Nāgārjuna and the Limits of Thought

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Proceedings of the third Indian Conference on Logic and Its Applications, 2009

In his excellent paper, Nāgārjuna as anti-realist, Siderits showed that it makes sense to perform a connection between the position of the Buddhist Nāgārjuna and contemporary anti realist theses such as Dummett's one. The point of this talk is to argue that this connection is an important one to perform for one's correct understanding of what Nāgārjuna is doing when he criticizes the contemporary Indian theories of knowledge and assertion, first section, but as soon as the theories of argumentation are involved, this connection can be implemented in a better way from an other anti realist perspective, namely the one of Dialogical logic (Erlangen school), in which the signification is given in terms of rules in a language game. The philosophical issues are to hold an interpretation of the type of assertion performed by Nāgārjuna. We here aim at making a rational reconstruction of his chief claim 'I do not assert any proposition' in which a proposition is considered as the set of its strategies of justification. As for the last section, the point will be to apply these analyses to Buddhist practice. We will in this section consider the conventional character of human activities as the fact that any speech act is performed within a dialogue under ad-hoc restrictions; and the question of one's progress in the soteriological path to liberation will be asked 1 .

BUDDHIST ILLOGIC, 2002

BUDDHIST ILLOGIC engages in a critical analysis of Nagarjuna's arguments. The 2nd Century CE Indian philosopher Nagarjuna founded the Madhyamika (Middle Way) school of Mahayana Buddhism, which strongly influenced Chinese, Korean and Japanese Buddhism, as well as Tibetan Buddhism. His writings include a series of arguments purporting to show the illogic of logic, the absurdity of reason. He considers this the way to verbalize and justify the Buddhist doctrine of “emptiness” (Shunyata). The present essay demonstrates the many sophistries involved in Nagarjuna’s arguments

JOWO, 2017

Journal of Indian Philosophy 47, 749−777, 2019

On the basis of Nāgārjuna’s works, especially the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, this paper proposes a sceptic presupposition as the departure point of Nāgārjuna’s refutations. This presupposition invalidates perceptual knowledge, and thus the identities of existents (svabhāva) can only be deemed as referents assumed by concepts (nāman, vikalpa, etc.). Then the “confinement principle,” a theorem tacitly applied in Nāgārjuna’s arguments, is justified, i.e., any definition or description of a concept would necessarily confine its assumed referent to an invariable and isolated state. This principle enables Nāgārjuna to deduce contradictions between the static and isolated nature of the assumed referent, and the activity in which it must be involved. Notions of both a static identity and its activity are deep-rooted in all referential mental activities of sentient beings. Hence all concepts are found to be self-contradictory and therefore devoid of referents (niḥsvabhāva), namely, empty (śūnya). Thus, Nāgārjuna is refuting the whole intelligible world, and his position can be identified as epistemological nihilism—nothing within our ken can possibly be.

2024

As one of the most pivotal thinkers in the history Mahāyāna Buddhism, the writings of Nāgārjuna have long attracted the attention of scholars aiming to interpret in declarative terms the meaning of the arguments contained therein. However, the very aim of such an endeavor that seeks to ascribe to Nāgārjuna a philosophical position is fundamentally at odds with the unwaveringly critical nature of his project. In order to illustrate the singular character of Nāgārjuna's methodology, this article seeks to clarify three crucial points concerning his thought: (1) the central concept in his philosophical works, dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), ironically denotes the non-origination (anutpāda) of any entity (bhāva) whatsoever and is universal in scope; (2) emptiness (śūnyatā) is not a meaningful predicate of any entity, meaning that no entity exists that can be identified as being empty; and (3) the Two Truths (satyadvaya) are not a philosophically significant device for Nāgārjuna and subsequently do not provide a means by which to mitigate the radical consequences of his arguments. As a result, we can understand Nāgārjuna's claim to have no postulative thesis (pratijñā) as a statement that he predicates no quality (dharma) of any subject (dharmin), and that his methodology is strictly critical, offering us no constructive theory by which to make sense of reality.

2020

You know that one person in class who always says things against the status quo? Who has no opinions of their own, but just in relation to and against the opinions of others? Well, that person within Buddhism is Nagarjuna, a Madhyamika Buddhist philosopher who seems to hold a contrarian view within the field regarding svabhava, or intrinsic nature. In my thesis presentation, I tackle the question of whether Nagarjuna indulges in defining terms to his advantage and playing games in order to reach his position, or whether he does so through legitimate argumentation, or, even if the two are mutually exclusive. I also try to make sense of how his views of svabhava fit in with the general Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, and whether a completely negative (one that negates rather than asserts) view can actually teach us something.

2003

Among the incidental features of N āḡarjuna’s philosophy that have captured my attention over the years, there are two in particular that I wish to discuss in this paper. The first observation is that his philosophical writings seem to have fascinated a large number of modern scholars of Buddhism; this hardly requires demonstration. The second observation is that N āḡarjuna’s writings had relatively little effect on the course of subsequent Indian Buddhist philosophy. Despite his apparent attempts to discredit some of the most fundamental concepts of abhidharma, abhidharma continued to flourish for centuries, without any appreciable attempt on the part of ābhidharmikas to defend their methods of analysis against N āḡarjuna’s criticisms. And despite N̄ aḡarjuna’s radical critique of the very possibility of having grounded knowledge (pramān. a), the epistemological school of Dign āga and Dharmak ı̄rti dominated Indian Buddhist intellectual circles, again without any explicit attempt t...