Description
There is much in Paul Williams' response to my review of his book to which I might reply, but I fear the debate may already be too protracted. So I shall take this opportunity just to try to clarify some key claims of mine about which I think Williams might be confused, and then leave it to the reader to decide where the truth lies. Since Williams has made it fairly clear where he stands, perhaps I should begin by indicating my own (present) views concerning the larger context in which our dispute is located. I do not think the Reductionist project—reducing persons to a wholly impersonal causal series of psychophysical elements—can ultimately be made to work. At the same time, I believe that Reductionism has the resources to answer the objections that its many critics, such as Williams, raise. The Reductionist view of persons is also, I think, compatible with at least two different sorts of ontology: the mental/material (nāma/rūpa) dualism of early Buddhism and Abhidharma and the naturalistic physicalism of much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Reductionism is likewise compatible both with belief in rebirth and with its denial. The real difficulty I see for Reductionism lies in answering the far more fundamental challenge of the Mādhyamikas. (Unlike Williams, I do not think the Madhyamaka claim that nothing bears its own essential nature is incoherent, or tantamount to metaphysical nihilism.) Yet I suspect that the key to understanding the bodhisattva's compassion may lie in seeing that the Madhyamaka critique does not undermine all the consequences of Reductionism. So I think it is worth investigating whether there is a plausible reading of Śāntideva's argument that makes more philosophical sense than Williams sees in it. (Siderits, introductory remarks, 453)
