Books by Christian Coseru
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What turns the continuous flow of experience into perceptually distinct objects? Can our verbal d... more What turns the continuous flow of experience into perceptually distinct objects? Can our verbal descriptions unambiguously capture what it is like to see, hear, or feel? How might we reason about the testimony that perception alone discloses? Christian Coseru proposes a rigorous and highly original way to answer these questions by developing a framework for understanding perception as a mode of apprehension that is intentionally constituted, pragmatically oriented, and causally effective. By engaging with recent discussions in phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind, but also by drawing on the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Coseru offers a sustained argument that Buddhist philosophers, in particular those who follow the tradition of inquiry initiated by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, have much to offer when it comes to explaining why epistemological disputes about the evidential role of perceptual experience cannot satisfactorily be resolved without taking into account the structure of our cognitive awareness.
Perceiving Reality examines the function of perception and its relation to attention, language, and discursive thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness-namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence. Coseru advances an innovative approach to Buddhist philosophy of mind in the form of phenomenological naturalism, and moves beyond comparative approaches to philosophy by emphasizing the continuity of concerns between Buddhist and Western philosophical accounts of the nature of perceptual content and the character of perceptual consciousness.
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Papers by Christian Coseru
Notre Dame philosophical reviews, 2018
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Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures
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CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO CONSCIOUSNESS
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This paper examines Dharmakīrti's arguments against Cārvāka physicalism in the Pramāṇasiddhi ... more This paper examines Dharmakīrti's arguments against Cārvāka physicalism in the Pramāṇasiddhi chapter of his magnum opus, the Pramāṇavārttika, with a focus on classical Indian philosophical attempts to address the mind-body problem. The key issue concerns the relation between cognition and the body, and the role this relation plays in causal-explanatory accounts of consciousness and cognition. Drawing on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind about embodiment and the significance of borderline states of consciousness, the paper proposes a philosophical reconstruction that builds on two important features of the Buddhist account: an expanded conception of causality and a robust account of phenomenal content
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This paper examines two central issues prompted by a recent critique of this Buddhist modernist p... more This paper examines two central issues prompted by a recent critique of this Buddhist modernist phenomenon in Evan Thompson’s Why I Am Not a Buddhist: (i) the suitability of evolutionary psychology as a framework of analysis for Buddhist moral psychological ideas; and (iv) whether a Madhyamaka-inspired anti-foundationalism stance can serve as an effective platform for debating the issue of progress in science. The main argument of this paper is that if Buddhism is to enter into a fruitful dialogue with the mind sciences, it must be shown to complement the empirical claims to knowledge for which scientific naturalism so far provides the most viable basis
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Routledge, Oct 5, 2015
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Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy, 2019
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History of Indian Philosophy, 2017
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Analysis, 2022
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The Routledge Handbook Of Consciousness, 2018
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The thriving contemporary enterprise of Consciousness Studies owes its success in large measure t... more The thriving contemporary enterprise of Consciousness Studies owes its success in large measure to two late 20th-century intellectual developments in cognitive science and its allied philosophy of mind: a growing interest in the study of the neurobiological processes that underlie consciousness and cognition, and the rehabilitation of first-person approaches to the study of consciousness associated with the 20th-century European tradition of phenomenological philosophy. The first development marks a shift away from preoccupations with the status of mental representation to understanding the function of perception, attention, action, and cognition in embodied and enactive, rather than purely representational, terms. The second acknowledges the importance of fine-grained accounts of experience for the purpose of mapping out the neural correlates of consciousness. Both developments recognize that empirical research is essential to advancing any robust philosophical and scientific theor...
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This dissertation examines the theory of perception as reflected in the works of two influential ... more This dissertation examines the theory of perception as reflected in the works of two influential Buddhist philosophers, Santarakita's Tattvasamgraha and its commentary by Kamalasila, the Tattvasamgrahapanjika (ca. 750-800 C.E.). In these two works, the authors advance the notion that perception ought to be regarded as the primary source of knowledge and be restricted only to that cognition which is devoid of conceptual thought and non-erroneous. Largely following a model provided by Dharmakirti (ca. 640 C.E.), Santaraksita and Kamalasila adopt two specific viewpoints in defining the perceptual aspects of knowledge: (i) the notion that the domains of language and conceptual thought are coextensive, which can be traced back to the grammarian-philosopher Bhartrhari (ca. 4-5th century C.E.); and (ii) a psychological perspective centred on the notion that direct, unmediated, perception is in fact possible, which finds its origins in the Abhidharma literature. For these Buddhist epistemologists, perception is not only a psychological process to be understood within the framework of classical Abhidharma psychology, but also an epistemic modality for establishing what counts as a valid source of knowledge. The authors' approach is to differentiate non-conceptual cognitions from the mass of cognitive events that is characteristic of ordinary, 'folk,' beliefs about the contents of experience. This differentiation resembles in many ways the methodology adopted by modern psychological investigations into the mechanism of perception and knowledge representation. Adopting a naturalist reading of epistemology, this dissertation argues that Buddhist philosophers did not make a radical distinction between epistemology and the psychological processes of cognition, at least not in the Western sense in which modern epistemology has drifted away from naturalist explanations. Proceeding though a detailed analysis of the textual material, this study concludes that the causal model of perceptual knowledge developed in the two works is i [...]
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Is there such a thing as free will in Buddhism? Do moral and mental forms of cultivation at the h... more Is there such a thing as free will in Buddhism? Do moral and mental forms of cultivation at the heart of Buddhist practice imply some notion of agency and responsibility? And if they do, how are we to think of those individuals who embark on the path to liberation or enlightenment, considering that all Buddhists give universal scope to the noself doctrine? Of course, Buddhism is not alone among the world’s great philosophical traditions in providing ample testimony for the possibility of cultivating to a high degree such cardinal virtues as nonviolence, wisdom, compassion, and a general spirit of tolerance. But it is unique among them in articulating a theory of action that, it seems, dispenses altogether with the notion of agent causation. Buddhists pursue what are unmistakably moral ends, but there is no stable self or agent who bears the accumulated responsibility for initiating those pursuits, and seemingly no normative framework against which some dispositions, thoughts, and ac...
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Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, Feb 12, 2020
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Books by Christian Coseru
Perceiving Reality examines the function of perception and its relation to attention, language, and discursive thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness-namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence. Coseru advances an innovative approach to Buddhist philosophy of mind in the form of phenomenological naturalism, and moves beyond comparative approaches to philosophy by emphasizing the continuity of concerns between Buddhist and Western philosophical accounts of the nature of perceptual content and the character of perceptual consciousness.
Papers by Christian Coseru
Perceiving Reality examines the function of perception and its relation to attention, language, and discursive thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness-namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence. Coseru advances an innovative approach to Buddhist philosophy of mind in the form of phenomenological naturalism, and moves beyond comparative approaches to philosophy by emphasizing the continuity of concerns between Buddhist and Western philosophical accounts of the nature of perceptual content and the character of perceptual consciousness.