Buddhist Studies

2018 Lecture and Seminar Series

Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 5 pm
Annual Lecture by Evan Thompson
Meditation and Nonconceptual Awareness Perspectives from Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Berkeley

Mindfulness meditation practices are often traditionally said to induce “nonconceptual” forms of awareness, and scientists and clinicians often repeat such descriptions. But what does “nonconceptual” mean? Clearly, without a precise specification of what a concept or conceptual cognition is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill-defined. I present an account of concepts, concept formation, and nonconceptual awareness based on combining ideas from Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science. On the Buddhist side, I draw from Dharmakīrti’s “exclusion” (apoha) theory of concept formation and the Yogācāra view of conceptual cognition as necessarily structured by the duality of “grasper” (grāhaka) and “grasped” (grāhya) (i.e., by the duality of subject versus object). On the cognitive science side, I distinguish between sensory discrimination, perceptual categorization, and mental conceptualization (the deployment of concepts in thought). According to both Dharmakīrti’s “exclusion” theory and cognitive science considerations, perceptual categorization is the most minimal form of conceptual cognition. It structures our engagement with the world at a basic and prelinguistic level, and it is motivationally and affectively biased. Combining these Buddhist and cognitive science ideas provides a philosophically precise and empirically useful way to define “nonconceptual awareness” and “nondual awareness.” Nonconceptual mental events do not undergo or result from “exclusion” (apoha), and they do not involve perceptual categorization. Nondual awareness in addition lacks the grasper-grasped (subject-object) structure and is not motivationally and affectively biased. I apply this framework to scientific studies of Buddhist mindfulness meditation practices, with attention to experimental studies of the effects of these practices on the perception and experience of pain. One take-home message is that cognitive scientists, clinical scientists, philosophers, Buddhist scholars, and experienced meditation practitioners need to work together. In particular, more attention needs to be given to the cross-cultural philosophical issues about concepts discussed in the lecture to clarify and advance the empirical investigation of mindfulness meditation practices.

Tuesday/Thursday March 13, 15, 20, 22, 5 pm
Annual Seminars
Emptiness, Mind, and Reality Buddhist Interventions in the Realism Versus Anti-Realism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

Does it make sense to think that we inhabit a world that exists and has a nature independently of how anyone takes it to be? Realists answer yes, and argue that objective knowledge is impossible unless it tells us how things are independently of what anyone might think. Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, however, specifically the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra traditions, is usually understood to be anti-realist, because it denies either that things have intrinsic natures (Madhyamaka) or that things have intrinsic natures independently of the mind (Yogācāra). Philosophical scholarship on Madhyamaka and Yogācāra often relates them to anti-realist or idealist ideas in modern European philosophy (e.g., from Kant, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology). For example, Madhyamaka is variously interpreted as a form of conventionalism, global anti-realism, or quietism, while Yogācāra is sometimes read as a form of transcendental phenomenology. These four seminars will examine core ideas from Madhyamaka and Yogācāra in light of the resurgence of realism in contemporary philosophy. For example, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor argue that we can “retrieve” realism by giving up the idea that knowledge consists of ideas in the mind representing the external world; by denying this “meditational epistemology” we can regain a view of knowledge as being based on our direct access to the everyday world and the physical universe of science. Quentin Meillassoux argues that the way to be a realist is to give up “correlationism,” which is the idea that we only ever have access to the correlation between the mind and the world and never to either one considered apart from the other, and he argues that the reason to reject correlationism is that it cannot make sense of the meaning of scientific statements about the world anterior to the appearance of human beings. How should the contemporary Madhyamaka or Yogācāra philosopher respond to these kinds of arguments? What contributions can Madhyamaka and Yogācāra make to the contemporary debates about realism and anti-realism? These questions will be the guiding ones of the four seminars. We will read selections (in translation) from Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) and The Dispeller of Disputes (Vigrahavyāvartanī), as well as Vasubandhu’s Treatise on the Three Natures (Trisvabhāvanirdeśa), together with relevant secondary readings relating these texts to contemporary philosophy.

Seminar 1: March 13: Madhyamaka Versus Realism: Setting up the Debate

Seminar 2: March 15: Epistemology: Madhyamaka Versus Nyāya

Seminar 3: March 20: Yogācāra: Mind and World.

Seminar 4: March 22: Ambiguity, Paradox, Dialetheism, Quietism

Evan Thompson, Biography

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology. He is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, revised edition, 2017). He received his B.A. in Asian Studies from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto from 2005 to 2013, and held a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind at York University from 2002 to 2005. In 2014, he was the Numata Invited Visiting Professor at the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also held invited visiting appointments at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement (ICE) at Dartmouth College, the Faculty of Philosophy, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.