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i

A Mirror Is for Reflection

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iii

A Mirror Is
for Reflection
Understanding Buddhist Ethics

Edited by

JAKE H. DAVIS

1
iv

3
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v

To all my teachers

Imāya Pariyattiyā Ācariye Pūjemi

vi
vi

Contents

Foreword: Cross-​Cultural Philosophy and

the Moral Project—Owen Flanagan xi

Acknowledgments xix

Contributors xxi

Introduction—​Jake H. Davis 1

PART ONE:   Buddhist Ethics and Western Categories

1. “It’s Ethics, Jim, but Not as We Know It”: Reflections on the

Absence of Moral Philosophy in Buddhism—​Damien Keown 17

2. The Nature of a Buddhist Path—​B ronwyn Finnigan 33

3. Buddhist Moral Thought and Western Moral Philosophy—​

Christopher W. Gowans 53

PART TWO:   Constructing Buddhist Ethics

4. Zen Buddhism and the Space of Ethics—​J in Y. Park 73

5. Buddhist Ethics: A Perspective—​G raham Priest 92

6. Breaking Good: Moral Agency, Neuroethics, and the Spontaneity

of Compassion—​C hristian Coseru 109
vi

viii Contents

PART THREE:   Karma and Rebirth

7. Modern and Traditional Understandings of Karma—​

Charles Goodman 131

8. Buddhism without Reincarnation? Examining the Prospects

of a “Naturalized” Buddhism—​Jan Westerhoff 146

9. The Problems and Promise of Karma from an Engaged

Buddhist Perspective—​S allie B. King 166

PART FOUR:   Mindfulness, Memory, and Virtue

10. Ethical Reading and the Ethics of Forgetting and Remembering—​

Sara McClintock 185

11. Mindfulness and Ethics: Attention, Virtue, and Perfection—​

Jay L. Garfield 203

12. “When You Know for Yourselves”: Mindfulness, Wisdom,

and the Qualities of Heart—​Jake H. Davis 223

PART FIVE:   Intention and Action

13. The Dynamics of Intention, Freedom, and Habituation according

to Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya—​K arin L. Meyers 239

14. What Do Buddhists Think about Free Will?—​R iccardo Repetti 257

15. Buddhist Reductionist Action Theory—​M ark Siderits 276

ix

Contents ix

PART SIX:   Politics, Anger, and Equanimity

16. The Inherent Dignity of Empty Persons—​C hristopher Kelley 297

17. Ethics without Justice: Eliminating the Roots of Resentment—​

Amber Carpenter 315

18. Equanimity in Relationship: Responding to Moral Ugliness—​

Emily McRae 336

Index 353
x
xi

Foreword
Cross-​C ultural Philosophy and
the Moral Project

Owen Flanagan

THIS SPLENDID VOLUME responds to two pressing concerns. The first, which is
mainly of concern to Anglophone philosophers, especially those interested in
comparative philosophy, is What exactly is the nature of Buddhist ethics? What
kind of ethics is it? Is it a purely religious theory, where the real reward for
goodness is otherworldly, better rebirths, eventually nirvana? Or is it a perfect
instance of or model for a secular ethics, a practical way of being in this world
for everyone, as the 14th Dalai Lama says it is? If Buddhism is a kind of secular
ethics, is it a virtue theory, or an ethics of duty, or some kind of consequen-
tialism? Or is it something entirely new and different on the face of the earth?
The second pressing concern is What sort of resources for living good human
lives does Buddhism provide to the denizens of WEIRD cultures, for Western, edu-
cated, industrialized, rich, and democratic peoples? Sometimes ethical traditions
possess internal resources to improve or fix themselves; at other times a tradi-
tion will benefit from looking outside itself to get good new ideas or rediscover
insights it has lost. Can Buddhism play that role for Abrahamic peoples or for
their secular children of the Enlightenment? I’ll say a few brief words about
each topic.

1.
What kind of ethical theory does Buddhism provide? Buddhism presents a
paradox. On the one hand, Buddhism is attractive because Buddhists are
seen in the popular imagination as good, better than average in the morality
xi

xii Foreword

department, practicing what they preach and having high standards of moral
excellence. On the other hand, Buddhism doesn’t theorize ethics in anything
like the systematic way that it is theorized in multiple Western traditions,
both sacred and secular—​in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in Aristotle
and Stoicism, and in the modern consequentialist and deontological tradi-
tions. It isn’t that Buddhism isn’t excellent at providing pictures of exem-
plars, like the Buddha and bodhisattvas on the path, and saying that they
exemplify the four unsurpassable virtues of compassion, loving-​kindness,
sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It is. And it isn’t as if Buddhism isn’t
forthcoming with ethical advice. There are precepts (Don’t gossip, take
intoxicants, make weapons); there is the noble eightfold path; and there are
amazing taxonomies of wholesome and unwholesome states of the heart-​
mind. What is said to be lacking is a detailed philosophical map that explains
how exactly a metaphysic which teaches that impermanence and suffering
are basic and ubiquitous, that I am not what I think I am, not a permanent
or semipermanent self (anātman), and that emphasizes the dangers of false
belief and a grasping ego, as well as practice in mindfulness and medita-
tion, connects these insights and practices to an ethical vision of maximal
compassion and loving-​kindness. How exactly, if it does, does Buddhist met-
aphysics provide a ground for morality? Does Buddhism, which is atheistic
by Abrahamic standards, provide a satisfactory answer to the question Why
be moral? If I really am no-​self (and empty), why care about anything? Who
is there to care? What would it even mean for a no-​self to care? What sorts
of reasons does Buddhism give for awakening bodhicitta, the wellspring of
compassion, and for taking the bodhisattva’s vows? Is it because developing
compassion might alleviate my own suffering, if anything will? Or is it that
becoming maximally compassionate is good in itself? Or it is for some other
set of reasons altogether?
If Buddhist ethics is grounded in Buddhist metaphysics, and not in the
utterly contingent features of the way of life of early Buddhists, or in the com-
mands of the God of the Abrahamic traditions, or in heaven’s mandate (tian-​
ming), as is Confucian ethics, or in principles of pure reason, then a different
kind of worry arises.1 Suppose one doesn’t accept a metaphysic of no-​self
(anātman), but instead thinks there is a self—​a person, ātman, a Cartesian
soul, a transcendental ego—​and that its fate is really important, so important
that any ethics worth considering ought to make it possible for the maximum
number of selves to flourish. Is such a person, a philosophically different kind
of person, for example, a child of the European Enlightenment, ineligible to
be a Buddhist, ethically speaking? Or is there a way for such a person to be
xi

Foreword xiii

a Buddhist since Buddhists sometimes say there are no selves but there are
persons. And what does this even mean?
This much is clear insofar as the tradition says it again and again: A person
who understands or grasps the Buddhist metaphysics of no-​self will want to
be, or have reason to be, less selfish. Indeed if the individual really under-
stands or grasps no-​self, they will want to be a bodhisattva, to be maximally
compassionate and loving-​kind.
On the surface Buddhism looks as if its no-​self metaphysics logically or
practically entails moral unselfishness, some kind of other-​directed, altru-
istic morality. If so, there would be a structural isomorphism with Aristotle’s
virtue theory, Christian ethics, consequentialism, and deontology, each of
which finds a warrant for the ethical life in features of persons, human ­social
life, human reason, or God’s nature, reason, and will. The difference is that
the latter traditions work out the details of the connection between the meta-
physics of morals and the demands of morality in elaborate detail, and each
extant theory has taken it upon itself to develop a brand name that its fans
proudly recite. “I am a consequentialist.” “I am a Kantian.” “I am a virtue
theorist.” Pretty much every side would like to claim that Buddhism is a va-
riety or version of their favored theory. But Buddhism doesn’t easily fit into
any mold.
There is another aspect to the perplexity that is Buddhism. Each brand of
modern moral theory has taken it upon itself to explain how a person who
abides the relevant theory would perceive, feel, think, and act by developing a
distinctive moral psychology. Virtue theorists provide elaborate taxonomies of
the psychological dispositions, courage, honesty, kindness, forgiveness, and
the like, which taken together constitute character. Some virtue theorists say
virtues are necessary for goodness; a few—​perhaps only the Stoics—​that they
are sufficient. Others, some virtue theorists and members of other teams,
worry that virtues are too much like habits, too conventional, prone to getting
stale, and reflecting whatever moral order is in place to be up to the task of
morality, and thus that humans will need to consciously govern themselves, at
least some of the time, by reflective principles, such as the principle of utility
or the categorical imperative. Again the question arises: What is the Buddhist
stance on whether the right equipment is a constellation of virtues, or a ge-
neral principle—​End suffering whenever and wherever one can—​or a set of
metaphysical beliefs (impermanence, no-​ self, dependent origination, and
emptiness), or trance-​like, hallucinatory states that might motivate human
kindness? Where in Buddhist moral psychology is reason, what Aristotle
called phronesis, Confucians call zhi, and psychologists call System 2?
xvi

xiv Foreword

Ironically the theorizing in ethics that is commonplace in the

Anglophone academy has become so elaborate that ethics as practiced and
taught at the highest precincts in analytic philosophy is often mostly meta-​
ethics, not normative ethics, which the parents were hoping their kids were
getting a dose of. The emphasis is not on being good but on what various
traditions have thought being good involved, or what terms like good, bad,
right, and wrong mean as ordinary people, philosophers, and theologians
use them. When philosophers say they are utilitarian or Kantian or a virtue
theorist (or say they “work on” any one of them), it is 100 percent indeter-
minate whether they abide, or even try to abide, the relevant moral theory.
Nothing is even implied about whether they care about being good. All that
can be surmised is that they think that if there is something like a single
rational moral conception, this, their favored theory—​or something in its
vicinity—​would be it.
So another way to put the paradox is that Buddhism is terrific at present-
ing something like a first-​order normative theory, depicting what a morally
excellent life is or would be like, and even sometimes sketching or providing
a sense of how its metaphysics connects with its ethics but it fails to provide
a meta-​ethics. Buddhists don’t declare whether they are moral realists or fic-
tionalists. Which is it? And outsiders might say, and have said, that doctrines
such as no-​self and emptiness could as easily be taken to ground nihilism
and hedonism about moral value as the moral seriousness of the bodhisattva.
So which is it? There is also this concern: Any morality worth taking seri-
ously better provide a robust analysis of free will if it is going to make sense
of practices of holding people responsible, punishing people, and so on. But
Buddhism is silent on the topic of free will. There is at present a lively debate
about whether this lack of theorizing about free will is in fact a good or bad
feature of Buddhism, about whether Buddhists missed something about free
will or whether we made a really big two-​centuries-​long mistake in thinking
there is or needs to be such a thing as free will.
The paradox of Buddhism seeming to be ethically admirable but not forth-
coming on the nature and structure of its ethical theory cannot be explained
by the fact that Buddhism is generally atheoretical. It isn’t. In fact Buddhist
metaphysics is of great interest to mainstream contemporary analytic philoso-
phers precisely because it contains virtuoso theorizing about the nature of
reality, truth, knowledge, and the self.
Overall the demand to speak up and declare what kind of theory Buddhist
ethics is, what kind of meta-​ethics Buddhist meta-​ethics is or would be, are
demands made outside the Buddhist tradition in terms set by dominant tradi-
tions in Western academic ethics. That is not a problem in itself so long as
xv

Foreword xv

Buddhism, really the Buddhisms, can speak in their own terms, and so long
as the possibility that Buddhism is a sui generis theory, or perhaps no kind of
theory at all—​just a beautiful and worthy way of living—​remains open.

2.
I now turn briefly to the second issue: Can we learn anything practically from
Buddhism, even if we accept that it is not theorized in familiar ways, and pos-
sibly even if we make a considered judgment that its metaphysics is alien and
unacceptable to us? Can Buddhism, or any other deeply philosophical form of
life that is not ours, provide practical resources for criticizing and improving
our ethics, for finding ways to be better than we are in our own moral project?
Imagine for a moment that we agree Buddhism has elements that look
like elements of familiar virtue theories. It does. The fact remains that the
virtues are not the same as one sees on other lists of virtues. Karuṇā (compas-
sion) is not the same as Aristotle’s generosity, or Confucian ren, or Christian
agape or caritas, or Hume’s fellow-​feeling or benevolence, each of which is
different from the others. Among other things the scope of karuṇā differs. It
is compassion for all sentient beings.
Second, most moral forms of life address the question of how to deal with
conflicts. Confucius says that a son covers for his father when the father has
done wrong. So filial piety trumps the demands of law in extremis. But benev-
olence trumps propriety for Confucians. What do Buddhists say when there
is a conflict between compassion and justice? Some will say that compassion
is always the trump for Buddhists. Others will complain that justice as fair-
ness is undertheorized in Buddhism. To which still others reply that justice
as fairness is overtheorized by us, and that if compassion were highly devel-
oped, there would be much less need for what Hume called “the cautious
jealous virtue of justice.” This, I claim, is a really worthwhile conversation
to have because it encourages reflection on one’s own economy of virtues
and its strengths and weaknesses. Is it better than merely internal reflection?
Sometimes, possibly often, yes.
Buddhists emphasize as ground-​level values both compassion for all sentient
beings and nonviolence. Are these morally attractive? Do Buddhists give good
reasons for anyone to practice these virtues? If the answer is yes, then we have
reason to teach our children these values. Buddhists also say, as did the Stoics
in our own tradition, that anger is the most dangerous emotion. Like the Stoics,
and unlike Aristotelians, Buddhists are skeptical that either personal or political
anger can be contained, and they offer practices to mitigate, possibly eliminate
it, without at the same time giving up on the projects of demanding economic
xvi

xvi Foreword

and social justice. Could this be for us? Would we be better, by our own lights,
if we worked on personal and political anger in ways Buddhists recommend?
The point is that as soon as we charitably enter into this space of consid-
ering other forms of moral life, we are immediately confronted with things
to think about, challenges to our normal ways of thinking about the content,
scope, order, and sufficiency of our moral beliefs, virtues, and principles. If
upon critical examination our own values and practices look better than the
alternatives, then they gain a modest amount of moral confirmation. If they
look weaker than we originally thought, we have reason to make adjustments.
In a volume celebrating his life and work on the occasion of his eight-
ieth birthday, Alasdair MacIntyre offers this assessment of the overall state of
moral philosophy in the twentieth century:

On the view that I have found myself compelled to take, contempo-

rary academic moral philosophy turns out to be seriously defective as a
form of rational inquiry. How so? First, the study of moral philosophy
has become divorced from the study of morality or rather of moralities
and by so doing has distanced itself from practice. We do not expect se-
rious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never
studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have
never studied law. But there is not even a hint of a suggestion that
courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of so-
ciology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in
moral philosophy . . . Yet without such courses no adequate sense of
the varieties of moral possibility can be acquired. One remains impris-
oned by one’s upbringing. (MacIntyre, 2013, p. 31)

I write in hope that the 21st century will be an age in which we take for granted
a certain kind of openness to the varieties of moral possibility, which will in-
volve engaging in more cross-​cultural philosophy in order not only to un-
derstand others but also to actively learn from others. We need not worry
that such openness will result in complete loss of moral confidence. There is
much agreement among the great world philosophies about what makes for
moral excellence. So exposure to a greater variety of moral possibility need not
be viewed as an exercise designed to have us completely change our identity
or distinctive form of life. It does invite us to yield our unwarranted, cocky
confidence that we have discovered the right way of living and being good. We
haven’t. Other traditions, Buddhism in the present case, have a great deal to
contribute to the moral project even as non-​Buddhists conceive it.
xvi

Foreword xvii

Note
1. I take it more or less for granted here that Buddhist ethics is grounded in Buddhist
metaphysics. But I am aware of another possibility: that Buddhist metaphysics is,
as it were, an ex post facto attempt to find a deep justification for the Buddhist
form of life. I always ask lay Buddhists in East and Southeast Asia when I visit
what no-​self (anātman) means to them. They almost all—​like 90%—​say it means:
Don’t be selfish! I take up this topic in Flanagan (2016).

References
Flanagan, O. (2016). The geography of morals: Varieties of moral possibility. New York:
Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, A. C. (2013). On having survived the academic moral philosophy of the
twentieth century. In Fran O’Rourke (Ed.), What happened in and to moral philos-
ophy in the twentieth century? Philosophical essays in honor of Alasdair MacIntyre
(pp. 17–​34). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
xvi
xi

Acknowledgments

acknowledges the following: Christopher Kelley for

T H E E D I T O R G R AT E F U L LY
his ongoing support and collaboration, as well as for his work leading the or-
ganization of the conference at Columbia University that served as a seed for
this volume; the John Templeton Foundation and the Columbia University
Religion Department for their generous support of that conference; Routledge
Press and the Thai Journal of Buddhist Studies for permission to use previously
published material; and Katie Murphy for crafting the index.
x
xxi

Contributors

Amber Carpenter is an associate professor at Yale-​NUS. Her primary back-

ground is in ancient Greek philosophy, where her published work focuses on
the ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics of Plato. An Einstein Fellowship at
the Einstein Forum (Berlin) enabled her to pursue work in Indian Buddhist
philosophy, and her book on the subject appeared in 2014. She coordinates,
with Rachael Wiseman, the Integrity Project (integrityproject.org).

Christian Coseru is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at

the College of Charleston. He works in the fields of philosophy of mind, phe-
nomenology, and cross-​cultural philosophy, especially Indian and Buddhist
philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy and cognitive science. He is
the author of numerous articles and of the book Perceiving Reality: Consciousness,
Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press,
2012). He is currently completing a book on the intersections between percep-
tual and affective consciousness, tentatively entitled Sense, Self-​Awareness, and
Sensibility.

Jake H. Davis is a postdoctoral associate with the Virtues of Attention project

at New York University. He has taught at Brown University and at the City
College of New York, and holds a PhD in philosophy from CUNY Graduate
Center, with an interdisciplinary concentration in cognitive science, as well as
an MA in philosophy from the University of Hawai`i. He has authored and
coauthored articles at the intersection of Buddhist philosophy, moral philos-
ophy, and cognitive science, drawing on his textual, meditative, and monastic
training in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of Burma (Myanmar), including
work as an interpreter and teacher at meditation retreats.

Bronwyn Finnigan is a continuing lecturer and deputy head of the School

of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Her research interest
focuses on philosophy of action, mind, and epistemology as they bear on
ethics and ethical agency in both Western and Asian philosophical traditions
xxi

xxii Contributors

(particularly Buddhist philosophy). She has published several articles in

prominent journals and is a coauthor of Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in
Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Jay L. Garfield is the Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and a professor
of philosophy at Smith College, a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy
at the Harvard Divinity School, a professor of philosophy at the University of
Melbourne, and an adjunct professor of philosophy at Central University of
Tibetan Studies. He has written and edited a number of books in philosophy
in Buddhist studies. His most recent are Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness (with
the Cowherds; Oxford University Press, 2015) and Engaging Buddhism: Why It
Matters to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Charles Goodman is an associate professor in the Philosophy Department

and the Department of Asian and Asian-​American Studies at Binghamton
University. He is the author of several published articles on Buddhist phi-
losophy, ethics, and applied ethics, and of Consequences of Compassion: An
Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009).
His second book, The Training Anthology of Śāntideva: A Translation of the
Śikṣā-​samuccaya, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Christopher W. Gowans is a professor of philosophy and the chair of the

Philosophy Department at Fordham University. He is the author of numerous
articles in moral philosophy as well as Innocence Lost: An Examination of
Inescapable Moral Wrongdoing (Oxford University Press, 1994), Philosophy of
the Buddha (Routledge, 2003), and Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction
(Routledge, forthcoming).

Christopher Kelley holds a PhD from Columbia University. He has taught

at Columbia, the New School, and Brooklyn College. He is a cofounder of
the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy and served as the lead
organizer for two conferences on Buddhist philosophy, Mind and Reality
(Columbia University, 2006) and Contemporary Perspectives on Buddhist
Ethics (Columbia University, 2011).

Damien Keown is Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Ethics at University of

London, Goldsmiths. His interests include both theoretical and applied as-
pects of Buddhist ethics, with an emphasis on contemporary moral problems.
He has authored and edited numerous publications, including The Nature
of Buddhist Ethics (Palgrave, 1992), Buddhism and Bioethics (Palgrave, 1995),
Contemporary Buddhist Ethics (Routledge, 2000), Buddhism: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Buddhist Ethics: A Very Short
xxi

Contributors xxiii

Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is also a founding coeditor

of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.

Sallie B. King is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Religion at James Madison

University. She is the author of Buddha Nature (SUNY Press, 1991), Journey in
Search of the Way: The Spiritual Autobiography of Satomi Myodo (SUNY Press,
1993), Being Benevolence: The Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism (University of
Hawai`i Press, 2005), and Socially Engaged Buddhism (University of Hawai`i
Press, 2009). She is a coeditor (with Christopher S. Queen) of Engaged
Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (SUNY Press, 1996) and
(with Paul O. Ingram) of The Sound of Liberating Truth: Buddhist-​Christian
Dialogues in Honor of Frederick J. Streng (Curzon Press, 1999).

Sara McClintock is an associate professor of religion at Emory University,

where she teaches courses in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist nar-
rative traditions, interpretation theory, and Indian philosophy. She is the
author of Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason: Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla
on Rationality, Argumentation, and Religious Authority (Wisdom Publications,
2010), an exploration at the intersection of religion, philosophy, and rhetoric
in the writings of two eighth-​century Indian Buddhist philosophers. She is
currently at work on a book on Indian Buddhist epistemological theories of
the production of truth and reality through the interaction of conceptual, dis-
cursive, and material processes.

Emily McRae is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New

Mexico. She specializes in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, ethics, and femi-
nism. Much of her work is devoted to exploring the relationship between the
emotions, morality, and contemplative practices such as meditation. She has
published articles on emotions and ethics in Asian philosophies, particularly
Buddhism, in American Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly,
Philosophy East and West, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Journal of Religious Ethics,
and Sophia. Her current projects include papers on the role of empathy in
Tibetan Buddhism, the moral psychology of Indo-​Tibetan Buddhist ethics,
and the Buddhist resources for understanding and responding to the psy-
chology of oppression.

Karin L. Meyers is an assistant professor and the director of the MA program

in Buddhist studies at Kathmandu University’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at
Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, where she teaches courses in Pali, Indian,
and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist history, and religious studies.
Her research interests include free will and intention in Buddhism, Buddhist
xvi

xxiv Contributors

theories of path and mind, and the relationship between contemplative prac-
tice and philosophical reasoning.

Jin Y. Park is an associate professor of philosophy and religion and the di-
rector of the Asian Studies Program at American University. Park special-
izes in East Asian Zen and Huayan Buddhism, Buddhist ethics, East-​West
comparative philosophy, and Buddhist encounters with modernity in East
Asia. She is the author of Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan and the
Possibility of Buddhist Postmodern Ethics (Lexington Books, 2008); the trans-
lator of Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (University of Hawai`i Press, 2014);
the editor of Buddhisms and Deconstructions (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2006) and Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism (SUNY Press, 2010); and a co-
editor of Merleau-​Ponty and Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2009).

Graham Priest is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate

Center, City University of New York. He is also Boyce Gibson Professor
Emeritus at the University of Melbourne and Arché Professorial Fellow at the
University of St. Andrews. He works in many areas, including metaphysics,
the history of philosophy, and Asian philosophy, but is best known for his
work on philosophical logic, especially paraconsistent logic. He is the author
of over 200 papers and books, including In Contradiction (2nd edition, Oxford
University Press, 2006), Beyond the Limits of Thought (2nd edition, Oxford
University Press, 2002), Towards Non-​Being (Oxford University Press, 2005),
Doubt Truth to Be a Liar (Oxford University Press, 2006), Introduction to Non-​
Classical Logic (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2008), and One
(Oxford University Press, 2014).

Riccardo Repetti is an associate professor of philosophy at Kingsborough

Community College, CUNY. His publications focus on free will in analytic
philosophy and in Buddhism. He is interested in meditation, consciousness,
self, agency, and responsibility. Author of The Counterfactual Theory of Free
Will: A Genuinely Deterministic Form of Soft Determinism (LAP Lambert, 2010),
he has published articles on the ethics of teaching philosophy, contemplative
pedagogy, and Buddhism and free will, and is currently writing a monograph
and editing an anthology, both on Buddhist perspectives on free will. Rick is
also a multiple-​decades practitioner and teacher of yoga and meditation.

Mark Siderits recently retired from the Philosophy Department of Seoul

National University, where he taught Asian and comparative philosophy. His
research interests lie in the intersection between classical Indian philosophy
on the one hand, and analytic metaphysics and philosophy of language on
the other. Among his more recent publications are Buddhism as Philosophy
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Contributors xxv

(Ashgate/​Hackett, 2007), Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty

Persons (Ashgate, 2003), and, together with Shōryū Katsura, Nāgārjuna’s
Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Wisdom Publications, 2013). He has
also edited several collections of work on Indian and analytic philosophy.

Jan Westerhoff is an associate professor of religious ethics at the University

of Oxford; a fellow and tutor in theology and religion at Lady Margaret Hall,
University of Oxford; and a research associate at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London. His publications include
Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka (Oxford University Press, 2009), The Dispeller of
Disputes: Nagarjuna’s Vigrahavyavartani (Oxford University Press, 2010), and
Reality: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011). His research
concentrates on systematic aspects of ancient Indian philosophy, especially
Madhyamaka.
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A Mirror Is for Reflection

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