Material Practice and the Metamorphosis of a Sign: Early Buddhist Stupas and the Origin of Mahayana Buddhism

From at least the third century b.c. , Buddhist ritual focused on stupas, stylized replicas of the mounds of earth in which early Buddhists interred relics of the Buddha. Beginning in the first century b.c. , Buddhist monks in western India began manipulating the physical shape of monastic stupas to make them appear taller and more massive than they actually were. Buddhist monks used these manipulations to help assert authority over the Buddhist laity. Employing theories of practice, materiality, and semiotics, I argue that physical manipulations of the shape of stupas by Buddhist monks led to the progressive detachment of the primary signs of Buddhism from their original referents. Where earlier stupas were icons and indexes of the Buddha encased within indexes of his presence, later stupas were symbols of the Buddha and Buddhist theology. This change in the material practice of Buddhism reduced stupas’ emotional immediacy in favor of greater intellectual detachment. In the end, this shift in the meaning ascribed to stupas created the preconditions from which the Buddhist image cult and Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first through fifth centuries a.d . The development of Mahayana Buddhism and Buddha images signified a return to iconic worship of the Buddha

Why Obey the Laws of Logic?

The status of the law of noncontradiction is the ultimate battleground on which the traditional forces of rationalism and anti-rationalism have met. This conflict is the topic of this essay. People who reject the law of noncontradiction obliterate any significant difference between speech acts of asserting and denying. In doing so, they deprive themselves of the significant use of their own speech acts. Thus they are self-silencers. This is Aristotle’s “negative demonstration” of the law of noncontradiction, and I find it entirely persuasive

Supporting Pluralism by Artificial Intelligence: Conceptualizing Epistemic Disagreements as Digital Artifacts

A crucial concept in philosophy and social sciences, epistemic disagreement, has not yet been adequately reflected in the Web. In this paper, we call for development of intelligent tools dealing with epistemic disagreements on the Web to support pluralism. As a first step, we present Polyphony, an ontology for representing and annotating epistemic disagreements

Meaning and Understanding

Explores the central role in Wittgenstein's later work of his opposition to a 'mechanistic' conception of understanding. Offers a diagnosis of Kripke's skeptical paradox on this basis

Contextualismo y externismo: cambiando una forma de escepticismo por otra

The central claim of this essay is that contemporary externalists and contextualists, in their efforts to refute Cartesian skepticism, open the door to Pyrrhonian skepticism or, more strikingly, actually embrace a position indistinguishable from it. David Lewis's essay "Elusive Knowledge" is presented as a specimen of just this tendency

Show Me the Argument: Empirically Testing the Armchair Philosophy Picture

Many philosophers subscribe to the view that philosophy is a priori and in the business of discovering necessary truths from the armchair. This paper sets out to empirically test this picture. If this were the case, we would expect to see this reflected in philosophical practice. In particular, we would expect philosophers to advance mostly deductive, rather than inductive, arguments. The paper shows that the percentage of philosophy articles advancing deductive arguments is higher than those advancing inductive arguments, which is what we would expect from the vantage point of the armchair philosophy picture. The results also show, however, that the percentages of articles advancing deductive arguments and those advancing inductive arguments are converging over time and that the difference between inductive and deductive ratios is declining over time. This trend suggests that deductive arguments are gradually losing their status as the dominant form of argumentation in philosophy

Agency without Avoidability: Defusing a New Threat to Frankfurt’s Counterexample Strategy1

In this paper, I examine a new line of response to Frankfurt’s challenge to the traditional association of moral responsibility with the ability to do otherwise. According to this response, Frankfurt’s counterexample strategy fails, not in light of the conditions for moral responsibility per se, but in view of the conditions for action. Specifically, it is claimed, a piece of behavior counts as an action only if it is within the agent’s power to avoid performing it. In so far as Frankfurt’s challenge presupposes that actions can be unavoidable, this view of action seems to bring his challenge up short. Helen Steward and Maria Alvarez have independently proposed versions of this response. Here I argue that this response is unavailable to Frankfurt’s incompatibilist opponents. This becomes evident when we put this question to its proponents: “Are actions that originate deterministically ipso facto unavoidable?” If they answer “yes,” they encounter one horn of a dilemma. If they answer “no,” they encounter the other horn. Since no one has a clearer stake in meeting Frankfurt’s challenge than these theorists do, it is significant that the Steward-Alvarez response is unavailable to them

Hard and Blind: On Wittgenstein's Genealogical View of Logical Necessity

My main aim is to sketch a certain reading (‘genealogical') of later Wittgenstein's views on logical necessity. Along the way, I engage with the inferentialism currently debated in the literature on the epistemology of deductive logic.publishedVersio