The No-Self Teaching and Emergentist Personhood

The Buddhist no-self teaching opposes the view that a human being is (or has) a nonphysical ātman as a persisting substrate, and in its place offers a nondualist account of human beings. How should this teaching of “selfless persons” be understood? In Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Princeton, 2022), philosopher Jay Garfield argues that the Buddhist no-self teaching is best understood in a nominalist way. Here, a person’s name refers to no entity in the world but is merely a conventional way of thinking and speaking. In this paper, I argue against this reductive account and recommend instead an emergentist account of personhood. On an emergentist account, a person’s name refers to an entity in the world with novel powers not possessed even partially by its constituent parts (e.g., powers of subjectivity and agency). This paper debates the no-self teaching in light of contemporary philosophy and neuroscience.