Monima Chadha

Monima Chadha
Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Arts

Doctor of Philosophy

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40
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183
Citations

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
This paper aims to contribute to an integrated understanding of what goes missing in adverse meditation experiences and in cases of depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder is characterized by distressing alterations in, and sometimes the complete disappearance of, the 'I'-sense. This paper examines the nature of the 'I'-sense and wha...
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Mark Siderits has been one of the sharpest, clearest philosophers working on Buddhism in the last several decades. His work has also been strikingly wide-ranging. In this chapter, we will focus on two themes in his work that we find particularly interesting. First, Siderits makes a strong case that Abhidharma Buddhists promote mereological nihilism...
Article
Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argu...
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Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a...
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Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy presents a version of what is now often called “panprotopsychism.” The most pressing group of problems for the Abhidharma panprotopsychism, like all other panpsychist views, is what Seager calls “the combination problem.” There are at least three versions of the problem: the subject-combination problem; the quality-co...
Article
The Buddhist no-self and no-person revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a better structure that is motivated by the normative goal of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering. The revised structure, in turn, entails a major reconsideration of our ordinary everyday person-related concerns and practices and interpersonal attitudes, such as mor...
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The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity argum...
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The paper evaluates a well‐known argument for a self from episodic memories—that remembering that I did something or thought something involves experiencing the identity of my present self with the past doer or thinker. Shaun Nichols argues that although it phenomenologically appears to be the case that we are identical with the past self, no metap...
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The Buddhists philosophers put forward a revisionary metaphysics which lacks a “self” in order to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world. The first task in the paper is to answer the question: what is the “self” that the Buddhists are denying? To answer this question, I look at the Abhidharma arguments (as presented in...
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The Abhidharma Buddhist revisionary metaphysics aims to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks a self. The first part of the paper claims that the Abhidharma ‘no-self’ view can be plausibly interpreted as a no-ownership view, according to which there is no locus or subject of experience and thus no owner of...
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This paper defends the realist representationalist version of the Buddhist-Abhidharma account of consciousness. The account explains the intentionality and the phenomenality of conscious experiences by appealing to the doctrine of self-awareness. Concerns raised by Buddhist Mādhyamika philosophers about the compatibility of reflexive awareness and...
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This paper elucidates the Abhidharma attempt to revise our ordinary ways of thinking and our ordinary conceptual scheme in which the self (minimally conceived of as the referent of ‘I’) occupies a prime position. This revisionary metaphysics provides an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks such a self. The no-self th...
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This chapter considers two issues that have gained currency in contemporary philosophy because of the recent surge of liberal naturalist attitude that endeavours to place self, mind, consciousness and religious belief back into nature. The first issue, at the intersection of philosophy of religion and cognitive science, concerns the ubiquity and tr...
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In this paper I use the Naiyāyika distinction between determinate (conceptual or qualificative) and indeterminate (non-conceptual or nonqualificative) awareness to show why a causal-explanatory account of conceptual content in terms of non-conceptual content fails. The Naiyāyikas, like Peacocke and other contemporary philosophers, believe that non-...
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Presented here is the Yogācāra account of unity of consciousness, showing how it relates to contemporary philosophical accounts. Section 1 briefly charts the relevant Abhidharma background and the reasons that led the Yogācāra to the postulation of ālaya-vijnāna . Section 2 explains the contemporary formulation of the “unity of consciousness” probl...
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One of the major aims of this article is to provide the theoretical account of mindfulness provided by the systematic Abhidharma epistemology of conscious states. I do not claim to present the one true version of mindfulness, because there is not one version of it in Buddhism; in addition to the Abhidharma model, there is, for example, the nondual...
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Presented here are arguments for the novel and interesting Navya-Nyāya thesis that we can be perceptually acquainted with universals or properties (nominalist arguments will not be addressed directly: we start out with the assumption that there are universals!). The first section briefly explicates the Nyāya notion of universals and then states the...
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In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of imper...
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In this paper, I argue that some of the work to be done by the concept of self is done by the concept of mind in Buddhist philosophy. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on an account of memory and its ownership. The task of this paper is to analyse Vasubandhu’s heroic effort to defend the no-self doctrine against the Nyāya-Vaiśeikas in o...
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The paper argues that empirical work on Buddhist meditation has an impact on Buddhist epistemology, in particular their account of unity of consciousness. I explain the Buddhist account of unity of consciousness and show how it relates to contemporary philosophical accounts of unity of consciousness. The contemporary accounts of unity of consciousn...
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In this paper I revisit the early Nyāya argument for the existence of a self. In section 1, I reconstruct the argument in Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.10 as an argument from recognition following the interpretation in the Nyāyasūtra-Bhāya and the Nyāya-Vārttika. In Section 2, I reassess the plausibility of the Nyāya argument from memory/recognition in the Bhāya...
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The interest in an account of self-awareness derives from the fact that it aims to illuminate, if only partly, an essentially invisible subject of experience. A preliminary look at accounts of self-awareness, discussed in ancient Indian and Western theories, shows that the self is neither essentially nor exclusively an invisible subject. Theories o...
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In this paper we (i) identify the notion of ‘essentially non-conceptual content’ by critically analyzing the recent and contemporary debate about non-conceptual content, (ii) work out the basics of broadly Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content in relation to a corresponding theory of conceptual content, and then (iii) demonstrate one...
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In this paper I aim to situate the Naiyayika theory of perception in contemporary philosophy of mind. Following the ancients, I suggest we reconsider the taxonomy and the assumed interactions between kinds of perceptual content. This reclassification will lead us to reconsider some aspects of the Cartesian conception of mind that continue to influe...
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The overall goal of this paper is to offer an independent, empirical route to characterize the content on nonconceptual content. I pursue a recent move by Pylyshyn, a leading cognitive scientist and philosopher of mental representation, who focuses on empirical considerations in favor of nonconceptual representations. Pylyshyn proposes a minimalist...
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2007 by University of Hawai‘i Press 533 religions, but it clearly has no place within nontheistic religions. That is why Barry Whitney’s comprehensive bibliography on theodicy has so few entries relating to the doctrine of karma (Whitney 1993).3 Kaufman is not unaware of this problem, but states in response that ‘‘it would be a great mistake to ins...
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In a series of classic papers, Donald Davidson put forward an ingenious argument to challenge the ascription of minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidson's conclusions have been mercilessly demolished in the literature by cognitive ethologists, but none of them have directly addressed Davidson's argument. First, this paper is an attempt to elucidate...
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2006 by University of Hawai‘i Press 333 minate perception must have occurred at an earlier time. So, in effect, this comment questions the influential view with respect to nirvikalpaka pratyaks ˙ a, according to which it is a purely concept-free perception that the subject is necessarily unaware of. I argue that indeterminate perceptions involve di...
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2001 by University of Hawai‘i Press experiences are, at least potentially, objects of cognition or awareness. After all, the whole point of introducing the notion of the content of perceptual experiences is to explain a perceiver’s capacity to gain knowledge of perceived objects. This minimal claim is beefed up by the Nya ¯ ya philosophers by addin...

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