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Sellarsian Buddhism Comments on Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

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Abstract

This paper critically examines Jay Garfield’s accounts of the self, consciousness, and phenomenology in his book, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. I argue that Garfield’s views on these topics are shaped, in problematic ways, by views he takes over from Wilfrid Sellars and applies to Buddhist philosophy.

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Notes

  1. Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). All parenthetical page references in the text are to this book.

  2. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), Part Two: Chapter One, and Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 20–21.

  3. Husserl, Ideas, op. cit., p. 60.

  4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Don Landes (London: Routledge Press, 2013, p. p. lxxviii.

  5. See Sina Fazelpour and Evan Thompson, “The Kantian Brain: Brain Dynamics from a Neurophenomenological Perspective,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 31 (2015): 223–229.

  6. See my review article cited in the previous note.

  7. For our debate on these issues, see Jay L. Garfield, “Reflections on Reflectivity: Comments on Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being,” Philosophy East and West 66 (2016): 943–951, and Evan Thompson, “Response to Commentators on Waking, Dreaming, Being,” Philosophy East and West 66 (2016): 982–1000.

  8. See Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 106.

  9. Ibid.

  10. See Jonadon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  11. See Galen Strawson, “Self-Intimation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2015): 1–31.

  12. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, op. cit., p. 23.

  13. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. McAlister (London: Routledge Press, 1973), p. 128.

  14. Birgit Kellner, “Self-Awareness (svasamvedana) in Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya and vṛtti: A Close Reading,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 38 (2010): 203–231, at p. 22o.

  15. Ibid., pp. 227–228.

  16. For a detailed reading of Dignāga along these lines, see Sonam Kachru, “Who’s Afraid of Non-conceptual Content: Rehabilitating Dignāga’s Distinction Between Perception and Thought,” paper presented at the workshop, “Conceptuality and Nonconceptuality in Buddhist Thought,” University of California, Berkeley, Center for Buddhist Studies, November 4–6, 2016.

  17. See Evan Thompson, “Self-No-Self? Memory and Reflexive Awareness,” in Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, eds., Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 157–175.

  18. Ibid. See also Paul Bernier, “Dignāga on Reflexive Awareness,” Philosophy East and West 65 (2015): 125–156.

  19. See Laurence Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 617–645, and Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner, “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: The Prospective Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 (2007): 657–661.

  20. See Barbara Montero, Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  21. Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 249, 313–314.

  22. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 139.

  23. It is also incorrect to say that this approach differs from Heidegger’s and that “Thompson contrasts his position with Heidegger’s” (p. 212). I contrast my position with Hubert Dreyfus’s (1991) reading of Heidegger (see Mind in Life, pp. 313–314). In my view (and Zahavi’s), unlike Dreyfus’s, Heidegger clearly accepts the idea of prereflective self-awareness or self-acquaintance.

  24. For a classic argument in support of this point, see Sidney Shoemaker, “Self-reference and Self-awareness,” Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 555–567; for discussion with reference to phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, see Aaron Henry and Evan Thompson, “Witnessing from Here: Self-Awareness from a Bodily Versus Embodied Perspective,” in Shaun Gallagher, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Self (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2011), pp. 228–251.

  25. For the arguments in support of this point, see Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, op. cit. and Kristina Musholt, Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

  26. See Mark Siderits, Tom Tillemans, and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds., Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

  27. See Jesse Prinz, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), and Eric Mandelbaum, “Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Perception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2017): doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12368

  28. See Edouard Machery, Doing Without Concepts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  29. Gareth Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 100–105.

  30. See Diana Raffman, “On the Persistence of Phenomenology,” in Thomas Metzinger, ed., Conscious Experience (Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1995), pp. 293–308. Imprint Academic; Sean Kelly, “The Non-conceptual Content of Perceptual Experience: Situation Dependence and Fineness of Grain,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001): 601–608.

  31. See Robert Hanna, “Kant and Nonconceptual Content,” European Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005): 247–290; Robert Hanna, “Kantian Non-conceptualism,” Philosophical Studies 137 (2008): 41–64; and Lucy Allias, “Kant, Nonconceptual Content, and the Representation of Space,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 383–413.

  32. See José Luis Bermudez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, op. cit.; and Musholt, Thinking About Oneself, op. cit.

  33. See Adrian Cussins, “Content, Conceptual Content, and Nonconceptual Content,” in York Gunther, ed., Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 133–163; Hubert Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): 47–65; Hubert Dreyfus, “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” in Joseph Shear, ed., Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (London: Routledge Press, 2013), pp. 15–39. A locus classicus for this idea is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. Fisher (Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press, 1963), pp. 168–169.

  34. See Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  35. See Susan Hurley, “Non-conceptual Self-consciousness and Agency: Perspective and Access,” Communication and Cognition 30 (1997): 207–248.

  36. See Carl B. Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given (London: Routledge Press, 2015).

  37. Wilfrid Sellars, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures of Wilfrid Sellars,” Lecture I: The Lever of Archimedes, §45. The Monist 64 (1981): 3–90. Available at http://www.ditext.com/sellars/carus.html

  38. See Sachs, Intentionality and Myths of the Given, op. cit.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Buchanan E 370, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada

    Evan Thompson

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Thompson, E. Sellarsian Buddhism Comments on Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. SOPHIA 57, 565–579 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0671-8

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