Brains, Buddhas, And Believing

Through a careful exploration of the philosophical problems commonly faced by the seventh-century Indian Buddhist thinker Dharmakirti and twenty-first-century philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett, Dan Arnold seeks to advance an understanding of both first-millennium Indian arguments and modern debates in philosophy of mind. The issues center on what modern philosophers have called intentionality--the fact that mental events are about (or mean, or represent) other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through the arguments of Dharmakirti and some of his contemporaneous Indian critics, as well as Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, Arnold shows how seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of present-day philosophy.