In this article, the importance of the namelessness of language will be firstly explained through an analysis of authenticity in Heideggerian philosophy, and will be further clarified by way of the phenomenon of “profound boredom” from his Freiburg lecture. As the exploration of namelessness in Heideggerian philosophy plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between East and West, a brief comparison concerning the idea of namelessness and its underlying philosophy of language between the Heideggerian and the madhyamaka Buddhist tradition (...) will also be discussed. (shrink)

Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell's theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from (...) Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the adjustments. The result is a principled structural distinction between affirmative and negative catuṣkoṭi, as well as analyses for each that compare favorably to more recent efforts from Tillemans, Westerhoff, and Priest. (shrink)