ABSTRACT

There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers beginning with Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an unfounded illusion. In this paper, I present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s ‘neither-one-nor-many argument’ against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning is driven by a set of implicit questions concerning the nature of and relation between consciousness and its intentional object. These questions not only set the agenda for centuries of intra-Buddhist debate on the topic, but they are also questions to which any defender of unified consciousness or a simple subject of experience arguably owes responses.

摘要

有一个共同的推理思路，即假设意识体验的现象统一是基于一个类似心灵的简单主体。相反，从斯里古普塔（七至八世纪）开始的中观佛教哲学家认为，任何一种心智单纯都是不连贯的，因此在形而上学上是不可能的。由于缺乏任何统一的原则，意识体验的现象统一反而是一种毫无根据的幻觉。在本文中，我对斯里古普塔反对心智简单的“非一也非多论证”进行了分析，并展示了他的推理路线是如何由一系列关于意识及其意向对象的本质和关系的隐含问题驱动的。 。这些问题不仅为几个世纪以来佛教内部关于这个话题的辩论设定了议程，