Time Atomism and Ash‘Arite Origins for Cartesian Occasionalism Revisited

Abstract

In gauging the contributions of Asian thinkers to the making of modern “Western” philosophy and science, one often encounters the difficulty of establishing a direct influence. Arun Bala and George Gheverghese Joseph have termed this “the transmission problem.”¹ One can establish a precedence, as well as a strong probability that an influence occurred, without being able to find concrete evidence for it. In the face of this difficulty (which appears to occur quite generally in the history of thought), I suggest here that the influence of earlier thinkers does not always occur through one person reading others’ works and becoming persuaded by their arguments, but by people in given epistemic situations being constrained by certain historically and socially conditioned trends of thought—for which constraining and conditioned trends of thought I coin the term “epistemic vectors”—and opportunistically availing themselves of kindred views from other traditions.