Vaibhāsika metaphoricalism

Philosophy East and West 55 (3):377-393 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

: Scholars have proposed several different interpretations of the doctrine of no-self found in the Buddhist Abhidharma literature. It is argued here that two of these, Constitutive Reductionism and Eliminativism, are ruled out by textual evidence. A third, the Eliminative Reductionism of Siderits, is much closer to the intent of the texts.We can refine it further by attending to the role of metaphor in Vaibhāsika accounts of the no-self doctrine. If we update this view by drawing on analytic philosophy, the result is a variety of metaphoricalism that portrays statements about composite, persisting objects as literally false but practically useful and approximately true. This theory could be relevant to contemporary discussions of reductionism in personal identity

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Syntactic reductionism.Richard Heck - 2000 - Philosophia Mathematica 8 (2):124-149.
Reductionism about persons; and what matters.Tim Chappell - 1998 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (1):41-58.
Personal identity and reductionism.Brian Garrett - 1991 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (June):361-373.
Buddhist reductionism.Mark Siderits - 1997 - Philosophy East and West 47 (4):455-478.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
319 (#57,212)

6 months
4 (#315,466)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?