Could physicalism be compatible with Buddhist goals and practices? Mark Siderits considers a question that has the potential to altogether change our understanding of Buddhism. Buddhist Physicalism? is by necessity a work of fusion philosophy -- a conversation between two distinct philosophical traditions. In drawing from the Buddhist philosophical tradition, as well as recent work in philosophy of mind, it attempts to mediate this conversation and answer two vexing questions in p...

This volume brings together nineteen of Mark Siderits's most important essays on Buddhist philosophy. Together they cover a wide range of topics, from metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, to the specific discussions of the interaction between Buddhist and classical Indian philosophy. Each of the essays is followed by a postscript that Siderits has written specifically for this volume. The postscripts connect essays of the volume with each other, show themat...

It is widely known that Buddhists deny the existence of the self. However, Buddhist philosophers defend interesting positions on a variety of other issues in fundamental ontology. In particular, they have important things to say about ontological reduction and the nature of the causal relation. Amidst the prolonged debate over global anti-realism, Buddhist philosophers devised an innovative approach to the radical nominalist denial of all universals and real resemblances. While some defend...

Since the publication of Mark Siderits' important book in 2003, much has changed in the field of Buddhist philosophy. There has been unprecedented growth in analytic metaphysics, and a considerable amount of new work on Indian theories of the self and personal identity has emerged. Fully revised and updated, and drawing on these changes as well as on developments in the author's own thinking, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy, second edition explores the conversation between Buddhi...

Mark Siderits's The Buddha’s Teachings As Philosophy explores three different systems of thought that arose from core claims of the Buddha. By detailing and critically examining key arguments made by the Buddha and developed by later Buddhist philosophers, Siderits investigates the Buddha's teachings as philosophy: a set of claims—in this case, claims about the nature of the world and our place in it—supported by rational argumentation and, here, developed with a variety of systematic resu...

What can the philosophy of language learn from the classical Indian philosophical tradition? As recently as twenty or thirty years ago this question simply would not have arisen. If a practitioner of analytic philosophy of language of that time had any view of Indian philosophy at all, it was most likely to be the stereotyped picture of a gaggle of navel gazing mystics making vaguely Bradley-esque pronouncements on the oneness of the one that was one once. Much work has been done in the in...

When we understand that something is a pot, is it because of one property that all pots share? This seems unlikely, but without this common essence, it is difficult to see how we could teach someone to use the word "pot" or to see something as a pot. The Buddhist apoha theory tries to resolve this dilemma, first, by rejecting properties such as "potness" and, then, by claiming that the element uniting all pots is their very difference from all non-pots. In other words, when we see...