This article describes the ultimate ground of reality, Brahman, as a single power unfolding in concert in all things. It uses counterfactual argumentation to imply that a cosmos must consist of telic causal orders or manifested ‘powers’ as its most granular building block – and that they must be unified into a single whole. It is based on an argument for a single causally-conditioning substrate of all things recorded in India’s classical Sāṃkhya Kārikā and Brahma Sūtras; this was used by (...) scholastic Vedāntic thinkers including the non-dualist Śaṃkara and the ‘transformationist’ Bhedābheda thinker Śrīnivāsa. It takes up arguments for satkārya, the pre-existence of a thing’s various transformations in potentio within its substrate, and employs them to paint a picture of reality as an ordered yet entangled pattern of causal trajectories. These manifest as the changing world we know. While Vedānta’s main motivation for making the arguments was to prove monism, this conception of an ‘immanent cause’ of all was also seen as divine. We see how this accords with moves in contemporary analytic philosophy to shift away from a broadly Humean model of constant conjunctions (reminiscent of key Buddhist approaches) toward a Neo-Aristotelian ‘metaphysics of powers’. But we also indicate how it may go further than most modern powers-metaphysicians in proposing a deeper connection between powers and what it is for there to be a cosmos at all. (shrink)

The Idea of a unified foundation of all reality has long been core to many attempts at a fundamental ontology, as well as many arguments for the divine. In medieval India a cluster of arguments for metaphysical inheritance, causal entanglement, the impossibility of fundamental relations and more, were advanced together to show there must be an ultimate and unified ground. But foundationalism has been under attack in both recent metaphysics, and Buddhist philosophy. This article unpacks Vedānta’s defense of divine foundationalism (...) against Madhyamaka Buddhism’s metaphysical nihilism. Firstly, we look at how inheritance arguments for ultimate ground aimed to circumvent the possibility of infinite regress. Secondly, we assess three arguments that this ground is a unified modal anchor, with entangled causal power, providing a connective medium for all phenomena. We address some caveats and limitations, but go on to argue that if they are right, they circumvent the Buddhists’ ‘dualistic’ assumption that if the empirical world is mere imagined convention, it needs no explanation. Monists and nihilists are allies against excessively realist ontologies, but these arguments make a compelling case for some unified fundamental nature from which, as the Upaniṣads put it, all things emerge like sparks from a fire. (shrink)

Is Being a mere sum of separate things variously re-combined over time? Or is it not there at all, arising from nothing more than the projection of a fevered metaphysical imagination? Or might it be the intrawoven phenomenon of all we experience, grounded in a single underlying all-determining nature? This is the first of a pair of articles on the ontological issues that prompted a philosophical fork between pluralism, nihilism, and monism in India. The present article will focus on Indian (...) critiques of metaphysical pluralism based on the apparent incoherence of ultimately individuating reality's building blocks. The second article will focus on debates about grounding of the causal powers that shape the world and fix it modally. I trace critiques of pluralism (the view found in Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma that Being is composed of plural fundamental ‘bits’) through to the competing conclusions of the Madhyamaka ‘emptiness’ view, and Vedānta's idea that there is a single ground of all Being. For the nihilists, commonsense realism about Being must be repudiated in such a way as to destroy the notion of Being itself. For the monists, the philosophical problems with a pluralistic ontology show that Being is a complex yet holistic medium, and the ground of a cosmos-defining modal inheritance. Thus in each article I tell the story of how debates about individuation, relation, causation, recombination and modal inheritance blossomed into some of history's most radical philosophies of Being—and in each I set out some prospects for the monistic view's core ontological claims that Being is, and is one. (shrink)

If there is something non-reducible to anything else, self-existent, unsusceptible to further explanation, then in what sense might it befundamental, and in what sense might it beunified? In my response to Kerry McKenzie and Peter Adamson, I try to clarify the idea of “foundation” that these arguments claim to show, by first contrasting two conceptions of fundamentality (a concrete complete bottom level from which the world isbuilt up –the kind people often have in mind, and an ultimate modal determination thatexplainsthings), (...) and then discussing McKenzie’s main worry that what is modally irreducible does not necessarily qualify as fundamental, and Adamson’s worry that the bottom-level entities need not be numerically single. (shrink)

Shedding light on the way in which Indian philosophical traditions crafted an elaborate picture of the world, this book brings Indian thinkers into dialogue with modern philosophy and global concerns. For those interested in philosophical traditions in general, this book will establish a foundation for further comparative perspectives on philosophy. For those concerned with the understanding of Indic culture, it will provide a platform for the continued renaissance of research into India's rich philosophical traditions.

Radical doubt about the truths that govern life has posed a problem for thinkers in many different cultures and periods. This study uncovers the solutions offered by a postmodern Western thinker, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and an early modern Indian thinker, Rupa Gosvami, each of whom offers a renewed postskeptical vision of a revitalized life that is firmly rooted in the transcendental truths of reality.