Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind
Dan Arnold
Abstract
This book looks at first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind and shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy. It explains how pre-modern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable “mind scientists” whose insights anticipated modern research on the brain and mind. It confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: the fact that since most Indian Buddhists hold that ... More
This book looks at first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind and shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy. It explains how pre-modern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable “mind scientists” whose insights anticipated modern research on the brain and mind. It confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: the fact that since most Indian Buddhists hold that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by death they disagree with the idea that everything about the mental can be explained in terms of brain events. It also shows that a predominant stream of Indian Buddhist thought, associated with the seventh-century thinker Dharmakīrti, turns out to be vulnerable to arguments that modern philosophers have levelled against physicalism. It explains that these issues center on what modern philosophers have called intentionality—the fact that the mind can be about (or represent or mean) other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, the book argues that intentionality cannot, in principle, be explained in causal terms. The book shows that despite his concern to refute physicalism, Dharmakīrti's causal explanations of the mental mean that modern arguments from intentionality cut as much against his project as they do against physicalist philosophies of mind.
Keywords:
Dharmakīrti,
classical Buddhism,
physicalism,
Immanuel Kant,
Wilfrid Sellars,
John McDowell,
intentionality,
Indian thinkers,
philosophy of mind,
mental continuum
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231145473 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231145473.001.0001 |
