Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits

499 Pages·2023·12.653 MB·English

by  Christian Coseru

Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures 36
Christian Coseru   Editor
Reasons
and Empty
Persons: Mind,
Metaphysics,
and Morality
Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits
Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures
Volume 36
Editor-in-Chief
Purushottama Bilimoria, The University of Melbourne, Australia
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Series Editor
Christian Coseru, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA
Associate Editor
Jay Garfield, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Assistant Editors
Sherah Bloor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Amy Rayner, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Peter Yih Jiun Wong, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Editorial Board
Balbinder Bhogal, Hofstra University, Hempstead, USA
Christopher Chapple, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA
Vrinda Dalmiya, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA
Gavin Flood, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Jessica Frazier, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Kathleen Higgins, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
Patrick Hutchings, Deakin University, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Morny Joy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Carool Kersten, King's College London, London, UK
Richard King, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Arvind-Pal Maindair, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Rekha Nath, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa, USA
Parimal Patil, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Laurie Patton, Duke University, Durham, USA
Stephen Phillips, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
Joseph Prabhu, California State University, Los Angeles, USA
Annupama Rao, Columbia University, New York, USA
Anand J. Vaidya, San Jose State University, San Jose, USA
The Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures focuses
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Christian Coseru
Editor
Reasons and Empty
Persons: Mind, Metaphysics,
and Morality
Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits
Editor
Christian Coseru
Department of Philosophy
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC, USA
Editor-in-Chief
Purushottama Bilimoria
ISSN 2211-1107 ISSN 2211-1115 (electronic)
Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures
ISBN 978-3-031-13994-9 ISBN 978-3-031-13995-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13995-6
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
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The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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Mark Siderits, Borobudur Temple, Central Java, 2012. Photograph by Esther Viros.
v
Acknowledgments
My sincere gratitude goes first to the outstanding group of scholars for their contri-
butions, and for lending their support and expertise at different stages of this long-
in-the-making project. The call for a volume to celebrate the work of Mark Siderits
came at a time when few if any of us conceived that a crisis of global proportions
would alter our personal and professional lives in such dramatic and seemingly
irrevocable ways. The immediate and enthusiastic response to that call provided
unstinting support and encouragement as the project began to take shape in the wake
of the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to thanking all the contributors for tailor-
ing their essays in consideration of Siderits’ influential work, I would also like to
thank the three anonymous referees who read the manuscript for Springer, and pro-
vided detailed and helpful comments. Grateful acknowledgement also to Routledge
for permission to reproduce a slightly altered version of my chapter “Reasons and
Conscious Persons”, originally published in A. Sauchelli (2020), Derek Parfit’s
Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry, London: Routledge.
My heartfelt thanks go to Purushottama Bilimoria, Editor-in-Chief and architect of
the Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures Series,
for inviting me to be a part of the editorial team, and for considering the volume for
this Series. I am also grateful to Christopher Coughlin, senior editor for philosophy
at Springer Nature, for shepherding it through the final stages of production, and to
the entire production team for their wonderful job in preparing the volume for pub-
lication. Lastly, I wish to thank my wife and colleague, Sheridan Hough, for her
unwavering patience, enthusiastic support, and above all for helping this editorial
endeavor achieve a measure of stylistic and thematic consistency. The original rea-
son for this book is Mark Siderits himself, the person whose innovative work set in
motion the many causes and conditions that led to its existence. Whatever one may
think about the reality of persons, we ardently wish for the continued flourishing of
his diligent scholarship, sharp analytic insights, and unyielding generosity.
vii
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Christian Coseru
Part I Mind
But Aren’t We Conscious? A Buddhist Reflection on the Hard Problem . . . . . 19
Georges Dreyfus
Reasons and Conscious Persons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Christian Coseru
Descartes and the Buddha—a rapprochement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Galen Strawson
The Imperfect Reality of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Jonardon Ganeri
Eliminating Selves, Reducing Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Monima Chadha and Shaun Nichols
The Curious Case of the Conscious Corpse: A Medieval Buddhist
Thought Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Robert H. Sharf
How Can Buddhists Account for the Continuity of Mind After Death? . . . . 141
Jan Westerhoff
What’s in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual
in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Evan Thompson
On Necessary Connection in Mental Causation––Nāgārjuna’s Master
Argument Against the Sautrāntika-Vasubandhu: A Mādhyamika
Response to Mark Siderits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Sonam Thakchoe
ix
x Contents
Part II Metaphysics
A Post-Reductionist Buddhism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Matthew MacKenzie
Madhyamaka, Ultimate Reality, and Ineffability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Jay L. Garfield and Graham Priest
The Real According to Madhyamaka, Or: Thoughts on Whether
Mark Siderits and I Really Disagree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Dan Arnold
Anti-Realism and Realism About the Past: A Present
for Mark Siderits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Arindam Chakrabarti
Buddhist Shipping Containers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Koji Tanaka
Finite and Infinite: On Not Making ‘Them’ Different Enough . . . . . . . . . 307
Rupert Read and Christian Greiffenhagen
Part III Epistemology
Mark Siderits on Anumāna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Shoryu Katsura
Buddhist Reductionism, Fictionalism, and Expressibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Laura P. Guerrero
The Presupposition Strategy and the Two Truths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
John Spackman
Part IV Morality
Ideas and Ethical Formation: Confessions of a Buddhist-Platonist . . . . . . 387
Amber Carpenter
Self-Cultivation Philosophy as Fusion Philosophy: An Interpretation
of Buddhist Moral Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
Christopher W. Gowans
Can We Know Whether Śāntideva Was a Consequentialist? . . . . . . . . . . . 437
Charles Goodman
Selfhood and Resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
Rick Repetti
Publications of Mark Siderits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
Contributors
Dan Arnold is Associate Professor of philosophy of religions at the University of
Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief:
Epistemology in South Asian Philosophy of Religions (2005), which won the
American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, and
of Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical
Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind (2012), which won the
Numata Book Prize in Buddhism, both with Columbia University Press, and editor
of Reasons and Lives in Buddhist Traditions, Studies in Honor of Matthew Kapstein
(with Cécile Ducher and Pierre-Julien Harter, Wisdom, 2019). He is currently work-
ing on an anthology of original translations from India’s Madhyamaka tradition of
Buddhist philosophy.
Amber Carpenter is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. Her
research interests span the ancient Greek and Indian philosophical tradition, with a
topical focus on the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology underpin-
ning Plato’s ethics and Indian Buddhist ethics. She is the author of Indian Buddhist
Philosophy (Routledge, 2014) and of Portraits of Integrity (with Charlotte Alston,
Rachael Wiseman, Bloomsbury, 2020). Her articles have appeared in Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, Ratio, Phronesis, Ancient Philosophy, The Classical
Review, History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis, Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, and numerous edited volumes.
Monima Chadha is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her
research interests are in the self, consciousness, and mind, which she studies from a
cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Her papers have appeared in
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, Mind & Language, Philosophy East and West, Philosophers' Imprint,
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
Asian Philosophy, Sophia, European Journal of Philosophy, Consciousness and
Cognition, and several edited collections.
xi