7 ms·

Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism

43 points by danielam 4y ago

kwatsonafter 4y ago
So sick. Are you familiar with Dr. Michael Sugrue? I believe he's also Catholic.
- hgamaral 4y ago
  Sorry, could you please expand on what you mean by "sick"?
  - atoav 4y ago
    Probably in the sense a skateboarder would say "dude, this trick was sick". Would be my guess at least.
- kar5pt 4y ago
  Sugrue is great. His YouTube lectures are fantastic.
jk20 4y ago
its_bbq 4y ago
This article seems to miss the point of what "existence" means in Buddhism. Using the clay pot example from the text, a Buddhist might say that the pot "conventionally exists" in that that arrangement of clay is there and fits the description of "clay pot" but "ultimately" doesn't exist because it doesn't exist unconditionally. It's a position against certain groups at the time which didn't believe in causality.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Related to this is Nagarjuna's two truths doctrine[1], where there is a distinction made between provisional or conventional truth and ultimate truth or reality. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine
- danielam 4y ago
  I'm not sure if I see where this article misses this point. Can you point me to specific statements that lead you to draw this conclusion? The article seems to be attributing to the Buddhist atomist precisely the ultimate sense, in which the conventional sense is the one denied as ultimate. (N.b. there appears to be a similarity between the conventional/ultimate distinction you've explicitly mentioned and the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between accidental form and substantial form. In the former case, we may speak of artifacts like chairs, computers and clay pots whose telos is extrinsic and observer relative (to borrow a Searlian expression) whereas in the latter case we may speak of human beings and oak trees whose telos is intrinsic. That a suitably shaped piece of fired clay it taken to be a clay pot is thus a matter of convention, but that a particular man is a human being is not. The atomist is therefore someone who takes everything to be an accidental whole arranged out of whatever he takes to be atoms.)
  - its_bbq 4y ago
    It's not quite the same. The duality of extrinsic / instrinsic, if I'm understanding you correctly, is in Buddhist perspectives (really Madhyamaka Buddhist as another comment below pointed out) is all within conventional existence. Ultimate existence of everything is that anything only exists conditioned on the other processes around it. "The Buddhist position presupposes that we can know that there are atoms, but claims that the composites we take to be made up of atoms are unreal. "If they are unreal, then of course we cannot be said to know of them through perception. But the atoms are not perceptible either. So how could the Buddhist know of them any more than he knows the purportedly unreal composites? In fact it is only through the composites that we can know the atoms that make them up. Hence the composites must be real." The Buddhist argument doesn't say that the composite isn't perceivable or doesn't exist, just that it only exists conditionally. Nobody denies you can't see the composite. It's important in these conversations that the Buddhist position is always one of soteriological convenience. The point of conceptually separating conventional and ultimate existence is to point out that your mind and identity exist only conditionally. The suffering you experience is part of this conditionally existing group of mental processes. So therefore the causes for your suffering can be removed and that will remove the suffering which is conditioned on those causes.
sundarurfriend 4y ago
If anyone's looking for a good accessible resource on Indian philosophy, I can recommend the "History of Philosophy in India" (now called the "History of Indian and Africana Philosophy") podcast. [URL][Feed] It covers a few different schools of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophy, in a way that a novice like me could follow. (The Indian philosophy part ended in 2018, with 62 episodes, and the African philosophy part seems to be still ongoing at 101 episodes.) URL: https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-philosophy https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-phil... Feed: http://hopwag2.podbean.com/feed/ http://hopwag2.podbean.com/feed/
- svat 4y ago
  The podcast was very listenable/entertaining, and they have a book based on it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X ISBN 019285674X Other books by Jonardon Ganeri seem to be good too. And here's an insightful interview of his (about Hinduism, not particularly philosophy) on the NYT website: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-krishna-do-or-shiva-or-vishnu/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-...
superb-owl 4y ago
It's great to see non-Western philosophy being treated seriously and on equal footing with the Western tradition. Too often it gets rolled into "religious philosophy." You can still catch whiff of it when certain ideas are called "Buddhist" or "Hindu" rather than being attributed to a certain author or book. That'd be like calling Kantian ideas "Christian Philosophy" - not entirely wrong, but very much over-simplified.
- ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
  WWDITS fan?
- naravara 4y ago
  One of the challenges is that Indian intellectual tradition didn't highly prioritize keeping track of or attributing authorship to ideas, so often they just kind of floated around or were put into the mouths of sages or deities. It's hard to disentangle the line between religion and philosophy in these contexts. So much so that a lot of religious scholars argue that the very concept of "religion" and how we talk about it is inextricably tied into Christian cosmology and ideas of divinity and we either need to take explicit steps to broaden the definition or do away with the term altogether.
benlivengood 4y ago
I see atoms; it's not like "a pot" is reflecting photons from the sun as a whole. Individual atoms (electrons, even) are providing me with a portion of my vision of the object they're a part of. Maybe they're onto something for Bose-Einstein condensates, though. What happens if you try looking at those? https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ultra_slow_light/ultra_slow_light.htm https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ul...

43 points by danielam 4y ago

kwatsonafter 4y ago

So sick. Are you familiar with Dr. Michael Sugrue? I believe he's also Catholic.

hgamaral 4y ago
Sorry, could you please expand on what you mean by "sick"?
- atoav 4y ago
  Probably in the sense a skateboarder would say "dude, this trick was sick". Would be my guess at least.
kar5pt 4y ago
Sugrue is great. His YouTube lectures are fantastic.

jk20 4y ago

its_bbq 4y ago

This article seems to miss the point of what "existence" means in Buddhism. Using the clay pot example from the text, a Buddhist might say that the pot "conventionally exists" in that that arrangement of clay is there and fits the description of "clay pot" but "ultimately" doesn't exist because it doesn't exist unconditionally. It's a position against certain groups at the time which didn't believe in causality.

pmoriarty 4y ago
Related to this is Nagarjuna's two truths doctrine[1], where there is a distinction made between provisional or conventional truth and ultimate truth or reality. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine
danielam 4y ago
I'm not sure if I see where this article misses this point. Can you point me to specific statements that lead you to draw this conclusion? The article seems to be attributing to the Buddhist atomist precisely the ultimate sense, in which the conventional sense is the one denied as ultimate. (N.b. there appears to be a similarity between the conventional/ultimate distinction you've explicitly mentioned and the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between accidental form and substantial form. In the former case, we may speak of artifacts like chairs, computers and clay pots whose telos is extrinsic and observer relative (to borrow a Searlian expression) whereas in the latter case we may speak of human beings and oak trees whose telos is intrinsic. That a suitably shaped piece of fired clay it taken to be a clay pot is thus a matter of convention, but that a particular man is a human being is not. The atomist is therefore someone who takes everything to be an accidental whole arranged out of whatever he takes to be atoms.)
- its_bbq 4y ago
  It's not quite the same. The duality of extrinsic / instrinsic, if I'm understanding you correctly, is in Buddhist perspectives (really Madhyamaka Buddhist as another comment below pointed out) is all within conventional existence. Ultimate existence of everything is that anything only exists conditioned on the other processes around it. "The Buddhist position presupposes that we can know that there are atoms, but claims that the composites we take to be made up of atoms are unreal. "If they are unreal, then of course we cannot be said to know of them through perception. But the atoms are not perceptible either. So how could the Buddhist know of them any more than he knows the purportedly unreal composites? In fact it is only through the composites that we can know the atoms that make them up. Hence the composites must be real." The Buddhist argument doesn't say that the composite isn't perceivable or doesn't exist, just that it only exists conditionally. Nobody denies you can't see the composite. It's important in these conversations that the Buddhist position is always one of soteriological convenience. The point of conceptually separating conventional and ultimate existence is to point out that your mind and identity exist only conditionally. The suffering you experience is part of this conditionally existing group of mental processes. So therefore the causes for your suffering can be removed and that will remove the suffering which is conditioned on those causes.

sundarurfriend 4y ago

If anyone's looking for a good accessible resource on Indian philosophy, I can recommend the "History of Philosophy in India" (now called the "History of Indian and Africana Philosophy") podcast. [URL][Feed] It covers a few different schools of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophy, in a way that a novice like me could follow. (The Indian philosophy part ended in 2018, with 62 episodes, and the African philosophy part seems to be still ongoing at 101 episodes.) URL: https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-philosophy https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-phil... Feed: http://hopwag2.podbean.com/feed/ http://hopwag2.podbean.com/feed/

svat 4y ago
The podcast was very listenable/entertaining, and they have a book based on it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X ISBN 019285674X Other books by Jonardon Ganeri seem to be good too. And here's an insightful interview of his (about Hinduism, not particularly philosophy) on the NYT website: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-krishna-do-or-shiva-or-vishnu/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-...

superb-owl 4y ago

It's great to see non-Western philosophy being treated seriously and on equal footing with the Western tradition. Too often it gets rolled into "religious philosophy." You can still catch whiff of it when certain ideas are called "Buddhist" or "Hindu" rather than being attributed to a certain author or book. That'd be like calling Kantian ideas "Christian Philosophy" - not entirely wrong, but very much over-simplified.

ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
WWDITS fan?
naravara 4y ago
One of the challenges is that Indian intellectual tradition didn't highly prioritize keeping track of or attributing authorship to ideas, so often they just kind of floated around or were put into the mouths of sages or deities. It's hard to disentangle the line between religion and philosophy in these contexts. So much so that a lot of religious scholars argue that the very concept of "religion" and how we talk about it is inextricably tied into Christian cosmology and ideas of divinity and we either need to take explicit steps to broaden the definition or do away with the term altogether.

benlivengood 4y ago

I see atoms; it's not like "a pot" is reflecting photons from the sun as a whole. Individual atoms (electrons, even) are providing me with a portion of my vision of the object they're a part of. Maybe they're onto something for Bose-Einstein condensates, though. What happens if you try looking at those? https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ultra_slow_light/ultra_slow_light.htm https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/slow_light_project/ul...