Personal identity, minimalism, and madhyamaka

Philosophy East and West

Volumn 52, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 373-385

  Perrett, Roy W ^a  

^a CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949554159     PISSN: 00318221     EISSN: 15291898     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2002.0017     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. - See John Perry, ed., Personal Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pt 1
2. - Cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 210
3. - Vinit Haksar's Indivisible Selves and Moral Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) is particularly apposite for my present purposes since Haksar explicitly defends Non-Reductionism against both Buddhist and Parfitian Reductionism. Other contemporary defenders of Non-Reductionism include Roderick M. Chisholm, Person and Object (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976)
4. Richard Swinburne, "Personal Identity," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973-1974): 231-248
5. Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981)
6. - Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 2
7. - Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 307-311
8. - Derek Parfit, "Comments," Ethics 96 (1986): 838-843
9. - See, for instance, Haksar, Indivisible Selves and Moral Practice
10. - Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
11. - Susan Wolf, "Self-Interest and Interest in Selves," Ethics 96 (1986): 704-720
12. - Christine M. Korsgaard, "Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit," Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989): 101-132
13. - Simon Blackburn, "Has Kant Refuted Parfit?" in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
14. - The papers by Mark Johnston include "Is There a Problem about Persistence?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Series 61 (1987): 107-135
15. "Reasons and Reductionism," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 589-618
16. "Human Concerns without Superlative Selves," in Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit
17. - Indeed, Minimalism about the metaphysical problem of persons might be taken as confirmatory of Arthur Danto's general thesis that "philosophical problems arise in connection with indiscriminable pairs, the difference between which is not a scientific one ... [or a] difference that need ever be imagined as revealing itself in experience at all.... Life could go forward perfectly well without these distinctions ever needing to be thought about" (Arthur Danto, Connections to the World [New York: Harper and Row, 1989], p. 11)
18. - For independent criticism of four such Parfitian arguments see Brian Garrett, Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 88-94
19. - Johnston, "Human Concerns without Superlative Selves," p. 167
20. - Derek Parfit, "The Unimportance of Identity," in Henry Harris, ed., Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 33
21. - Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-136
22. "What Mary Didn't Know," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291-295
23. - See Lawrence Nemerow, "Physicalism and the Cognitive Role of Acquaintance," and David Lewis, "What Experience Teaches," both in William G. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
24. For other responses to the Knowledge Argument see Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere, eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 557-617
25. - T.R.V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), chap. 1
26. - Advaita Vedānta is a slightly tricky case to classify here since while they are Non-Reductionists about the absolute Self (ātman), the precise ontological status within their system of the empirical self (jīva) is, notoriously, a matter of intramural controversy
27. - Cf. James Duerlinger, "Reductionist and Nonreductionist Theories of Persons in Indian Buddhist Philosophy," Journal of Indian Philosophy 21 (1993): 79-101
28. Mark Siderits, "Buddhist Reductionism," Philosophy East and West 47 (1997): 455-478
29. - Derek Parfit, "An Interview with Derek Parfit," Cogito 9 (1995): 123
30. - Pace Jim Stone, "Parfit and the Buddha: Why There Are No People," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (1988): 519-532
31. For more on this point see Siderits, "Buddhist Reductionism."
32. - Duerlinger, "Reductionist and Nonreductionist Theories," pp. 83-84
33. - This Tibetan way of distinguishing between Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka is not to be found in any extant Indian text. However, when the Tibetan Mādhyamika Tsong kha pa utilizes it, it is clear that he takes himself to be expounding the position of the Indian Prāsaṅgika Candrakīrti
34. - See Kenneth Inada, Nāgārjuna: A Translation of His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā with an Introductory Essay (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1970)
35. Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
36. - Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, The Dialectical Method of Nāgā rjuna (Vigrahavyāvartanī), 2d ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986)
37. See also Mark Siderits, "The Madhyamaka Critique of Epistemology I," Journal of Indian Philosophy 8 (1980): 307-335
38. - Ratnavāli 1.79
39. as quoted in C. W. Huntington, Jr., and Geshé Namgyal Wangchen, The Emptiness of Emptiness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), p. 26
40. Cf. Jeffrey Hopkins, The Precious Garland and the Song of the Four Mindfulnesses (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 28
41. - See Geshé Rabten, Echoes of Voidness, trans. and ed. by Stephen Batchelor (London: Wisdom Publications, 1983)
42. Huntington and Wangchen, The Emptiness of Emptiness
43. Peter Fenner, The Ontology of the Middle Way (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990)
44. - Madhyamakāvatāra 6.120-164
45. On the development of Candrakīrti's sevenfold analysis in Tibetan Madhyamaka see Joe Wilson, Chandrakirti's Sevenfold Reasoning: Meditation on the Selflessness of Persons (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1980)
46. - Madhyamakāvatāra 6.185-186
47. - Madhyamakāvatāra 6.166-167
48. Rabten, Echoes of Voidness, p. 82
49. - What follows here owes a debt to the perceptive remarks in Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 192-205, and the use Mohanty makes there of his distinction between "subject" and "person."
50. - This generalization assumes an austere characterization of "the Hindu philosophical tradition" as the darśana tradition of speculative philosophy. The epic and theological traditions are often much less quietist
51. - Cf. Paul J. Griffiths, "Concentration or Insight: The Problematic of Theravāda Buddhist Meditation-Theory," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1981): 605-624
52. On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (La Salle: Open Court, 1986), pp. 13-16
53. - See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)