Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism(edwardfeser.blogspot.com)
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/06/anti-reductionism-in-nyaya-vaisesika.html
16 comments
The podcast was very listenable/entertaining, and they have a book based on it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X ISBN 019285674X
Other books by Jonardon Ganeri seem to be good too. And here's an insightful interview of his (about Hinduism, not particularly philosophy) on the NYT website: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-...
Other books by Jonardon Ganeri seem to be good too. And here's an insightful interview of his (about Hinduism, not particularly philosophy) on the NYT website: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-...
This article seems to miss the point of what "existence" means in Buddhism. Using the clay pot example from the text, a Buddhist might say that the pot "conventionally exists" in that that arrangement of clay is there and fits the description of "clay pot" but "ultimately" doesn't exist because it doesn't exist unconditionally. It's a position against certain groups at the time which didn't believe in causality.
I'm not sure if I see where this article misses this point. Can you point me to specific statements that lead you to draw this conclusion? The article seems to be attributing to the Buddhist atomist precisely the ultimate sense, in which the conventional sense is the one denied as ultimate.
(N.b. there appears to be a similarity between the conventional/ultimate distinction you've explicitly mentioned and the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between accidental form and substantial form. In the former case, we may speak of artifacts like chairs, computers and clay pots whose telos is extrinsic and observer relative (to borrow a Searlian expression) whereas in the latter case we may speak of human beings and oak trees whose telos is intrinsic. That a suitably shaped piece of fired clay it taken to be a clay pot is thus a matter of convention, but that a particular man is a human being is not. The atomist is therefore someone who takes everything to be an accidental whole arranged out of whatever he takes to be atoms.)
(N.b. there appears to be a similarity between the conventional/ultimate distinction you've explicitly mentioned and the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between accidental form and substantial form. In the former case, we may speak of artifacts like chairs, computers and clay pots whose telos is extrinsic and observer relative (to borrow a Searlian expression) whereas in the latter case we may speak of human beings and oak trees whose telos is intrinsic. That a suitably shaped piece of fired clay it taken to be a clay pot is thus a matter of convention, but that a particular man is a human being is not. The atomist is therefore someone who takes everything to be an accidental whole arranged out of whatever he takes to be atoms.)
It's not quite the same. The duality of extrinsic / instrinsic, if I'm understanding you correctly, is in Buddhist perspectives (really Madhyamaka Buddhist as another comment below pointed out) is all within conventional existence. Ultimate existence of everything is that anything only exists conditioned on the other processes around it.
"The Buddhist position presupposes that we can know that there are atoms, but claims that the composites we take to be made up of atoms are unreal.
"If they are unreal, then of course we cannot be said to know of them through perception. But the atoms are not perceptible either. So how could the Buddhist know of them any more than he knows the purportedly unreal composites? In fact it is only through the composites that we can know the atoms that make them up. Hence the composites must be real."
The Buddhist argument doesn't say that the composite isn't perceivable or doesn't exist, just that it only exists conditionally. Nobody denies you can't see the composite.
It's important in these conversations that the Buddhist position is always one of soteriological convenience. The point of conceptually separating conventional and ultimate existence is to point out that your mind and identity exist only conditionally. The suffering you experience is part of this conditionally existing group of mental processes. So therefore the causes for your suffering can be removed and that will remove the suffering which is conditioned on those causes.
"The Buddhist position presupposes that we can know that there are atoms, but claims that the composites we take to be made up of atoms are unreal.
"If they are unreal, then of course we cannot be said to know of them through perception. But the atoms are not perceptible either. So how could the Buddhist know of them any more than he knows the purportedly unreal composites? In fact it is only through the composites that we can know the atoms that make them up. Hence the composites must be real."
The Buddhist argument doesn't say that the composite isn't perceivable or doesn't exist, just that it only exists conditionally. Nobody denies you can't see the composite.
It's important in these conversations that the Buddhist position is always one of soteriological convenience. The point of conceptually separating conventional and ultimate existence is to point out that your mind and identity exist only conditionally. The suffering you experience is part of this conditionally existing group of mental processes. So therefore the causes for your suffering can be removed and that will remove the suffering which is conditioned on those causes.
> The Buddhist argument doesn't say that the composite isn't perceivable or doesn't exist, just that it only exists conditionally. Nobody denies you can't see the composite.
I don't think anyone makes exactly this claim. From the article, which I presume draws faithfully from the source text[0]:
"Both sides make reference to ordinary objects, such as a clay pot. Both sides agree that the pot is ultimately made up of unobservable atoms. But the Buddhist reductionist says that those atoms are really all that exist, that there is no such thing as a composite whole over and above them."
The point of disagreement between the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator, then, is over the existence of composites as bona fide things versus, say, perceptual illusions or whatever. Because both the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator refer to composites, clearly both accept composites as objects of perception, so what is perceived is not the point of disagreement, in which case where does the misunderstanding over the conditionality of composites enter the picture? Again, the Nyāya commentator doesn't deny that composites are composed of atoms, nor that their existence is contingent or temporary. Additionally, it seems that if atoms are what ultimately exist, then there would appear to be at least some things which are not conditioned, if I understand the term.
Now, given that, the counterargument is epistemological in nature, specifically, that if what we know about the world begins with perception, and what is perceived are composites and not atoms, and that our knowledge of atoms is inferred from our knowledge of what is perceived, then it is incoherent to also deny the existence of composites because our knowledge of atoms depends on our knowledge of composites. To deny the reality of the latter is to deny the knowledge of anything that depends on the former being the case.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Nyaya-sutra-Selections-Early-Commenta...
I don't think anyone makes exactly this claim. From the article, which I presume draws faithfully from the source text[0]:
"Both sides make reference to ordinary objects, such as a clay pot. Both sides agree that the pot is ultimately made up of unobservable atoms. But the Buddhist reductionist says that those atoms are really all that exist, that there is no such thing as a composite whole over and above them."
The point of disagreement between the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator, then, is over the existence of composites as bona fide things versus, say, perceptual illusions or whatever. Because both the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator refer to composites, clearly both accept composites as objects of perception, so what is perceived is not the point of disagreement, in which case where does the misunderstanding over the conditionality of composites enter the picture? Again, the Nyāya commentator doesn't deny that composites are composed of atoms, nor that their existence is contingent or temporary. Additionally, it seems that if atoms are what ultimately exist, then there would appear to be at least some things which are not conditioned, if I understand the term.
Now, given that, the counterargument is epistemological in nature, specifically, that if what we know about the world begins with perception, and what is perceived are composites and not atoms, and that our knowledge of atoms is inferred from our knowledge of what is perceived, then it is incoherent to also deny the existence of composites because our knowledge of atoms depends on our knowledge of composites. To deny the reality of the latter is to deny the knowledge of anything that depends on the former being the case.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Nyaya-sutra-Selections-Early-Commenta...
Related to this is Nagarjuna's two truths doctrine[1], where there is a distinction made between provisional or conventional truth and ultimate truth or reality.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine
It's great to see non-Western philosophy being treated seriously and on equal footing with the Western tradition. Too often it gets rolled into "religious philosophy." You can still catch whiff of it when certain ideas are called "Buddhist" or "Hindu" rather than being attributed to a certain author or book. That'd be like calling Kantian ideas "Christian Philosophy" - not entirely wrong, but very much over-simplified.
One of the challenges is that Indian intellectual tradition didn't highly prioritize keeping track of or attributing authorship to ideas, so often they just kind of floated around or were put into the mouths of sages or deities. It's hard to disentangle the line between religion and philosophy in these contexts. So much so that a lot of religious scholars argue that the very concept of "religion" and how we talk about it is inextricably tied into Christian cosmology and ideas of divinity and we either need to take explicit steps to broaden the definition or do away with the term altogether.
WWDITS fan?
I see atoms; it's not like "a pot" is reflecting photons from the sun as a whole. Individual atoms (electrons, even) are providing me with a portion of my vision of the object they're a part of.
Maybe they're onto something for Bose-Einstein condensates, though. What happens if you try looking at those? https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ul...
Maybe they're onto something for Bose-Einstein condensates, though. What happens if you try looking at those? https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ul...
So sick. Are you familiar with Dr. Michael Sugrue? I believe he's also Catholic.
It covers a few different schools of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophy, in a way that a novice like me could follow. (The Indian philosophy part ended in 2018, with 62 episodes, and the African philosophy part seems to be still ongoing at 101 episodes.)
URL: https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-phil...
Feed: http://hopwag2.podbean.com/feed/