I will end my Westerhoff/Nagarjuna coverage with one more selection from right at the end of Westerhoff’s book: According to the Madhyamaka view of truth, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it. All one is left with is conventional truth, Continue Reading …
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Nagarjuna on the Thing-in-Itself (More Westerhoff)
Our Nagarjuna episode seemed to conclude that ultimate reality is beyond our ability to speak about it. The objects of our experience are a shared fiction, and the most we can do with language is to show that they’re fictional; even the terms we use to accomplish this (like emptiness) are themselves constructs, serving only this negative, critical function. So, Continue Reading …
Westerhoff on Nagarjuna on Metaphysically Basic Entities
One of the topics we didn’t really get into on the podcast, and which in our Buddhism reading I actually found the most interesting, is the metaphysics of basic elements of the world. Nagarjuna argues that reality has no ultimate foundation, and in the episode we discussed that in terms of the possibility of Cartesian “substance” being basic or Spinoza’s Continue Reading …
B.S. about Jesus and Buddhism
Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught Buddhism? Hmmm? Hmmm? Here’s something that apparently showed on the BBC at some point: Watch on youtube. OK, some silly speculation here (and more amusingly told in Christoper Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),but a few points of comparison are made here between the Continue Reading …
Secondary Sources for Nagarjuna
For our Nagarjuna episode, in addition to the works by Nagarjuna that we provided links to, we discussed two additional works that you may want to look into: First, Jan Westerhoff’s Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka covers the philosophical concepts of the core Nagarjuana texts, not only clarifying N’s view within the tradition (i.e. clarifying what position he’s arguing against at any given Continue Reading …
Topic for #27: Nagarjuna the Indian Buddhist
Does anything really exist? Sure, we have experiences, which seem confirmed by other experiences, and other people seem to corroborate some of these experiences, so we naively consider the world of our experience as objectively there, but is that all there is to it? Well, if you go into philosophy with the idea that life is fundamentally sucky and even Continue Reading …