Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
I'm currently concerned with how pursuing epistemic ideals (or holding oneself to extremely high epistemic standards) has ethically transformative effects on the person pursuing these ideals. These effects are different in Platonic and in (Indian) Buddhist epistemological ethics, because their respective conceptions of ideal knowledge differ--and so the ideals pursued and how they are pursued differ. What I would most like to investigate in this area at the moment is how, in Vasubandhu, Dignāga and (if I must!) Dharmakīrti, pursuing ideal conventional knowledge fits into this picture. Since the standards, norms and ideals of conventional knowledge are so different from those of prajñā, what does pursuing conventional knowledge do to and for us, ethically--if anything? Is it just a useful but external means towards attaining transformative knowledge of reality as it is? Is it a necessary means, or is there no good reason for thinking conventional knowledge is the only means to attain ultimate cognition? Are there any character-forming aspects to pursuing inferential/conventional knowledge? Or is it just important pragmatically -- for achieving given practical ends, and for responding to arguments by non-Buddhists or navigating disputes between Buddhists -- and those who can avoid spending too much time pursuing ideal conceptual cognition would be better off doing so?
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
Buddhist ethics can be seen to hold up a certain epistemic ideal—knowledge of reality as it is—as that at which we ought to aim, if we would be free from suffering. It is thus a fundamentally epistemological and idealist ethics. Dignāga codifies the nature of this epistemic ideal in his pramāṇa-theory, which argues there are exactly two forms of valid cognition and only one of them cognises things as they are. By considering how a conception of ideal knowledge embeds certain values and virtues (but not others), I wish to set out the expected effects on character of striving for, and attaining the primary epistemic ideal of knowing reality as it is. I then shall ask what the ethical effects are, if any, of pursuing or attaining the secondary form of valid cognition, anumāṇa, in pursuit of which one is held to quite different norms and values.