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BUDDHA AND HARD ELIMINATIVISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2020

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Abstract

An appropriate description for the Buddha's philosophy of persons within the frame of materialist philosophy of mind, prima facie, would understandably be a kind of reductionism, given that the Buddha reduced the self to nothing but a collection of impersonal and impermanent psychophysical elements. In this article, I argue that this view is only appropriate for understanding the self within conventional reality, as is the term used by Buddhists, and does not tackle the other half, namely, ultimate reality. I claim that eliminative materialism provides a more accurate description of the Buddha's prescriptive practice, and although falling prey to the same problems that reductionism faces, creates a good basis for an alternative position of the Buddha as a Hard Eliminativist.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2020

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References

Churchland, P. M. (1981) ‘Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 6790.Google Scholar
O'Sullivan, Simon (2014) ‘A Life between the Finite and Infinite: Remarks on Deleuze, Badiou and Western Buddhism’, Deleuze Studies 8(2): 256–79.10.3366/dls.2014.0145CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shields, James (2013) ‘Liberation as Revolutionary Praxis: Rethinking Buddhist Materialism’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20: 461–99.Google Scholar