This collection of essays is presented as a project in comparative philosophies, ancient Greek and Indian Buddhist. Specifically, it canvasses some Indian Buddhist and ancient Greek theories about the ultimate nature of reality and the existence of a substantial self. Two themes run through the work: first, that of the possibility of influence in both directions, and second that of the relation between an eliminativist or reductionist account of reality and the application of that account to the self.
On the first score, there is no doubt that Pyrrho of Elis encountered Indian philosophy when he accompanied Alexander the Great to India. Whether Pyrrho in his radical skepticism—either in regard to the structure of the world or to the possibility of our knowing it—influenced his Indian hosts or whether it worked the other way around is not entirely clear. In any case, a number of the essays in this book take up the parallel radical skepticisms in both Greek and Indian philosophy. On the second score, this radical skepticism about the reality of the world as ordinary commonsense views it is applied, especially in the essays on Buddhist philosophy, to the deconstruction of the concept of the self.
It is certainly not possible to discuss the thirteen rich and complex essays in this book in a review with the assigned length. I shall mention what I take to be some highlights in the book and some provocative questions that are raised.
The book’s third essay, by Roberta Ioli, and the fourth, by Ugo Zilioli, introduce us to Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily and his work On That Which is Not or On Nature, a work which is largely lost, though it exists in summaries by Sextus Empiricus and by an unknown Peripatetic usually labeled Pseudo-Aristotle. Gorgias lived more than one hundred years before Pyrrho and there is no evidence that he traveled to India. But his work could be read, as Ioli and Zilioli do, as an early defense of ontological nihilism, a reaction to dogmatic philosophies of the fifth century BCE. Zilioli also introduces us to Nāgārjuna, an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the first/second century CE, whose writings show some similarities to Gorgias’ in his argument that the world is “empty,” that is, empty of real differences and samenesses among things. This view leads Nāgārjuna, according to Zilioli, to a kind of ontological nihilism, although he does not suggest that he did this under the influence of Gorgias or, for that matter, Pyrrho. So, here we have an example of “parallel” speculation without a hint of influence one way or the other. It is not clear to me what work “comparative philosophy” is doing in this context.
Güremen’s essay on Pyrrho takes on the longstanding problem of how to interpret Pyrrho’s claim that “things are indifferent, unstable, and indeterminable.” According to the epistemological interpretation, this claim is about us and our cognitive deficiencies, not about the way the world really is. According to the ontological interpretation, by contrast, Pyrrho is making a bold claim to the effect that the world is really not one way or another. Güremen, availing himself of Fregean analytic tools, wants to show that Pyrrho is arguing that our sensations and opinions are not to be trusted because there is, following Frege’s distinction, sense but no reference for the propositions we formulate based on our experience. Our embodied cognition does contain content, but what is misleading is supposing that it contains true content. What Güremen calls Pyrrho’s “vagueness thesis” holds that the predicates in our propositional claims are indeterminate in the sense that they contribute neither truth nor falsity to the propositions. As a result, we should, according to Pyrrho, withhold assent to them. I have never before seen Frege brought in to assist in the interpretation of Pyrrho and I find Güremen’s suggestion intriguing.
Chakravarty contributes a valuable survey of various scholarly attempts to provide historically-based content for the claim that Pyrrho’s philosophy has its origin in Indian Buddhism. He gives a brief account of the philosophy of Sañjaya Belatṭhiputta of the Ajñāna school, a contemporary of Gautama Buddha and Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the founder of the Jain school. Chakravarty argues for the plausibility of the claim that Pyrrho was influenced by a doctrine of the suspension of belief found in Sañjaya and his followers. He claims that members of the Ajñāna school embraced a radical skepticism about belief in line with Sextus Empiricus’ account of Pyrrho. I do find this account credible, but I wonder how far we can go beyond the bare minimum of accepting that Pyrrho was inspired in his distinctive view by his encounter with some of his Indian counterparts.
The last four essays in the book, by Piergiacomi, Aufderheide, Sangiacomo, and Szanyi, focus on Greek and Indian skeptical and reductivist accounts of a substantial self. Piergiacomi argues that Democritus, despite his atomism, maintains a robust concept of the self. He tries to show that Democritus can defend ethical and agential attributes for the self understood as supervenient on the fundamental atomistic structure of reality. Democritus held that, apart from atoms and the void, everything is conventional. So, it would seem to follow that our atoms can produce the conventional self of ordinary discourse, supervenient on the atoms but not therefore non-existent. Piergiacomi argues that, on the assumption of a naturalistic or physicalist account of reality generally, one must either renounce the substantial reality of a self or explain it reductively in naturalistic terms. He thinks that Democritus does the latter. But if that is indeed what Democritus does, it needs to be emphasized that explaining away, say, ethical convictions on the assumption that they could be nothing but supervenient on atomic activity might just as well lead us to question the assumption as the counterintuitive conclusion based on it.
Aufderheide writes about Plato’s analysis in Theaetetus of the claim that perception is knowledge. Since knowledge, says Plato, must be of what is and be infallible, he tries to give an account of perception that would give to perception these two properties. So, Plato adduces Protagoras who held that “man is the measure of all things” and gives to him a theory of perception that maintains that perception is infallible because “things” only exist when they are perceived and only for the one who perceives them. Aufderheide applies this to the perceiver as well as to the perceived so that there is no self apart from the ephemeral subject of the actual act of perception. He shows the parallel between this interpretation of Plato’s account of Protagoras and the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self” or anātmavāda. He argues that without a substantial self, we avoid the ignorance that both Plato and Buddhism seek to eliminate. This result occurs just because perception is infallible. Aufderheide concentrates on the argument of the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, who presents a highly articulated argument on behalf of the deconstruction of a substantial self. This self is reduced to a façon de parler which presumably removes from it ethical and agential properties.
The essays by Sangiacomo and Szanyi address various Buddhist accounts of consciousness, including phenomenal and “pure” varieties, the latter eliminating a self who is conscious along with any intentional objects or consciousness. These two essays raise a host of new issues, including the sense, if any, that can be given to a concept of rebirth without a perduring self.
Rare will be the reader expert in both ancient Greek and Indian traditions, certainly including this reviewer. For this reason, one struggles to read this collection of essays with a consistent level of attention. I mean that one is likely to approach essays in one of the traditions with many elementary questions and the other with questions and criticisms of a more sophisticated nature. The essay on Democritus presents a positive construction of the self, while the essays on Gorgias and Pyrrho suggest a negative conclusion. The latter represent a decidedly minority position in ancient Greek philosophy, while the “no-self” view evidently has a much more prominent place in the history of Indian philosophy. Many of the essays stress the tentative nature of the comparison made between the two traditions, especially with regard to the elusive concept of influence. But there is much to learn from a book that aims to position itself at the forefront of comparative philosophy.
Authors and titles
- Ancient Greek and Indian Buddhist philosophies: Status of the art and a comparative appraisal (Jan Westerhoff and Ugo Zilioli)
- Travel and intellectual exchange across the ancient Indian Ocean world (ca. 100BCE-600CE) (Matthew Cobb)
- Being and not being in Gorgias’ own demonstration: For a non-eliminativist reading of PTMO (Roberta Ioli)
- On what is not: Gorgias and Nāgārjuna on nihilism (Ugo Zilioli)
- An Aristotelian viewpoint on the presence of an eliminativist trend in Presocratic philosophy (Diego Zucca)
- For and against simplemindedness in Buddhist metaphysics (Sonam Kachru)
- Pyrrho’s revelation: On the hieratic style and oral origin of the Aristocles passage, between East and West (Ugo Zilioli)
- Pyrrho and Vagueness: A Fregean analysis (Refik Güremen)
- Interweaving ancient philosophical traditions: Sañjaya’s Gymnosophism and Pyrrhonism (Anish Chakravarty)
- The treasury of the self: Democritus on physical and moral identity (Enrico Piergiacomi)
- No-self in Plato and Vasubandhu (Joachim Aufderheide)
- Consciousness in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha (Andrea Sangiacomo)
- Rebirth without a self: Sthiramati on the transformation of consciousness (Szilvia Szanyi)