Online research in philosophy

In this paper I argue that a recently discovered set of visual illusions sheds new light on the nature of time consciousness. In particular, I argue that these illusions put strong pressure on a view I call Temporal Atomism that otherwise might have seemed quite attractive. According to temporal atomism if you were to fix which non-temporal properties are experienced as well as the temporal properties of your experience itself, you would also have fixed which temporal properties are experienced. While it has been claimed before that views like temporal atomism are confused, and face conceptual as well as empirical problems, my argument based on the newly discovered illusions provides a new and more straightforward challenge: temporal atomism either has to give up its crucial motivations, or it can not even so much as make sense of the content of the subject’s visual experience. I end with brief suggestions concerning how the results of this paper bears on further philosophical debates about time consciousness, change blindness, and the role of attention in perceptual experience.

Dōgen's views of time are descriptively compared to the modern western philosophical view called "B-theory" and found to contain elements of each of the four main tenets of the B-theory. Furthermore, a fundamental incongruency is discovered. Even accounting for traditional Buddhist approaches to apparent contradictions, Dōgen's problems in this regard call into question the assumption of consistency that has characterized modern interpretations of his views on time.

Introduction Atoms theory and symmetry theory dominated physics. Symmetry propagation and interactions verify the Curie principle. But its violation by symmetry breaking is spontaneous.Fragility is creative. An information breaks a generalized symmetry. Results on symmetry breakings are not valid for fuzzy symmetries. The breaking of a fuzzy symmetry leads only to a pour symmetry (Fig.1).

Introduction Atoms theory and symmetry theory dominated physics. Symmetry propagation and interactions verify the Curie principle. But its violation by symmetry breaking is spontaneous.Fragility is creative. An information breaks a generalized symmetry. Results on symmetry breakings are not valid for fuzzy symmetries. The breaking of a fuzzy symmetry leads only to a pour symmetry (Fig.1).

This paper elaborates upon various responses to the Problem of the One over the Many, in the service of two central goals. The first is to situate Huayan's mereology within the context of Buddhism's historical development, showing its continuity with a broader tradition of philosophizing about part-whole relations. The second goal is to highlight the way in which Huayan's mereology combines the virtues of the Nyāya-Vaisheshika and Indian Buddhist solutions to the Problem of the One over the Many while avoiding their vices.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the Huayan school of East Asian Buddhism in a Western language.

The Buddhist master Fazang is regarded as one of the greatest metaphysicians in medieval Asia.

This is an attempt to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereology, why someone might accept some prima facie puzzling remarks by Fazang, such as his claims that the eye of a lion is its ear and that a rafter of a building is identical to the building itself. These claims are corollaries of the Huayan Buddhist thesis that everything is part of everything else, and it is intended here to show that there is a rational basis for this thesis that involves a nonstandard notion of parthood and, importantly, that does not violate the principle of noncontradiction.

In his _Treatise on the Golden Lion_, Fazang says that wholes are _in_ each of their parts and that each part of a whole _is_ every other part of the whole. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of these remarks according to which they are not obviously false, and I use this interpretation in order to rigorously reconstruct Fazang's arguments for his claims. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part. I also argue that this interpretation is more plausible than its extant competitors.