The author of this paper discusses some major points vital for two classical Indian schools of philosophy: (1) a significant feature of linguistic analysis in the Yoga tradition; (2) the role of the religious practice (iśvara-pranidhana) in the search for true self-identity in Samkhya and Yoga darśanas with special reference to their gnoseological purposes; and (3) some possible readings of ‘ahamkara’ and ‘asmita’ displayed in the context of Samkhya-Yoga phenomenology and metaphysics. The collision of language and metaphysics refers to the (...) risk of paralogism caused by the common linguistic procedures making the subject define its identity within the semantic order (i.e. verbal conventions and grammatical rules) which does not reflect the actual metaphysical situation of the self, though it determines one’s self-understanding in the empirical sense. Whereas, Samkhya-Yoga aims at recognizing, reorganizing and, finally, going beyond these procedures regarded as the obstacles on the path towards self-knowledge and liberation form metaphysical ignorance. (shrink)

Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take accept-able teleological explanations (...) of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position “anticausalist teleologism,” or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance. (shrink)

D. In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: 1) the agent does x intentionally; 2) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and 3) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.

Hidden in the cave : the Upaniṣadic self -- Dangerous truths : the Buddha on silence, secrecy and snakes -- A cloak of clever words : the deconstruction of deceit in the Mahābhārata -- Words that burn : why did the Buddha say what he did? -- Words that break : can an Upaniṣad state the truth? -- The imperfect reality of persons -- Self as performance.

The basic subject matter of the philosophy of action is a pair of questions: (1) What are actions? (2) How are actions to be explained? The questions call, respectively, for a theory of the nature of action and a theory of the explanation of actions. Donald Davidson has articulated and defended influential answers to both questions. Those answers are the primary focus of this chapter.