With responses from Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University)
"Philosophy of Language, or Philosophy of Mind?
Thoughts on What Apohavādins and Their Critics are Arguing About"
This talk summarizes my current project whose guiding philosophical impulse is to develop a critique of attempts at "naturalizing" intentionality, and to characterize some of the things about intentionality that make it resistant to such a program. The framing idea is that despite the fact that he is emphatically not a physicalist, the philosophical program of the Buddhist Dharmakirti nevertheless turns out to be vulnerable to some of the same kinds of arguments that can pressed against characteristically physicalist positions -- and that the category of intentionality best picks out the range of issues that this Buddhist thinker and contemporary physicalists commonly have a hard time accounting for.
The project significantly involves, then, my own attempt to develop what I take (following Sellars and, especially, McDowell) to be a broadly Kantian account of intentionality -- an account that makes sense, in particular, of the thought that intentionality is a constitutively conceptual or semantic phenomenon, and that the difficulties in advancing a naturalized account of intentionality thus center on how to account for the semantic or conceptual character of thought. I take it that it's distinctive of both Dharmakirti's approach and those of contemporary physicalists to aim for an explanation of this character of thought that finally adverts only to causally describable relations among particulars. Thus, my sense is that a lot of questions in philosophy of mind come down to such issues as whether a complete account of the mental can be given with reference only to particulars having specifiable identity criteria, or whether instead some reference must be made to the "kinds" of things that figure in Sellars's "logical space of reasons"; and whether a complete account of the mental can be given only in terms of efficient causation, or whether something like a teleological level of description necessarily figures in our understanding.
In the contemporary context, such issues are typically framed in terms, e.g., of semantic internalism vs. semantic externalism; how to make sense of the constitutively "normative" character of conceptual content; and how to square one's position on these kinds of issues with an account of mental causation. What I have it in mind to discuss in your seminar (and what figures in the papers I sent) is the idea that when Indian philosophers debate the ontological status of linguistic universals, there's an important extent to which these kinds of issues in philosophy of mind are chief among the things they're talking about. So, in both of the articles I sent, there's an attempt to characterize Dharmakirti's philosophical program with reference to Jerry Fodor -- and an attempt to suggest that some classical Indian critiques of Dharmakirti can be understood as making some of the same kinds of arguments that contemporary critics of Fodor have made against him.
Please feel free to read the following relevant essays from Professor Arnold:
- "On (Non-semantically) Remembering Conventions:
Dharmakīrti and Dharmottara on Saṁketa-kāla" - "On Semantics and Saṁketa:
Thoughts on a Neglected Problem with Buddhist Apoha Doctrine"
Wednesday - November 18, 2009
5:30-7:30 pm
Faculty House, Columbia University
400 W 117 St, New York, NY
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