Asian Philosophy by Nicholaos Jones
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2021
Comparing Buddhist and contemporary analytic views about mereological composition reveals signifi... more Comparing Buddhist and contemporary analytic views about mereological composition reveals significant dissimilarities about the purposes that constrain successful answers to mereological questions, the kinds of considerations taken to be probative in justifying those answers, and the value of mereological inquiry. I develop these dissimilarities by examining three questions relevant to those who deny the existence of composite wholes. The first is a question of justification: What justifies denying the existence of composite wholes as more reasonable than affirming their existence? The second is a question of ontology: Under what conditions are many partless individuals arranged composite-wise? The third is a question of reasonableness: Why, if there are no composites available to experience, do "the folk" find it reasonable to believe there are? I motivate each question, sketch some analytic answers for each, develop in more detail answers from the Theravādin Buddhist scholar Buddhaghosa, and extract comparative lessons.
Comparative Philosophy, 2020
Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant an... more Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell's theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the adjustments. The result is a principled structural distinction between affirmative and negative catuṣkoṭi, as well as analyses for each that compare favorably to more recent efforts from Tillemans, Westerhoff, and Priest (among others).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
This paper examines the Huayan teaching of the six characteristics as presented in the Rafter Dia... more This paper examines the Huayan teaching of the six characteristics as presented in the Rafter Dialogue from Fazang's Treatise on the Five Teachings. The goal is to make the teaching accessible to those with minimal training in Buddhist philosophy, and especially for those who aim to engage with the extensive question-and-answer section of the Rafter Dialogue. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, contextualizing Fazang's account of the characteristics with earlier Buddhist attempts to theorize the relationships between wholes and their parts; second, explicating the meaning Fazang likely attributes to each of the six characteristics; third, situating the characteristics as explicated within Fazang's broader metaphysical framework.
Philosophy East and West, 2018
This paper explicates the counting ten coins metaphor as it appears in Fazang's Treatise on the F... more This paper explicates the counting ten coins metaphor as it appears in Fazang's Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan. The goal is to transform Fazang's inexact and obscure mentions of the metaphor into something that is clearer and more precise. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, presenting Fazang's version of the metaphor as improving upon prior efforts by Zhiyan and Ŭisang to interpret a brief stanza in the Avataṁsaka sutra; second, providing textual evidence to support this interpretation; third, contrasting this interpretation with alternatives from Francis Cook as well as Yasuo Deguchi and Katsuhiko Sano.
Dharma and Dao: Chinese Buddhist Metaphysics
Fazang's arguments in his Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan provide a philosophical founda... more Fazang's arguments in his Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan provide a philosophical foundation for the Avatamsaka Sutra's rich and suggestive imagery. This chapter focuses on one of Fazang's central arguments in that treatise, namely, his argument that mutually reliant dharmas are mutually identical. The chapter presents the background context for Fazang's argument, reconstructs the argument's logical structure, interprets the central concepts appearing therein, and explains why Fazang might have found plausible his argument's premises. Specific discussion points include: the non-duality of existence and emptiness; relations between causes and their conditions; the meaning of creation and identity; connections with the ti-yong paradigm; Fazang's analogy of the ten coins. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of Fazang's metaphysics for contemporary discussions of substance and ontological foundations.
The Moon Points Back
Mark Siderits defends two views about Buddhism. The first is that the Buddhist denial of independ... more Mark Siderits defends two views about Buddhism. The first is that the Buddhist denial of independently-existing selves is best understood as a kind of reductionism, according to which wholes, by virtue of being nothing more than their atomic parts, are conventionally real but ultimately unreal. The second is that the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is not a metaphysical thesis, according to which nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, but rather a semantic thesis, according to which no statement about ultimate reality is true. This chapter uses central metaphysical doctrines from the Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism to develop, in contrast, a non-reductionist approach to wholes and a metaphysical construal of emptiness.
![Research paper thumbnail of 法藏：阐释、因果与分体关系 [Fazang: Hermeneutics, Causation, and Mereology]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/46296354/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Fazang 法藏 (643-712) ranks among the preeminent Buddhists of medieval China. His writings reveal ... more Fazang 法藏 (643-712) ranks among the preeminent Buddhists of medieval China. His writings reveal an innovative vision of the world that reconciles Buddhist philosophy to traditional Chinese values. This chapter focuses on his hermeneutics, accompanying theories of causation, and the teaching of the six characteristics that results from his theory of dharmadhātu causation. The chapter begins by showing how Fazang's commitment to an ideal of inclusivity motivates one of his schemes for classifying the diverse schools of Buddhism. Next, the chapter surveys four different theories of causation, demonstrating how Fazang's commitment to Huayan 華嚴 Buddhism as the maximally inclusive form of Buddhism motivates his theory of dharmadhātu causation. The chapter then explains how this theory motivates Fazang's mereology in his teaching of the six characteristics and evaluates extant proposals to justify this mereology. This sets the stage for a brief comparison between Fazang’s mereology and the mereological commitments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of whether Fazang’s metaphysics is paradoxical.
Huayan Buddhism offers a solution to the Problem of the One over the Many that preserves the real... more Huayan Buddhism offers a solution to the Problem of the One over the Many that preserves the reality of wholes without treating the whole-part relation as eternal. I reconstruct the details of this solution, and contrast it with competitors from Nyāya-Vaisheshika and Indian Buddhism.
This paper interprets some of Fazang's mereological remarks--that wholes are in each of their par... more This paper interprets some of Fazang's mereological remarks--that wholes are in each of their parts and that each part of a whole is every other part of the whole--and reconstructs his arguments for these remarks. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part.
This paper attempts to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereolog... more This paper attempts to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereology and in a way that does not violate the principle of non-contradiction, why someone might accept some prima-facie puzzling remarks by the Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang, such as his claims that the eye of a lion is its ear and that a rafter of a building is identical to the building itself.
This paper presents a formal system for the logic of soku that relies upon a distinction between... more This paper presents a formal system for the logic of soku that relies upon a distinction between internal and external negation and preserves the principle of non-contradiction.
Philosophy of Science by Nicholaos Jones
Philosophy of Science, 2018
I consider three explanatory strategies from recent systems biology that are driven by mathematic... more I consider three explanatory strategies from recent systems biology that are driven by mathematics as much as mechanistic detail. Analysis of differential equations drives the first strategy; topological analysis of network motifs drives the second; mathematical theorems from control engineering drive the third. I also distinguish three abstraction types: aggregations, which simplify by condensing details; generalizations, which simplify by generalizing details; and structurations, which simplify by contextualizing details. Using a common explanandum as reference point-namely, the robust perfect adaptation of chemotaxis in Escherichia coli-I argue that each strategy targets various abstraction types to different mechanistic details.
The increasing application of network models to interpret biological systems raises a number of i... more The increasing application of network models to interpret biological systems raises a number of important methodological and epistemological questions. What novel insights can network analysis provide in biology? Are network approaches an extension of or in conflict with mechanistic research strategies? When and how can network and mechanistic approaches interact in productive ways? In this paper we address these questions by focusing on how biological networks are represented and analyzed in a diverse class of case studies. Our examples span from the investigation of organizational properties of biological networks using tools from graph theory to the application of dynamical systems theory to understand the behavior of complex biological systems. We show how network approaches support and extend traditional mechanistic strategies but also offer novel strategies for dealing with biological complexity.
Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for un... more Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for understanding biological phenomena. We introduce the notion of constraint-based reasoning as a fruitful tool for conceptualizing some of these developments. One important role of mathematical abstractions is to impose formal constraints on a search space for possible hypotheses and thereby guide the search for plausible causal models. Formal constraints are, however, not only tools for biological explanations but can be explanatory by virtue of clarifying general dependency-relations and patterning between functions and structures. We describe such situations as constraint-based explanations and argue that these differ from mechanistic strategies in important respects. While mechanistic explanations emphasize change-relating causal features, constraint-based explanations emphasize formal dependencies and generic organizational features that are relatively independent of lower-level changes in causal details.. Our distinction between mechanistic and constraint-based explanations is pragmatically motivated by the wish to understand scientific practice. We contend that delineating the affordances and assumptions of different explanatory questions and strategies helps to clarify tensions between diverging scientific practices and the innovative potentials in their combination. Moreover, we show how constraint-based explanation integrate several features shared by otherwise different philosophical accounts of abstract explanatory strategies in biology
Erkenntnis
"While mechanistic explanation and, to a lesser extent, nomological explanation are well-explored... more "While mechanistic explanation and, to a lesser extent, nomological explanation are well-explored topics in the philosophy of biology, topological explanation is not. Nor is the role of diagrams in topological explanations. These explanations do not appeal to the operation of mechanisms or laws, and extant accounts of the role of diagrams in biological science explain neither why scientists might prefer diagrammatic representations of topological information to sentential equivalents nor how such
representations might facilitate important processes of explanatory reasoning unavailable to scientists who restrict themselves to sentential representations. Accordingly, relying upon a case study about immune system vulnerability to attacks on CD4+ T-cells, I argue that diagrams group together information in a way that avoids repetition in representing topological structure, facilitate identification of specific topological properties of those structures, and make available to controlled processing
explanatorily salient counterfactual information about topological structures, all in ways that sentential counterparts of diagrams do not."
We argue that diagrams in biology can provide functional explanations and facilitate the construc... more We argue that diagrams in biology can provide functional explanations and facilitate the construction of mathematical models. Extending beyond prior analyses, we also show how diagrams facilitate the construction of mathematical models, we argue that the diagrams permit nomological explanations of the cell cycle, and we argue that what makes diagrams integral and indispensible for explanation and model construction is their nature as locality aids: they group together information that is to be used together in a way that sentential representations do not.
How and why were you initially drawn to systems biology? How do you view the relation between phi... more How and why were you initially drawn to systems biology? How do you view the relation between philosophy and systems biology, and (how) can these fields inform each other? What do you consider the most neglected topics and/or contributions in late 20th Century (philosophy of) biology? What have been the most significant advances in systems biology? What do you consider the most important problems in (philosophy of) systems biology and what are the prospects for progress in this respect?
I propose a necessary condition for a substantial distinction between abstracting from a property... more I propose a necessary condition for a substantial distinction between abstracting from a property of a physical system and idealizing that property.
Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood be... more Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists' attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do so in a way that prevents those hypotheses from being false by virtue of their constituent idealizations.
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Asian Philosophy by Nicholaos Jones
Philosophy of Science by Nicholaos Jones
representations might facilitate important processes of explanatory reasoning unavailable to scientists who restrict themselves to sentential representations. Accordingly, relying upon a case study about immune system vulnerability to attacks on CD4+ T-cells, I argue that diagrams group together information in a way that avoids repetition in representing topological structure, facilitate identification of specific topological properties of those structures, and make available to controlled processing
explanatorily salient counterfactual information about topological structures, all in ways that sentential counterparts of diagrams do not."
representations might facilitate important processes of explanatory reasoning unavailable to scientists who restrict themselves to sentential representations. Accordingly, relying upon a case study about immune system vulnerability to attacks on CD4+ T-cells, I argue that diagrams group together information in a way that avoids repetition in representing topological structure, facilitate identification of specific topological properties of those structures, and make available to controlled processing
explanatorily salient counterfactual information about topological structures, all in ways that sentential counterparts of diagrams do not."
Aquinas on: Being, Existence, and Essence; Causation; Being and Goodness; Five Ways
Selections from Plato's Dialogues: Meno, Phaedo, Republic 5-7, Parmenides, Timeaus
Hesiod, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Melissus, Democritus, Georgias
Note: A revised and expanded version of these notes is available at https://www.academia.edu/42336220/The_Presocratics
(Comments much appreciated by October 22 2017. Thank you!)
(This is a longer version of a talk given for the Second Year Experience in Autumn 2012 at University of Alabama in Huntsville.)
(This is a write-up from a presentation to the AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University, January 2018.)