Taking Non-Conceptualism Back to Dharmakīrti
Date：Jan 6, 2022
Venue：(線上視訊)
Speaker：Amit Chaturvedi (香港大學哲學系助理教授)
Type：演講
講者：Amit Chaturvedi (香港大學哲學系助理教授)
題目：Taking Non-Conceptualism Back to Dharmakīrti (*已修改題目)
時間：2022/01/06 (四) 下午2:10-4:00
地點：(線上視訊)
主辦：政大佛教哲學研究中心
Abstract:
Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological, with the goalposts of the debate shifting according to one's prior assumptions about concepts and concept possession. This has left modern conceptualists and non-conceptualists struggling to define a position that is neither obviously false nor non-trivially true. To remedy this terminological impasse, and especially to rescue non-conceptualism from challenges posed by more refined conceptualist accounts, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function is necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go "back to Kant" to find the most defensible version of an essentialist content non-conceptualism. I propose instead that non-conceptualists go back even further to the 7th-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, so that they may not only find historical precedent for an essentialist content view, but also some better arguments in its favor. This essay reconstructs Dharmakīrti's essentialist non-conceptualism about the contents of conscious sensory representations and the refined theory of conceptualization that it presupposes. In particular, I examine his arguments from the proprietary phenomenology of sensory experience, the cognitive encapsulation of sensory processing, as well as the iconic format of sensory representations, and assess the strength of these arguments relative to their modern counterparts.
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