Abstract
Jonardon Ganeri’s The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance is a trailblazing study in cross-cultural philosophy of mind. Its liberal conception of naturalism makes room for a rich analytic taxonomy of conceptions of personal identity that go well beyond the standard models of Cartesianism, Physicalism, and Reductionism. But this naturalistically respectable model of the self must contend with the fact that the findings of the cognitive sciences are also compatible with ontological antirealism about the self. And while the book opens new avenues for systematic reflection that thoroughly engages the historical material (specifically, the views of influential first millennium Indian and Buddhist philosophers), its solutions to the problem of personal identity and the problem of self-knowledge often shortcut descriptive accounts that take agency and self-awareness to be constituted by their proprietary phenomenology.
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Notes
The literature on cross-cultural philosophy of mind has been growing steadily in recent years. Jonardon’s book, along with such edited collections as Self, No-Self: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (Siderits et al. 2011), showcase the state of the art in the exploration of issues about consciousness, subjectivity, and selfhood from across different philosophical traditions.
As Smith (2012) noted recently on the opinion pages of the New York Times, this exclusionary attitude is compounded by the fact that many if not most philosophers today reject the idea that “what they do is essentially bound to the discipline’s past.” Having reconceived philosophy on the model of the sciences, which are free to reject past theories that were disproven long ago, most practitioners of the genre consider it perfectly reasonable to ignore not just the philosophical traditions of ancient India and China, but those of early modern Europe as well.
There is perhaps no more flagrant an expression of this bias than Anthony Flew’s now classic sweeping remark, in his An Introduction to Western Philosophy: ‘…philosophy, as the word is understood here, is concerned first, last and all the time with argument. It is, incidentally, because most of what is labeled Eastern Philosophy is not so concerned––rather than any reason of European parochialism––that this book draws no materials from any source east of Suez’ (Flew 1971: 36).
In my first book, I argue that insofar as they are rooted in different aspects of their conscious experience rather than, say, doctrinal considerations, the argumentative strategies of first millennium Indian and Buddhist philosophers “are better showcased when made continuous with contemporary philosophical concerns” (Coseru 2012). I make a stronger case for the cosmopolitan approach in Coseru (2017).
Bhushan and Garfield (2011: xiii) quote the following statement from Daya Krishna: “Anybody who is writing in English is not an Indian philosopher…What the British produced was a strange species…The strangeness of the species is that their terms of reference are the West…They put [philosophical problems] in a Western way.”
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Coseru, C. Personal identity and cosmopolitan philosophy. Philos Stud 174, 1749–1760 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0829-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0829-6