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  1. Buddhism, comparative neurophilosophy, and human flourishing.Christian Coseru - 2014 - Zygon 49 (1):208-219.
    Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain represents an ambitious foray into cross-cultural neurophilosophy, making a compelling, though not entirely unproblematic, case for naturalizing Buddhist philosophy. While the naturalist account of mental causation challenges certain Buddhist views about the mind, the Buddhist analysis of mind and mental phenomena is far more complex than the book suggests. Flanagan is right to criticize the Buddhist claim that there could be mental states that are not reducible to their neural correlates; however, when the mental states (...)
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  • The Conscious Theory of Higher-Orderness.Nicholas Silins - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.
    The massive debate in philosophy and psychology and neuroscience about higher-order theories of consciousness has not adequately distinguished between the following two claims. (Necessary Awareness): For any conscious mental state M and subject S, if S is in M, then S is aware of M. (The Higher-Order Theory): For any conscious mental state M and subject S, if S is in M, then M is conscious because S is aware of M. -/- While I will assume that the first claim (...)
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  • Can Global Anti-Realism Withstand the Enactivist Challenge?Christian Coseru - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):131-142.
    This paper argues that some defenses of global antirealism that critique both epistemic foundationalism and ontological priority foundationalism (e.g., Westerhoff 2020) turn on a false dilemma that ignores non-representational approaches to consciousness and cognition. Arguments against the existence of an external world and against introspective certainty, typically draw on a range of empirical findings (mainly about the brain-based mechanisms that realize cognition) and that are said to lend support to irrealism. Theories that incorporate these findings, such as the interface theory (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Middle Way to Reality: on Why I Am Not a Buddhist and Other Philosophical Curiosities.Christian Coseru - 2021 - Sophia 60 (3):1-24.
    This paper examines four central issues prompted by Thompson's recent critique of the Buddhist modernism phenomenon: (i) the suitability of evolutionary psychology as a framework of analysis for Buddhist moral psychological ideas; (ii) the issue of what counts as the core and main trajectory of the Buddhist intellectual tradition; (iii) the scope of naturalism in the relation between science and metaphysics, and (iv) whether a Madhyamaka-inspired anti-foundationalism stance can serve as an effective platform for debating the issue of progress in (...)
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  • Whose Consciousness? Reflexivity and the Problem of Self-Knowledge.Christian Coseru - 2020 - In Mark Siderits, Ching Keng & John Spackman (eds.), Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness: Tradition and Dialogue. Boston: Brill | Rodopi. pp. 121-153.
    If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...)
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  • A Pāli Buddhist Philosophy of Sentience: Reflections on Bhavaṅga Citta.Sean M. Smith - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):457-488.
    In this paper, I provide a philosophical analysis of Pāli texts that treat of a special kind of mental event called bhavaṅga citta. This mental event is a primal sentient consciousness, a passive form of basal awareness that individuates sentient beings as the type of being that they are. My aims with this analysis are twofold, one genealogical and reconstructive, the other systematic. On the genealogical and reconstructive side, I argue for a distinction between two kinds of continuity that are (...)
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  • Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem in Indian Philosophy.Christian Coseru - 2018 - In Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. New York: Routledge. pp. 92-104.
    This chapter considers the literature associated with explorations of consciousness in Indian philosophy. It focuses on a range of methodological and conceptual issues, drawing on three main sources: the naturalist theories of mind of Nyaya and Vaisesika, the mainly phenomenological accounts of mental activity and consciousness of Abhidharma and Yogacara Buddhism, and the subjective transcendental theory of consciousness of Advaita Vedanta. The contributions of Indian philosophers to the study of consciousness are examined not simply as a contribution to intellectual history, (...)
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  • Mental Time Travel and Attention.Jonardon Ganeri - 2017 - Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (4):353-373.
    ABSTRACTEpisodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an earlier field of experience, yet (...)
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  • Is consciousness reflexively self‐aware? A Buddhist analysis.Bronwyn Finnigan - 2018 - Ratio 31 (4):389-401.
    This article examines contemporary Buddhist defences of the idea that consciousness is reflexively aware or self-aware. Call this the Self-Awareness Thesis. A version of this thesis was historically defended by Dignāga but rejected by Prāsaṅgika Mādhyamika Buddhists. Prāsaṅgikas historically advanced four main arguments against this thesis. In this paper I consider whether some contemporary defence of the Self-Awareness Thesis can withstand these Prāsaṅgika objections. A problem is that contemporary defenders of the Self-Awareness Thesis have subtly different accounts with different assessment (...)
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  • What Do Buddhists Think about Free Will?Rick Repetti - 2017 - In Davis Jake H. (ed.), In A Mirror Is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist Ethics, edited by Jake Davis. Oxford University Press. pp. 257-275.
    A critical overview to the bulk of extant Buddhist theories of free will.
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  • Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will: Agentless Agency?Rick Repetti (ed.) - 2016 - London, UK: Routledge / Francis & Taylor.
    A collection of essays, mostly original, on the actual and possible positions on free will available to Buddhist philosophers, by Christopher Gowans, Rick Repetti, Jay Garfield, Owen Flanagan, Charles Goodman, Galen Strawson, Susan Blackmore, Martin T. Adam, Christian Coseru, Marie Friquegnon, Mark Siderits, Ben Abelson, B. Alan Wallace, Peter Harvey, Emily McRae, and Karin Meyers, and a Foreword by Daniel Cozort.
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  • Buddhism and Animal Ethics.Bronwyn Finnigan - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (7):1-12.
    This article provides a philosophical overview of some of the central Buddhist positions and argument regarding animal welfare. It introduces the Buddha's teaching of ahiṃsā or non-violence and rationally reconstructs five arguments from the context of early Indian Buddhism that aim to justify its extension to animals. These arguments appeal to the capacity and desire not to suffer, the virtue of compassion, as well as Buddhist views on the nature of self, karma, and reincarnation. This article also considers how versions (...)
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  • Intentionality.Joel Krueger - 2018 - In Giovanni Stanghellini, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Paolo Fusar-Poli, Andrea Raballo & René Rosfort (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • Buddhist Idealism.Bronwyn Finnigan - 2017 - In K. Pearce & T. Goldschmidt (eds.), Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics. Oxford University Press. pp. 178-199.
    This article surveys some of the most influential Buddhist arguments in defense of idealism. It begins by clarifying the central theses under dispute and rationally reconstructs arguments from four major Buddhist figures in defense of some or all of these theses. It engages arguments from Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā and Triṃśikā; Dignāga’s matching-failure argument in the Ālambanaparīkṣā; the sahopalambhaniyama inference developed by Dharmakīrti; and Xuanzang’s weird but clever logical argument that intrigued philosophers in China and Japan. It aims to clarify what is (...)
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  • On the Coherence of Dignāga’s Epistemology: Evaluating the Critiques of Candrakīrti and Jayarāśi.Ethan Mills - 2015 - Asian Philosophy 25 (4):339-357.
    I discuss two critiques of Dignāga’s epistemology, one from Candrakīrti and another from Jayarāśi. I argue that they are two versions of what I call the core problem: if the content of Dignāga’s epistemology were correct, two fundamental beliefs within this epistemological theory could not be established or known to be true, as Dignāga claims they are. In response to objections found within the classical Indian tradition as well as several plausible contemporary objections, I then argue that the core problem (...)
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  • Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti.Amit Chaturvedi - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):3-29.
    Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...)
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  • (1 other version)Reasons and Conscious Persons.Christian Coseru - 2020 - In Andrea Sauchelli (ed.), Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 160-186.
    What justifies holding the person that we are today morally responsible for something we did a year ago? And why are we justified in showing prudential concern for the future welfare of the person we will be a year from now? These questions cannot be systematically pursued without addressing the problem of personal identity. This essay considers whether Buddhist Reductionism, a philosophical project grounded on the idea that persons reduce to a set of bodily, sensory, perceptual, dispositional, and conscious elements, (...)
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  • Through the Mirror: The Account of Other Minds in Chinese Yogācāra Buddhism.Jingjing Li - 2019 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 18 (3):435-451.
    This article proposes a new reading of the mirror analogy presented in the doctrine of Chinese Yogācāra Buddhism. Clerics, such as Xuanzang 玄奘 and his protégé Kuiji 窺基, articulated this analogy to describe our experience of other minds. In contrast with existing interpretations of this analogy as figurative ways of expressing ideas of projecting and reproducing, I argue that this mirroring experience should be understood as revealing, whereby we perceive other minds through the second-person perspective. This mirroring experience, in its (...)
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  • Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy.Christian Coseru - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Perhaps no other classical philosophical tradition, East or West, offers a more complex and counter-intuitive account of mind and mental phenomena than Buddhism. While Buddhists share with other Indian philosophers the view that the domain of the mental encompasses a set of interrelated faculties and processes, they do not associate mental phenomena with the activity of a substantial, independent, and enduring self or agent. Rather, Buddhist theories of mind center on the doctrine of no-self (Pāli anatta, Skt.[1] anātma), which postulates (...)
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  • The Notion of Awareness of Self-awareness and the Problem of Infinite Regress in the Cheng Weishi Lun.Chih-Chiang Hu - 2022 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 21 (2):299-316.
    This essay aims to show that the fourfold division theory of consciousness in the Cheng Weishi Lun 成唯識論 is the third way between phenomenology and the higher-order theories of consciousness. Regarding the problem of infinite regress, in particular, this theory represents an alternative between the reflexive model and the reflective model of self-consciousness. The main purpose of this essay is not to prove or to argue for the theory, but to clearly present its structure and the systematic or Abhidharmic way (...)
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  • Shifting Concepts: The Realignment of Dharmakīrti on Concepts and the Error of Subject/Object Duality in Pratyabhijñā Śaiva Thought.Catherine Prueitt - 2017 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 45 (1):21-47.
    Contemporary scholars have begun to document the extensive influence of the sixth to seventh century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti on Pratyabhijñā Śaiva thought. Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta’s adaptation of Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory provides a striking instance of the creative ways in which these Śaivas use Dharmakīrti’s ideas to argue for positions that Dharmakīrti would emphatically reject. Both Dharmakīrti and these Śaivas emphasize that the formation of a concept involves both objective and subjective factors. Working within a certain perceptual environment, factors such as (...)
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  • Is Yogācāra Phenomenology? Some Evidence from the Cheng weishi lun.Robert H. Sharf - 2016 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 44 (4):777-807.
    There have been several attempts of late to read Yogācāra through the lens of Western phenomenology. I approach the issue through a reading of the Cheng weishi lun, a seventh-century Chinese compilation that preserves the voices of multiple Indian commentators on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā. Specifically, I focus on the “five omnipresent mental factors” and the “four aspects” of cognition. These two topics seem ripe, at least on the surface, for phenomenological analysis, particularly as the latter topic includes a discussion of “self-awareness”. (...)
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  • Is the Pramāṇavārttika a Madhyamaka Treatise?Tsering Nurboo - 2020 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 48 (5):827-844.
    This paper deals with the problem of the Pramāṇavārttika’s tenet affiliation and the related question of its final philosophical view within the framework of Buddhist philosophical schools. There are contrasting views and positions on this issue in Tibetan interpretations of the text. Some claim that the Pramāṇavārttika is a text advocating the other-emptiness doctrine, while other scholars argue that it is a Sautrāntika–Vijñānavāda or Vijñānavāda treatise. By contrast, Padma dkar po holds view that it is a Svātantrika-Madhyamaka text, while believing (...)
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  • On the Early Buddhist Attitude Toward Metaphysics.Qian Lin - 2022 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 50 (1):143-162.
    Buddhist scholars in the West broadly agree with the proposition that Buddhism has a philosophical tradition, in many respects comparable to Western ones, while many claim that it also has a practical or empirical dimension that Western philosophies, especially the analytic tradition, lack. There is also a scholarly consensus that an implicit metaphysical system serves as the foundation for the doctrines and practices of early Buddhism as represented in the Pāli suttas. However, Buddhist scholarship to date has not distinguished clearly (...)
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  • Confronting the Truth: Epistemological Conflicts between Early Buddhists and Jains.J. Noel Hubler - 2023 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 51 (3):263-281.
    The lay follower Citta’s debate with Mahāvīra in the _Nigaṇṭha Sutta_ reflects not just simple polemic, but a fundamental epistemological division between Early Jains and Buddhists. A close reading of the _Ācārāṅga Sūtra_ shows that the Jains see the truth as a property of the self-knowing purified soul that knows all things. For the Buddhists, consciousness is conditioned and dependent. If truth is a property or relation of consciousness, then it too is conditioned and dependent. In order to maintain that (...)
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  • Buddhism and the scientific image: Reply to critics.Owen Flanagan - 2014 - Zygon 49 (1):242-258.
    I provide a précis of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (), and then respond to three critics, Christian Coseru, Charles Goodman, and Bronwyn Finnigan.
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  • Personal identity and cosmopolitan philosophy.Christian Coseru - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (7):1749-1760.
    Jonardon Ganeri’s The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance is a trailblazing study in cross-cultural philosophy of mind. Its liberal conception of naturalism makes room for a rich analytic taxonomy of conceptions of personal identity that go well beyond the standard models of Cartesianism, Physicalism, and Reductionism. But this naturalistically respectable model of the self must contend with the fact that the findings of the cognitive sciences are also compatible with ontological antirealism about the self. And while the book (...)
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  • On Engaging Buddhism Philosophically.Christian Coseru - 2018 - Sophia 57 (4):535-545.
    This paper provides an outline and critical introduction to a symposium on Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. The main issues addressed concern: (i) the problem of personal identity, specifically the issue of whether the no-self view can satisfactorily account for such phenomena as agency, responsibility, rationality, and subjectivity, and the synchronic unity of consciousness they presuppose; (ii) a critique of phenomenal realism, which is shown to rests on a false dilemma, namely: either we must take people’s introspective (...)
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  • Perceptual experience and concepts in classical indian philosophy.Monima Chadha - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Solely Generic Phenomenology.Ned Block - 2015 - Open MIND 2015.
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