Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive Scientific Philosophy of Mind

Winner of the 2013 Toshihide Numata Book Prize Through a careful exploration of the philosophical prblems 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 intentionalityfact 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-millenium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much as the heart of present-day philosophy.