates: November 4-8, 2022

Hosted by: IIT, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

Keynote speakers:
Purushottama Bilimoria (Uni Melbourne, San Francisco State Uni, RUDN University),
Sachchidananda Mishra (ICPR, BHU Varanasi)

Details:
The aim of this workshop is to explore the philosophical and logical aspects pertaining to religion coming from the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain perspectives. The participants will inquire into how the relations between logic and religion are supported by rational inquiry on religious matters. They will scrupulously examine a wide range of arguments postulated by Indian philosophers, logicians, and theologians. The main themes will center around: the doctrine of karma and the related concepts of suffering, accumulation of merits, and detachment, the belief in an afterlife, rebirth, and/or liberation, the main arguments for the existence and non-existence of a permanent self, and the disputes between the theists and atheists over the existence of the divine realm(s) and God.

• We invite submissions of contributed papers on topics related to these questions, including but not restricted to:
• Philosophico-logical arguments for the possibility of liberation and reincarnation.
• Retributive dimension of the doctrine of karma.
• Logic and the concept of God, especially the arguments for and against the existence of God.
• Theism and Atheism in the Indian religious-philosophical traditions.
• Arguments for the existence and persistence of a self.
• Ethical implications of religious beliefs.

Paper proposals drawing upon original sources written in classical Indian languages (Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit) and papers with comparative and/or cross-cultural components are particularly welcome.

Abstracts must have a maximum of 600 words and be written in English according to our template; they must be submitted via Easychair (note that prior registration with EasyChair is required). In the submission, one of the keywords must be “Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Logic”. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the congress. Accepted abstracts will be published in the congress proceedings, which will be available during the congress. After the meeting authors will be invited to submit a complete version of their works, which will be peer-reviewed and published in a book and/or special issues of journals with publishers of international recognition. Peer-reviewed papers of previous WoCoLoR’s appeared as special issues of Logica Universalis (Springer), Sophia (Springer) and the Journal of Applied Logics (College Publications).

https://www.logicandreligion.com/workshops
https://philevents.org/event/show/101962?fbclid=IwAR0YXyedu1WbQuMcWjAYzq-JxN–3YAzKl4GdQc2Ep-bbtvRY_UEYWk2kuA

Douglas L. Berger. Indian and Intercultural Philosophy: Personhood, Consciousness, and Causality. viii + 231 pp., London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. $115 (hardback).

In the introduction of Indian and Intercultural Philosophy Berger notes: “In certain respects, a number of the chapters in this volume will . . . strike some readers as controversial and provocative” (p. 11). This claim is demonstratively true in Berger’s reading of Śaṅkara as a dualist (Chapter 1) and Berger’s rejection of Candrakīrti’s exegesis of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18 (Chapter 4). While such claims oppose traditional readings and scholarship, Berger provides convincing arguments that call for critical responses (or continuation of response as in the case of his reading of MMK 24:18).

The book is divided into three sections: (i) Brahmanical philosophy, (ii) Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, and (iii) intercultural philosophy. Since the book is a collection of independent papers, I will provide a cursory synopsis of each chapter.

The First Section

Chapter One focuses on an analysis of Śaṅkara through Daya Krishna’s Indian Philosophy: A Counter-Perspective. Berger argues that Śaṅkara propounds only a non-dualism of the self: there are no multiple selves; there is only one self, Brahman. He argues that Śaṅkara accepts Sāṃkhya’s tattva and Sāṃkhyin dualism, but disagrees over the number of puruṣa-s.

Chapter Two is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Kuznetsova, Ganeri, Ram-Prasad’s (eds.) Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue. In this chapter, he provides a defense of the Naiyāyika argument that self-consciousness continues through time. He does so through a phenomenological argument grounded on the subjectivity and agency required for memory, but he notes that the argument is limited by the unchanging nature of ātman.

Chapter Three focuses on the Buddhist/Naiyāyika debate over vikalpa. He argues that the Buddhist accounts of vikalpa create a division between imagination and perception, while Vācaspati Miśra’s account shows that the interconnection of imagination and memory help guides us to perceive external objects correctly.

The Second Section

Chapter Four is a reworking of Berger’s “Acquiring Emptiness: Interpreting Nāgārjuna’s MMK 24:18”.  In this chapter, Berger builds off Joseph Walser’s Nāgārjuna in Context and argues against Candrakīrti’s claim that neither ‘emptiness’ nor ‘causally conditioned co-arising’ should be understood as referential. Berger argues that Candrakīrti has taken several missteps in his exegesis of MMK 24:18. This leads Berger to claim (i) that ‘emptiness’ and ‘casually conditioned co-arising’ are synonymous, (ii) that following the middle way is understanding that all things are causally conditioned co-arisings, and (iii) ‘emptiness’ and ’causally condition co-arising’ are referential and not mere conceptual constructions.

Chapter Five expands B. S. Yadav’s account of Nāgārjuna’s and Candrakīrti’s deconstruction of svabhāva as inherently targeting the essentialism of Nyāya and Advaita. This attack on essentialism expands to a further attack on the elitism (e.g. the caste system) imbedded in Brahmanical soteriology.

Chapter Six is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Wang’s (ed.) Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought. In this chapter, he argues that Nāgārjuna’s “deconstruction” is not comparable to Derridean deconstruction, but, instead, Nāgārjuna provides a potential critique of Derrida by dissolving the tension between law and justice or giver and recipient through prioritizing and equalizing nirvāṇa with saṃsāra.

The Third Section

Chapter Seven is an expansion and rewriting of Berger’s “Relational and Intrinsic Moral Roots”. This chapter compares Mencius’ account of 孝 xiao (trans. filial piety) and Geoffrey Ashton’s analysis of the Bhagavad Gītā’s “call to social duty”. Berger argues that Mencius provides a better resolution for moral dilemmas, in which one’s family duty and social duty conflict, through a relational model of the self.

Chapter Eight builds off Berger’s Encounters of the Mind and provides his own account of luminous awareness between the practical models (prabhāsvaram cittaṃ or 明心 ming xin) and the metaphysical models (prakāśatva or 清浄心 qing jing xin).

Chapter Nine is a reprint of Berger’s “The Unlikely Commentator”. This chapter focuses on Dārā Shukōh’s attempts at synchronizing Islamic philosophy and Upaniṣadic philosophy. Dārā bases this move on Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Upaniṣads.

Chapter Ten is a reprint of Berger’s chapter in Conard’s (ed.) Nietzsche and the Philosophers. This chapter explains Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism and develops into a critique of Nietzsche’s understanding of the Buddha as a nihilist, in which Berger ultimately claims that Nietzsche’s philosophy would belong to what the early Buddhist called ‘nihilism’.

In short, the chapters of Indian and Intercultural Philosophy highlight Berger’s career and shows the impact he has had on the contemporary study of Indian philosophy. Each chapter is well-argued and compelling–his continuation of the debate over Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:8 (Chapter 4) and his continued analysis of luminous awareness (Chapter 5) are of special interest.

My main criticism is that the “intercultural” element of the book is restricted to the last four chapters, which leaves most of the book engaging with only Indian philosophy. With Berger’s expertise in intercultural philosophy, a further engagement of Indian philosophy with Islamic philosophy or Chinese philosophy would have been of great addition to much-needed scholarship.

One thing that may be disappointing for some readers, who are familiar with Berger’s work, is the number of reprints in the book (Chapters Two, Six, Nine, and Ten), but such readers will likely find the other six chapters as a worthwhile read (especially the reworked Chapters Four and Seven).

Reviewed by Chris Rahlwes, University of Connecticut (website here)

In a number of publications, I have had the audacity to propose an explanation for certain developments in the history Indian philosophy.1 A simple assumption made clear how and why Indian thinkers had adopted a number of at first sight counterintuitive views, including the satkāryavāda, ajātivāda, śūnyavāda, anekāntavāda, etc. Very simply put, the thinkers concerned found it problematic that in situations described by statements such as “the potter makes a jar” there is no jar. The above-mentioned views were believed to solve this problem.
It goes without saying that these solutions will convince few modern readers, because most of them do not find it problematic that there is no jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. And without problem there is no need for a solution. Most modern readers will therefore conclude that the problem of the ancient thinkers was ill conceived and perhaps based on a somewhat naive understanding of the relationship between language and reality.
Given all this, it is not a little surprising that some scholars attribute naiveté, not to the Indian thinkers referred to above, but to the researcher who drew attention to their way of thinking, i.e., to me. Consider the following:

… we wish to note that naive referentialism, which is implicitly adopted by several Sanskritists who attempt to analyse the ancient Indian philosophy of language (see for instance the way the problem is framed in Bronkhorst 1999), does not, or at least not always, represent a good explanatory framework. This is so not only because it is not tenable in general, but also because, in particular, it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic (Freschi & Keidan 2017: 260).

I have some difficulty with his passage. It appears to accuse me, rather than certain early Indian thinkers, of implicitly adopting naive referentialism. This, of course, would be a case of killing the messenger, and therefore bizarre.
Let us therefore assume that what the authors of this article really wanted to say is that I attribute naive referentialism to certain early Indian thinkers. This does not in their opinion “represent a good explanatory framework … because it is not tenable in general”. This observation seems to presuppose that all the views and opinions of Indian thinkers were “tenable”. It excludes the possibility that they could ever be wrong or mistaken. I fail to believe that the authors of the article seriously accept this position.
One point remains: One should presumably not attribute naive referentialism to early Indian philosophers “because … it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic”. This point might be taken seriously, were it not for the fact that it contains a generalization that is hard to sustain. What is this “ancient Indian thinking” on cognition, language and reality that was accepted by all during all the phases of the development of Indian philosophy? What we do come across in the literature is a variety of opinions that are not always in agreement with each other (or indeed with modern thought).
My observations so far might be considered irrelevant if the attribution of more sophisticated ideas to the early Indian thinkers could provide a better explanation of the appearance of satkāryavāda and related doctrines. I cannot a priori exclude that this may be possible, but have not seen evidence that anyone has made the effort. Until and unless someone will successfully make that effort, I find it hard to see what is wrong with my explanation.
To illustrate my position, let us look at one passage that “proves” satkāryavāda. Śaṅkara on Brahmasūtra 2.1.18 states:

prāg utpatteś ca kāryasyāsattve utpattir akartṛkā nirātmikā ca syāt /
If the effect does not exist before it arises, the arising would lack an agent and would be void (taken from Bronkhorst 2011: 66).

The context of this line shows that it concerns the statement “the potter makes a jar”. Śaṅkara clearly thinks that the jar is there before it arises. He links this conviction to the linguistic expression, for he then states that, if there were no jar in the situation, one would say “the potter, etc., which are causes, arise” (kulālādīni kāraṇāni utpadyante) instead of “the jar arises” (ghaṭa utpadyate).
I conclude from this example that Śaṅkara somehow believed that the presence of the word “jar” guarantees that there is a jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. This conclusion is not waterproof, of course, but I do not succeed in coming up with a more plausible and more appropriate interpretation of this passage. If this means that I attribute to Śaṅkara “naive referentialism”, so be it. I am more than willing to change my mind if a better interpretation of Śaṅkara’s remarks is proposed that attributes to him more sophisticated notions regarding the relationship between cognitions, words and things. So far I have not seen any.
The critical remarks discussed above occur in an article that makes the point that a specialist acquaintance with modern ideas can help the interpretation of ancient texts. Indeed, “[a]ncient scientific treatises can be very sophisticated and anticipate modern insights; they should therefore not be considered ‘primitive’ or ‘naive’ by default” (p. 251). This is, in my opinion, a valuable observation, and the article gives some examples of misunderstandings in modern scholarship that are due to the neglect or ignorance of this principle.
However, there is no guarantee that all that is said in ancient Indian scientific treatises anticipates modern insights. An overzealous application of the principle may induce scholars to impose interpretations on ancient texts and overlook direct interpretations that do not anticipate any modern insights. The study of Indian philosophy should not become a game in which overly clever scholars “find” one modern insight after another in texts whose authors, to the best of our knowledge, were unaware of those insights. The presence of modern ideas in ancient texts remains something that is in need of demonstration, not something that can be taken for granted.

References:

Bronkhorst, Johannes (1999): Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne. Turnhout: Brepols. (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses, 105.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2011): Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought. Translated from the French by Michael S. Allen and Rajam Raghunathan. Revised and with a new appendix. Leiden – Boston: Brill. (Brill’s Indological Library, 36.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2013): “The correspondence principle and its critics.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 41(5), 491-499.
Freschi, Elisa & Keidan, Artemij (2017): “Understanding a philosophical text: The problem of ‘meaning’ in Jayanta’s Nyāyamñjarī, book 5.” Reading Bhaṭṭa Jayanta on Buddhist Nominalism. Ed. Patrick McAllister. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Pp. 251-290.

Notes:

1. Primarily Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne (1999) and its English translation Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought (2011); further “The correspondence principle and its critics” (2013).

Author: Johannes Bronkhorst
johannes.bronkhorst@unil.ch