For over twenty years Douglas Berger has advanced research and reflection on Indian philosophical traditions from both classical and cross-cultural perspectives. This volume reveals the extent of his contribution by bringing together his perspectives on these classical Indian philosophies and placing them in conversation with Confucian, Chinese Buddhist and medieval Indian Sufi traditions. Delving into debates between Nyaya and Buddhist philosophers on consciousness and identity, the nature of Sankara's theory of the self, the precise character of Nagarjuna's idea of (...) emptiness, and the relationship between awareness and embodiment in the broad spectrum of Indian thought, chapters exhibit Berger's unusually broad range of expertise. They connect Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts with classical Indian theories of ethics and consciousness, contrast the ideas of seminal European thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida from prevailing themes in Buddhism, and shed light on the spiritual and political dimensions of the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh's immersion into Vedantic thought. Always approaching the arguments from an intercultural perspective, Berger shows how much relevance and resonance classical Indian thought has with ancient Confucian views of ethics, Chinese Buddhist depictions of consciousness and medieval Mughal conceptions of divinity. The result is a volume celebrating the rigor, vitality and intercultural resonance of India's rich philosophical heritage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Comparative Philosophy and Method: Contemporary Practices and Future Possibilities ed. by Steven Burik, Robert Smid and Ralph WeberDouglas L. Berger (bio)Comparative Philosophy and Method: Contemporary Practices and Future Possibilities. Edited by Steven Burik, Robert Smid and Ralph Weber. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. vi + 272. Paperback $40.28, isbn 978-1-350-29704-3.The editors Steven Burik, Robert Smid and Ralph Weber, who have all made important revisions to (...) the theory of comparative philosophical method, have pulled together the contributions of ten other influential scholars in the field and their own work into this much-needed collection of essays. There has been much written about the methodology of comparative philosophy in the last hundred years. More recent reflections in this field have been strongly fueled by post-colonial evaluations as well as a proliferation of methodological approaches. Nonetheless, some consensus on what methods the field should adopt and to what ends still needs overt discussion. The editors argue in an Introduction and Epilogue to the volume that, now faced with the "obstacles" of often conflicting principles and aims of different methodological approaches which leads to their frequent mutual rejection, there is need for a wide acceptance of pluralism in the methodology of comparative philosophy (pp. 4–5). This methodological pluralism, for the editors, should be understood in two senses. Firstly, there should be a broad-based "methodological commitment to pluralism," which amounts to an acceptance that there is an existing plurality of philosophical traditions in the world which have very different foundational insights and worldviews (p. 254). Secondly, the fact that the plurality of philosophical traditions actually exhibits quite different approaches ought, despite any individual comparativist's preferred method, compel us to accept that this diversity is best dealt with by a plurality of research approaches (pp. 254–55). That is to say that, while the editors both acknowledge and endorse the particular specializations of any and all scholars engaged in intercultural philosophy, they urge each scholar to accept that both a descriptive and prescriptive pluralism of philosophical methodologies are necessary for the continued flourishing of the field. In order to demonstrate this descriptive and prescriptive pluralism, the editors organize the volume into what they call five "constellations" of discussion (p. 8).In the first "constellation" labeled "Necessary Conditions," Robert Neville, Jaap [End Page 1] van Brakel and Lin Ma offer general and detailed frameworks for what sorts of assumptions are needed for any comparative philosophical research to proceed fruitfully. Neville, while happily admitting that we need to be vigilant about biases and other limitations when crossing into other traditions, insists that philosophers need to at once be searching for the truth in any given comparison of ideas, while simultaneously always reflectively constructing the right categories on the basis of which the comparison may be justified and sound (pp. 22–27). Van Brakel and Ma present in their co-authored essay an elaborate blueprint for comparative research. This blueprint, while also conceding that there can never be "any one right interpretation" of any individual text, much less whole traditions, posit a basic "family resemblance principle" which highlights "mutually recognizable human practices" as the basic condition enabling comparative reflection in the first place (pp. 34–39).In the second "constellation," entitled "Generalization and Essentialization," Roger Ames and François Jullien insist in various ways that, while the essentialism that bedeviled previous eras of philosophy in general and comparative philosophy in particular should be rejected, generalizations are still fundamentally necessary to crystalize the most important ways in which traditions are distinct from one another. Ames, defending himself against recent allegations of essentialism in his approach, insists that the field needs to be supported by both a "self-reflective hermeneutical sensitivity" which acknowledges the positionality of the inquirer as well as a commitment to "search within the soil" of, in his case, the Chinese philosophical tradition for its own models of meaning (p. 58). To the latter end, Ames defends accurate generalizations which can help us understand "the language, the customs and the life-forms of a living tradition" since these, contrary to suspicions, aid us in preventing essentialization in comparative work (p. 63). Jullien... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview Professor Douglas V. Porpora discusses a number of issues. First, how he became a Critical Realist through his early work on the concept of structure. Second, drawing on his Reconstructing Sociology, his take on the current state of American sociology. This leads to discussion of the broader range of his work as part of Margaret Archer’s various Centre for Social Ontology projects, and on moral-macro reasoning and the concept of truth in political discourse.

This volume is the result of a three-year collaboration (funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the British Academy) between scholars of early China and of ancient/Hellenistic Greece to investigate the emergent discourses of emotions in philosophy, medicine, and literature from around the fifth century BCE to the second century CE. It brings together scholars working on the history and philosophy of emotions in the two ancient traditions, and with different areas of expertise, to investigate the emotions and (...) their conceptualization at a crucial period in the cultural and intellectual development of both cultures. The project was motivated by a desire to make an intervention in the existing scholarship on emotions in both fields, which stands to benefit from a greater methodological self-awareness about the category of emotions and the kinds of commitments it entails. The volume aims to explore how the tools of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary investigation might be deployed to advance our understanding of the emotions in the two ancient societies and to use that understanding as a contribution to current research on the emotions more generally. (shrink)

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the work of researchers in anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, biology, and ...

These essays engage Jin Y. Park’s recent translation of the work of Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun and public intellectual in early twentieth-century Korea. Park’s translation of Iryŏp’s Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun was the subject of two book panels at recent conferences: the first a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the second at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on a group program session sponsored by the (...) International Society for Buddhist Philosophy. This exchange also includes a response from Park. (shrink)

Several prominent voices have called for a democratization of science through deliberative processes that include a diverse range of perspectives and values. We bring these scholars into conversation with extant research on democratic deliberation in political theory and the social sciences. In doing so, we identify systematic barriers to the effectiveness of inclusive deliberation in both scientific and political settings. We are particularly interested in what we call misidentified dissent, where deliberations are starkly framed at the outset in terms of (...) dissenting positions without properly distinguishing the kinds of difference and disagreement motivating dissent. (shrink)

Introduction; Aidos in Homer; From Hesiod to the Fifth Century; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; The Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle; References; Glossary; Index of Principal Passages; General Index.

Analysis and case studies show that including different orientations toward the natural world makes for more effective scientific practice and science education.

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

The paper examines constraints and preferences employed by people in learning decision rules from preclassified examples. Results from four experiments with human subjects were analyzed and compared with artificial intelligence (AI) inductive learning programs. The results showed the people's rule inductions tended to emphasize category validity (probability of some property, given a category) more than cue validity (probability that an entity is a member of a category given that it has some property) to a greater extent than did the AI (...) programs. Although the relative proportions of different rule types (e.g., conjunctive vs. disjunctive) changed across experiments, a single process model provided a good account of the data from each study. These observations are used to argue for describing constraints in terms of processes embodied in models rather than in terms of products or outputs. Thus AI induction programs become candidate psychological process models and results from inductive learning experiments can suggest new algorithms. More generally, the results show that human inductive generalizations tend toward greater specificity than would be expected if conceptual simplicity were the key constraint on inductions. This bias toward specificity may be due to the fact that this criterion both maximizes inferences that may be drawn from category membership and protects rule induction systems from developing over‐generalizations. (shrink)

A pivotal focus of exegesis of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārïkā (MMK) for the past half century has been the attempt to decipher the text's philosophy of language, and determine how this best aids us in characterizing Madhyamaka thought as a whole. In this vein, MMK 24:18 has been judged of particular weight insofar as it purportedly insists that the concepts pratītyasamutpāda (conditioned co-arising) and śūnyatā (emptiness), both indispensable to Buddhist praxis, are themselves only "nominal" or "conventional," that is, they are merely labels (...) that do not referentially signify anything that can be taken to be an ontologically ultimate reality. In various guises, as a result of this explication, Nāgārjuna's thought has been seen to embrace an overarching linguistic nominalism or conventionalism in which words, whether they are used for the purposes of theory or practice, though they serve as commonly accepted currency in the transactions of worldly business (vyavahāra), are in the end only ideas (prajñapti) or metaphysical fabrications (prapanca). This interpretation is largely due to tenaciously inaccurate translations and expositions of MMK 24:18 and their dependence on Candrakīrti's peculiar analysis of this verse in his Prasannapadā. This essay will attempt to correct both the diction of the major translations of MMK 24:18 and the fictions of nominalism and conventionalism that the consequent interpretations of this stanza have perpetuated. The argument that will be developed in the course of this essay is that Candrakīrti's reading of this verse proffers a strong form of linguistic nominalism that Nāgārjuna himself does not embrace. It will be shown, based on everything else found in the MMK, that Nāgārjuna, rather than advocating the mere nominal or conventional status of terms such as pratītyasamutpāda and sunyata, demands they be accepted as both pedagogically useful and even referentially accurate descriptions of the world as it is. (shrink)

The current consensus is that most natural categories are not organized around strict definitions (a list of singly necessary and jointly sufficient features) but rather according to a family resemblance (FR) principle: Objects belong to the same category because they are similar to each other and dissimilar to objects in contrast categories. A number of computational models of category construction have been developed to provide an account of how and why people create FR categories (Anderson, 1990; Fisher, 1987). Surprisingly, however, (...) only a few experiments on category construction or free sorting have been run and they suggest that people do not sort examples by the FR principle. We report several new experiments and a two‐stage model for category construction. This model is contrasted with a variety of other models with respect to their ability to account for when FR sorting will and will not occur. The experiments serve to identify one basis for FR sorting and to support the two‐stage model. The distinctive property of the two‐stage model is that it assumes that people impose more structure than the examples support in the first stage and that the second stage adjusts for this difference between preferred and perceived structure. We speculate that people do not simply assimilate probabilistic structures but rather organize them in terms of discrete structures plus noise. (shrink)

Discusses the journey of Buddhist ideas on awareness and personhood from India to China. Encounters of Mind explores a crucial step in the philosophical journey of Buddhism from India to China, and what influence this step, once taken, had on Chinese thought in a broader scope. The relationship of concepts of mind, or awareness, to the constitution of personhood in Chinese traditions of reflection was to change profoundly after the Cognition School of Buddhism made its way to China during the (...) sixth century. India’s Buddhist philosophers had formulated the idea that, in order for human beings to achieve perfect enlightenment, they had to produce a state of awareness through practice that they described as “luminous.” However, once introduced to the Chinese tradition, the concept of the “luminous mind” was to become a condition already found within human nature for the possibility of achieving human ideals. This notion of the luminous mind was to have far-reaching significance both for Chinese Buddhism and for medieval Confucianism. Douglas L. Berger follows the transforming path of conceptions of the luminosity of consciousness and the perfectibility of personhood in order to bring into clearer relief the history of Indian and Chinese philosophical dialogue, as well as in the hope that such dialogue will be reignited. (shrink)

Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutical expansion? In engaging with this question, the symposium focuses upon methodological issues salient to cross-cultural inquiry. Douglas L. Berger lays out the ground for the debate by arguing for a methodological approach, which is able to rectify the discipline’s colonial legacies and bridge the hermeneutical distance with its objects of study. From their own perspectives, Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul Roth and A. Raghuramaraju analyze whether such a processual and hermeneutically-sensitive approach can (...) indeed open up new hermeneutic horizons. Their responses shed light upon cross-cultural philosophy’s continued embedment in Euroamerican professional philosophy and how the locality of its knowledge-seeking endeavors may indeed have repercussions on attempts to bridge temporal and spatial distances. (shrink)

The precautionary principle brings a special challenge to the practice of evidence-based public health decision-making, suggesting changes in the interpretative methods of public health used to identify causes of disease. In this paper, precautionary changes to these methods are examined: including discounting contrary evidence, reducing the number of causal criteria, weakening the rules of evidence assigned to the criteria, and altering thresholds for statistical significance. All such changes reflect the precautionary goal of earlier primary preventive intervention, i.e. acting on insufficient (...) evidence, the least amount, or minimum level, of evidence for causation. Evaluating the impact of these changes will be difficult without a careful study of how well the current methods of causal inference work, their theoretical foundations, and the ethical implications of their applications. That research program will be most productive if it is jointly developed by public health professionals trained in the ethics and philosophy and by bioethicists and philosophers trained in the theories, methods, and practice of public health. (shrink)

I am most grateful to Professors Garfield and Westerhoff for their comments on my article "Acquiring Emptiness: Interpreting Nāgārjuna's MMK 24 : 18" in the January 2010 issue of Philosophy East and West. Their responses to my essay and the critiques they offer, grounded in their considerable expertise in Buddhist philosophical schools, are well argued and rooted in thorough commentarial analysis. In what follows, I attempt to respond to their critiques and concerns.There can be no doubt that the occurrence of (...) the phrase sā prajñāptir upādāya in MMK 24 : 18 has been understood by the bulk of the commentarial literature on the treatise as a compound technical term meaning something like "dependent designation." The .. (shrink)

The scholarly career of Professor Chad Hansen has been devoted in large measure to an elucidation of the relationship between the classical Chinese language and the structure and aims of pre-Qin philosophical thought. His “mass-noun” hypothesis of classical Chinese thought, his notion of dao 道 as “guiding discourse,” and his clarifications of the significance of Mohism are marked achievements from which all of us have benefited immensely. In the opening chapters of A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, Hansen prefaces his (...) interpretation of how the Chinese language lends uniqueness to its philosophical tradition with a sharp contrast to Indo-European language and thought. Hansen attempts to show how the Indo-European .. (shrink)

In the shadowy world between philosophy of science and ethics lie the paired concepts of underdetermination and incommensurability. Typically, scientific evidence underdetermines the hypotheses tested in research studies, providing neither proof nor disproof. As a result, scientists must judge the weight of the evidence, and in doing so, bring scientific and extrascientific values to bear in their approaches to assessing and interpreting the evidence. When different scientists employ very different values, their views are said to be incommensurable. Less prominent differences (...) represent partial incommensurabilities. The definitions and analyses provided by McMullin and by Veatch and Stempsey lay the foundation for the description of partial incommensurabilities in the current practice of assessing and interpreting epidemiologic evidence. This practice is called "causal inference" and is undertaken for the purpose of making causal conclusions and public health recommendations from population-based studies of exposures and diseases. Following the work of Bayley and Longino, several suggestions are examined for dealing with the partial incommensurabilities found in the general practice of causal inference in contemporary epidemiology. Two specific examples illustrate these ideas: studies on the relationship between induced abortion and breast cancer and those on the relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast cancer. (shrink)