The Hand

The following excerpts are from Raymond Tallis’ marvelous book, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being (2003), the first work in a trilogy, the other two volume of which I hope to introduce at a later date.

“The burden of this book is that the special relationship we indubitably enjoy with respect to the material universe…is to a very great extent the result of the special virtues of our hands. Whether or not we sit at the right hand of God in the order of things, our belief that we do, and the evidence apparently justifying that belief, owes much to seemingly unimportant facts as that the thumb has uniquely free movements. [….] This hand—this professor of grasping, seizing, pulling, plucking, picking, pinching, pressing, patting, poking, prodding, fumbling, squeezing, crushing, throttling, punching, rubbing, scratching, groping, stroking, caressing, fingering, drumming, shaping, lifting, flicking, catching, throwing, and much else besides—is the master tool of human life.”—Raymond Tallis

“The origin of the sense of agency has been attributed to the special powers and virtues of the human hand. This organ makes possible the transformation of our relationship to our own bodies into an instrumental one, as opposed to one of ‘dumb’ suffering. [….] What we are proposing is that the greatly enhanced freedom of choice, with an expanded manipulative indeterminacy constrained by a closer respect for the manipulandum, and an intensifed self-addressing through ‘meta-fingering’ took hominids over a threshold that other primates were near—to progressive instrumentalisation of the body and the creation of tools and the instrumentalisation of the relationship to the world (and a world as a world of objective presences)—and that this ultimately led to the difference between the life that beasts live—suffer, endure, experience—to the life that humans lead. Just as the genius of manipulation was built on the genius of reaching, so opposability built on reaching and independent finger movement, to create the very special constrained, manipulative freedom that makes the hand a tool, the human body instrumental and the human being an agent. Opposability put the last coping stone in place that permitted humans to remain above nature long enough to create their own place outside of nature. By this means we moved from prehension to apprehension to comprehension. Through the gap that is opened up between the body and itself, a subject-object gap created in the first instance by the exploring, active hand, the distinctively human world enters the world of organic nature.”—Raymond Tallis

Legal Personhood for “Autonomous Artificial Agents”

I wanted to alert our readers to an intriguing online symposium that has begun today at Concurring Opinions (although the announced schedule was February 14—16) on Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White’s book, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). I’ve yet to read the book (it’s on order). In the announcement to the symposium I made a few preliminary comments (as did the other longstanding CO commenter, A.J. Sutter), to the last of which Professor Chopra responded as follows:

“Patrick: I think there might be one fundamental point of disagreement between us might be my refusal to consider human intentionality and morality some sort of singularity in the natural order, the attainment of which lies entirely beyond non-carbon based entities.” [….]

This is indeed a fundamental point of disagreement. I’m considerably more than a wee bit concerned when concepts and categories intrinsic to morality, ontology (if not metaphysics), and psychology (consciousness, intentionality, autonomy, moral agency, and so on) are taken from the domain of the human (and, to a limited extent, nonhuman) animal world and applied to the realm of “artificial intelligence” (AI) technology. In other words, their natural domain of application (pun intended) does, in fact, rule out both literal and metaphorical extension into the realm of “non-carbon based entities.”

Without going into the details or possible arguments, we might find it tempting or at least easier to extend our moral and psychological concepts and categories beyond the human and nonhuman animal world into the domain of AI technology if our understanding of the mind (including consciousness and intentionality) is beholden to metaphors, models, or pictures that are currently fashionable in some quarters of philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. One such model comes courtesy of “cognitive naturalism,” an “interdisciplinary amalgam of psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and linguistics,” the central hypothesis of which is “that thought can be understood in terms of computational procedures on mental representations,” dubbed by the philosopher Paul Thagard as CRUM, for Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind. On this model, mental representations are like (or virtually identical to) data structures and the mind’s putative “computational procedures” are algorithms, and thus “thinking” is tantamount to running programs. The current and fairly uncritical fascination with the neurosciences, evolutionary psychology, and reductionist theories in philosophy of mind together contribute to an intellectual climate and disciplinary inquiries that directly or implicitly sanction or legitimate the legal endeavor to ascribe moral autonomy and ethical agency to technological programs and devices like robots.

I’m not claiming that these new technologies don’t raise novel moral and legal problems for which we may need to craft a fairly new conceptual (including legal) vocabulary. But such an enterprise would necessarily eschew simply importing existing moral and psychological principles, predicates, and concepts (as presuppositions, assumptions, or axioms) into the world of technology and law. And such an enterprise will have to avoid, at the very least, the siren call of mind-brain reductionism. In other words, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity are decisive (i.e. basic or fundamental) properties or features or characteristics of our mental life which rule out the plausibility of reductionist or eliminativist “hypotheses.” (In Daniel Robinson’s words: ‘It cannot even be said that they are working hypotheses, because a working hypothesis is one that will rise or fall on the basis of relevant evidence, and there is no “evidence” as such that could tell for or against “hypotheses” of this sort.’)

I hope to write more on this topic in the near future.

*There is now a post up by James Grimmelmann: here.

Further Reading:

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.
• Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson, “Minds, Brains, and Norms” (July 10, 2009). Neuroethics. Forthcoming. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1432476.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. “Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience” (February 6, 2009). University of Illinois Law Review, 2010. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1338763. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1338763.
• Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
• Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Putnam, Hilary. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Limits of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.
• Thagard, Paul. Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
• Travis, Charles. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 ed.
• Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Andy Warhol: The Artist as Philosopher or Businessman?

“My assertion at one point that Warhol was closest to a philosophical genius of any twentieth-century artist very nearly cost me Robert[] [Motherwell’s] friendship, and he pointed out to me that Warhol rarely said more in front of a painting than ‘Wow.’ But that of course is just my point: the philosophy was in and through the work, and not in what was said in front of the work. There is in my view a great deal in Hegel’s belief that art and philosophy are deeply affined—that they are, in his heavy idiom, two moments of Absolute Spirit. The wonder of Warhol is that he did philosophy as art, in the sense that he defined false boundaries by crossing them. Since no philosopher of art in 1964 recognized the kind of problems Warhol raised, he could not have had a philosophical language in which to explain it. So, perhaps, ‘Wow.’ [….] Since at least Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo (and other) cartons at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1964, I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art. [….] Indeed, I believe it was among Warhol’s chief contributions to the history of art that he brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.”—Arthur C. Danto

“For Warhol all art is commercial, which says more about the power of commerce than it does about the power of art. It took little more than half a century to undo Kandinsky’s idea that art was the last bastion of spirituality against materialism. [….] The artist was once thought of as sacred—he had a spark of God’s creativity in him—but Warhol’s artist is a businessman, profaning everything sacred and creative by putting a price on it, as Marx said. [….] Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamor that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential costs. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social system with no existential resonance. ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This consumate statesman of postmodern nihilism suggests the reason that art has lost faith in itself: it has lost emotional and existential depth, and sees no reason to have any. [....] Some interpreters have thought Warhol was deliberately cynical, or at least ironical, but I think his seductive equation of money and art—not to say permanent confusion of their terms—was dead serious and honest. It is ruthlessly cool, in a world where ‘coolness’ is the aesthetic…. Cool is the way to be both indifferent to commerce and commercial at the same time.”—Donald Kuspit

Images: By Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol respectively.

The End of Art

The following is a synoptic introduction to Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

This book provides a brilliant and devastating diagnosis of what ails post-aesthetic or postmodern art: its failure to facilitate an aesthetic contemplative alternative to the “ugliness and injustice” of our social world (failing to realize that beauty is the ‘ultimate protest’ against ugliness); its constitutional inability to provide a “psychic space” that permits or encourages autonomy (wherein the ethical is inherent in aesthetics and beauty); its penchant for the tragicomic or farcical wherein the work of art, constructed by the would-be celebrity-artist, is merely a “psychosocial construction defined by its institutional identity, entertainment value, and commercial panache.”

Kuspit defines the “post-aesthetic” character of art as having abandoned the “heroic idea of the human potential of aesthetic experience,” which includes the “further[ing] [of] personal autonomy and critical freedom.” Postmodern “art” has become “consummately commercial,” causing the artist, the public, the patron and even the connoisseur to confuse or conflate commercial values with the spiritual values of art: “When commodity identity overtakes and subsumes aesthetic identity, so that an expensive work is uncritically accorded aesthetic significance, not to say spiritual value—they become everyday artifacts.” Postmodern art’s commercial value is linked to its role as entertainment: for the wealthy, who can afford its products, and the hoi polloi, whose consumption is passive, collective witness to the commercial spectacle and permitted vicarious association with the rich and famous aesthetes by way of “the museum,” an institution that serves as “an intellectual sarcophagus, as much as a physical museum.” Postmodern artists hanker after “an audience that will make them popular, giving them the celebrity and charisma they believe they are entitled to as artists.” Kuspit dares his readers to show him “the contemporary artist who would prefer to live from hand to mouth rather than fall into the hands of an art dealer.”

Kuspit laments “protest art” and art that is ostensibly “moral,” enlisting art in the service of “meliorative criticism and social advocacy” because it tends to “regard[] form as a kind of scaffolding for subject matter from which it can be proclaimed,” and “the artist tries to bully the spectator into believing what the artist believes,” all the while leaving matter more or less “aesthetically untransformed” and evidencing a “certain failure of creativity.” Protest artists (producers of what others call ‘agitprop’),

“fail to realize that beauty is the ultimate protest against ugliness, which why the absence of beauty in their works shows that they are not critical. They are in fact creative failures. Indeed, the inability to imagine beauty is a sign of the creative inadequacy of post-aesthetic art.”

By contrast, “traditional art reveals the qualities—dignity and empathy especially—that make us human. It is morally concerned, and often shows the moral siege in an immoral world.”

Kuspit’s stinging lament does not end in despair:

“The anti-aesthete, anti-imaginative, anti-unconscious seem to have destroyed the possibility of making an aesthetic masterpiece, but there are still artists who believe in the imaginative refinement, under the auspices of the unconscious, of raw social and physical material into aesthetically transcendent art.”

Image: By Avigdor Arikha who, together with Lucian Freud, Kuspit christens “Deans of the New Old Master artists.”

Yoga: A Basic Philosophical Introduction

[subscript diacritic dots missing]

Yoga: from a verbal root, “yuj,” which is often taken to mean “to yoke” or “to unite” (with God: here, as īśvara, an ‘impersonal, acosmic, detached presence whose inherent contentlessness can only show itself as what it is not’), however, as Gerald Larson explains, “[B]oth Vyāsa and Vācaspatimiśra [point] out that Yoga in the context of Pātañjala Yoga does not mean ‘yuj’ in the sense of ‘yoke’ or ‘join,’ but rather ‘yuj’ in the sense of samādhi or concentration [these being the two possible associations of the verbal root ‘yuj’].” It entails unswerving commitment and concentration as a meditative discipline that harnesses bodily and psychic energy on behalf of techniques designed to still the mind (the fluctuations of ‘mind-stuff’) and finely focus the mental powers of discrimination and concentration. It is a combination of physiological, psychological, and spiritual methods fashioned to alter routine states of consciousness or awareness.

Sometimes the term “yoga” is used in a general and loose sense to mean something like “disciplined thought” or meditative concentration, in which case it can refer to “disciplined work in any number of areas, including law, medicine, art, ritual, language, and so forth” (Larson). Our focus here is on the first and more technical meaning of Yoga as “that specific system of thought (śāstra) that has for its focus the analysis, understanding and cultivation of those altered states of awareness that lead one to the experience of spiritual liberation. [here: kaivalya, elsewhere: moksa]” (Larson).

Patañjali’s Yoga system is one of the six āstika (orthodox) darśanas,* hence a distinct philosophical school and a spiritual praxis, as elaborated in his Yoga Sūtra (3rd to 4th century CE; the Sūtra, usually read together with its indispensable commentary, Vyāsa’s Bhāsya), is also known as the “Eight-Limbed Yoga” (astānga-yoga), only one limb of which, the third and “outer member” (āsana), is found in contemporary “YMCA” and “classified ads” yoga (there are all-too-few exceptions to this generalization). In other words, in most contexts of contemporary public discourse, the word “yoga” is used in reductive reference to āsanas, although the two terms are not interchangeable. We might describe this as emblematic of the commodification and commercialization of religious praxis in conjunction with New Age orientalist nonsense. The long-term goal of yoga is asamprajñāta-samādhi, a non-conceptual awareness beyond all thought, attribute and description (nirvikalpa). As such a state of awareness becomes more than intermittent, it is capable of eliminating samskāras (karmic predispositions, i.e., it is karmically ‘seedless’). Classical Yoga largely assumed or took over Sāmkhya metaphysics: as Larson reminds us, Pātañjala Yoga “as a philosophical tradition is unintelligible without the Sāmkhya ontology and epistemology,” sharing many of the latter’s basic philosophical presuppositions and assumptions, but most importantly, the aim of disassociating pure consciousness from the mind-body complex (the latter a product of prakrti). Unlike Sāmkhya, however, Yoga introduces a deity essential to contemplation (īśvara-pranidhāna) and a model of the yogi’s ultimate goal, for “The Lord is a special [kind of] purusa, untouched by hindrances, karma, its fruition, and latent-deposits [of karmic actions]” (Yoga Sūtra 1.24). This is a peculiar deity indeed, for the Lord does not create the universe, remaining an utterly transcendent deity never in touch with the world (thus completely set apart from the manifestations of prakrti). Here, the deity appears to have a wholly functional spiritual and psychological rationale, dispensable and utterly transcended with asamprajñāta-samādhi. While ultimately on the order of an ‘illusion’ therefore, this deity is viewed as no less necessary until such time as the devotee has reached a certain pinnacle of meditative attainment or realization, a formulation not unlike its counterpart role in Advaita Vedānta.

Although Patañjali’s Yoga is both a darśana and an ascetic or meditative practice, we can distinguish Yoga as a classical philosophical system and school from Yoga as a spiritual tradition of “experimental or experiential practice (whether ritualistic, devotional, meditative, therapeutic, alchemical or magical)” (Larson), for there are many traditions of Yoga “that run parallel to philosophical Yoga from the earliest centuries of the Common Era through the medieval and modern periods,” only two of which we’ll mention here: the Yoga of the Bhagavad Gītā and Moksadharma portion of the epic Mahābhārata (e.g., bhakti-, karma-, and jñāna-yoga), and the yoga praxis (Kundalinī yoga) found in the monistic Śaivism of Abhinavagupta and Ksemarāja. (In a future post, we’ll introduce the former three yogas by way of a prelude to a discussion of Gandhi’s preference for karma-yoga). Alas, among the later, “popular extensions” of these parallel traditions one finds “peripheral” and “tangential” sub-traditions, writes Larson, “which sometimes have degenerated into pointless superstition and aberrant psychological behavior. Unfortunately, some of this peripheral and tangential material has found its way into New Age spiritual practices. New Age bookshelves continue to be filled with the most incredible nonsense that passes itself off as Yoga, ranging from so-called Yoga massage books to au courant techniques for new and improved tantric orgasms.” Both New Age “Yoga” and commodified gymnastic āsanas are, to put it feebly, a far cry from Patañjali’s Yoga philosophy and praxis or the yogas of the Bhagavad Gītā. Somewhat distinct from either of these contemporary expressions of Yoga, what we’ll term “hybrid-Yoga,” is well represented in the following article from the Los Angeles Times, “Bending yoga to fit their worship needs:”

“Christian pop music played quietly in the background as instructor Bryan Brock led a recent yoga class at the nondenominational Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth. Incorporating prayer and readings from the Bible, Brock urged his class of about 20 students to find strength in their connection to their creator through yoga’s deep, controlled breathing. ‘The goal of Christian yoga is to open ourselves up to God,’ he said. ‘It allows us to blur the line between the physical and the spiritual.’ The instructor then recited the Lord’s Prayer while his students moved slowly through a series of postures known as the sun salutation. Such hybrid classes, which combine yoga practice with elements of Christianity or Judaism, appear to be growing in popularity across Southern California and elsewhere. Some Christians call their versions of the discipline holy yoga or Yahweh yoga and some teachers urge participants to ‘breathe down Jesus.’ Jewish yogis, in turn, have developed—and in some cases, even trademarked—Torah yoga, Kabbalah yoga and aleph bet yoga, applying Eastern meditative movements to Jewish prayer and study.” [….]

Among its philosophical virtues, the Yoga tradition of Patañjali spells out in some detail the essentials of karma theory: paraphrasing Karl Potter’s concise summary, an act (karman) performed with purposive intent and desire or passion creates either a meritorious or unmeritorious karmic residue depending on the quality of the act (including its motivation). This karmic residue includes dispositional tendencies (samskāra) of various kinds, including two kinds of traces (vāsanās), one of which, when activated, produces certain mental and emotional afflictions (including ignorance, egoism, attachment) (kleśas). The kleśas color or characterize the thinking, feeling, and actions of one engaged in purposive activity and, in turn, causally lead to the production of yet more karmic residue, assuring the person’s continued bondage. At death, a person’s unactivated karmic residues, including his vāsanās, gather together within that individual’s citta (here, and loosely, ‘mind,’ as intellect, the ego and senses). Citta is the term for the bodily and mental evolutes or aspects of prakrti (material substance, from grosser to finer), made up of the three gunas (sattva, tamas, and rajas) whose fluctuations affect the thinking, willing, and feeling of individual selves. The citta associated with a jīva of the just-deceased body immediately passes on to a new body-mind configuration (assuming human rebirth here)—presumably a fetus—and accords the new body a citta appropriate to it. The karmic residues determine the individuation of the body-mind configuration, ceteris paribus, the length of its life, and the affective tone (bhoga) of the experiences the person will have (i.e., whether pleasurable or painful). When the person acts (as a purposive agent), karmic residues directly affect the tone of experience: ‘good’ residues producing pleasurable experiences, “bad” residues producing painful experiences. It is the individual’s response or reaction to those experiences (e.g., attached or non-attached) that determine whether or not she will create further karmic residues and associated vāsanās. According to the Gītā (cf. XII.12, 13-20; XVII.12), for example, it is “non-attachment” to or renunciation of the “fruits” of one’s actions that forestalls further karmic production. Such non-attachment or renunciation may require, as in Patañjali’s Yoga system, attainment of the highest state of meditative concentration (samādhi), an enduring state of non-conceptual awareness of reality (‘pure witness-consciousness’). (Please see Potter’s essay, ‘The Karma Theory and Its Interpretation in Some Indian Philosophical Systems,’ in O’Flaherty, ed., 1980: 241-267)

* The Wikipedia entry on “Hindu philosophy” is also fairly reliable.

References and Further Reading:

• Alter, Joseph S. Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Science and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Chapple, Chris and Eugene Kelly, trans. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1990.
• De Michelis, Elizabeth. A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism. New York: Continuum, 2004.
• Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
• Dyczkowski, Mark S.G. The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.
• Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Feuerstein, Georg. The Philosophy of Classical Yoga. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
• Feuerstein, Georg. The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997.
• Feuerstein, Georg. The Yoga-Sūtra of Patañjali: A New Translation and Commentary. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1989.
• Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Grimes, John. A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996, new ed.
• Jacobsen, Knut A. Prakriti in Sāmkhya-Yoga: Material Principle, Religious Experience, Ethical Implications. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2002.
• King, Richard. Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999.
• Larson, Gerald J. Classical Sāmkhya. Santa Barbara, CA: Ross/Erikson, 1979 ed.
• Larson, Gerald James and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies,Vol. IV, Sāmkhya—A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
• Larson, Gerald James and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. XII, Yoga: India’s Philosophy of Meditation. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.
• Miller, Barbara Stoler, trans. Yoga: Discipline of Freedom—The Yoga Sūtra attributed to Patañjali. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.
• Minor, Robert N., ed. Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.
• Mishra, Rammurti S. The Textbook of Yoga Psychology (includes translation of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras). New York: Julian Press, 1987 ed.
• Muller-Ortega, Paul Eduardo. The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.
• O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, ed. Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
• Patañjali (Chip Hartranft, tr., with commentary). The Yoga-Sutra of Pantañjali. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 2003.
• Phillips, Stephen. Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Potter, Karl H., ed. Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991 (first published in 1963).
• Sargent, Winthrop, trans. The Bhagavad-Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994 ed.
• Silburn, Lillian (Jacques Gontier, trans.) Kundalinī: The Energy of the Depths. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988.
• Stutley, Margaret and James. Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
• Sullivan, Bruce M. The A to Z of Hinduism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001.
• White, David Gordon. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• White, David Gordon. Kiss of the Yoginī: ‘Tantric Sex’ in Its South Asian Contexts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• White, David Gordon, ed. Tantra in Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Woods, James Haughton. The Yoga-System of Patañjali. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966.

[A slightly different version of this post was first written for ReligiousLeftLaw.com on May 9, 2010.]

Dreams and Dreaming: A Select Bibliography

Le Rêve (The Dream) is a 1932 oil painting by Pablo Picasso.

The select bibliography for “dreams and dreaming” is here. What follows is material on dreams and dreaming from several civilizations, cultures, and worldviews, as well as reflection on same from sundry writers, psychologists, and philosophers. The hope is that these nuggets of analysis and insight will grant one a taste (rasa) of the wonderful world of dreams.

“[D]reams are meaningful and dreaming a purposeful activity.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Dreams…are communications with the soma, psyche, polis, or cosmos of the dreamer.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Thanks mainly to Freud, the dream has been overwhelmingly in the hands of the psychologists. We cannot blame the psychologists for this, because they have proper business with the dream. But few humanist scholars have bothered to look directly at the dream as a subjective experience that has, however delusively, aroused in us all a sense of being alive in an unusual way. One scholar will write about Kafka and the dream, another about Mann or Strindberg and the dream, but few write about the dream itself. The average person is so used to dreaming that dreaming becomes as unremarkable as shaving or daydreaming on the bus. Yet for several hours each night, most of us invent and populate an outrageous world into which we are involuntarily projected to take our chances like the hero of a novel or a film. This is a staggering fact about human consciousness, this other reality….”—Bernard O. States

“Everyone approaches the subject, first and foremost, through their own personal dreaming. This is true for researchers and clinicians as well.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The most widely accepted facts about ordinary dreams are as follows: “(1) Nearly all humans remember at least some dreams. (2) A very small number of people report never dreaming. (3) Ordinary dreams are mostly visual and auditory, with some tactile sensations and very little smell or taste. (4) The whole range of emotions can appear in dreams but many dreams have no emotional tone at all. (5) High-level mental abilities for rational thought, decision-making, and self-reflection are active and normally functional in some dreams, but not in others. (6) Most dreams contain one or more characters other than the dreamer. (7) Many dreams involve speaking, listening and common forms of social interaction.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The following have been claimed as additional patterns in the form and content of ordinary dreams: “(1) Children dream more often of animals than adults do. (2) Women tend to remember more dreams than men do. (3) Men’s dreams tend to be more aggressive and sexual than women’s dreams. (4) Men dream more often of male characters than female characters, while women tend to dream evenly about male and female characters. (5) Falling dreams are much more common than flying dreams. (6) Some dreams include explicit reference to cultural symbols and metaphors. (7) The primary emotional concerns and activities of the waking life are accurately reflected in the frequencies of various elements of the dream content (the continuity hypothesis).”—Kelly Bulkeley

After Jung, we might make a distinction between “little” and “big” dreams. With regard to the latter: “(1) Many cultures do make a general distinction between significant and insignificant dreams, after casting it in religious terms (e.g., divine dream visions and merely human dreams). (2) Nightmares are an especially widespread form of highly memorable dreaming, with a high prevalence among the general population of two primal themes: being chased or attacked by another character (especially animals) and falling or losing control of one’s body (e.g., feeling paralyzed). (3) At the other end of the emotional spectrum, some highly memorable dreams involve feelings of intense sexual pleasure that carry over into physiological arousal on waking (wet dreams). (4) Among the most emotionally positive big dreams are those involving seemingly magical phenomena (e.g., flying, dead people appearing alive again), with qualities of unusually intense realism. (5) Other factors associated with big dreams include recurrence, aesthetics, bizarreness, temporality, and lucidity.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“At the farthest edge of speculation a science of big dreams allies itself with the study of other non-linear processes such as weather, quantum physics, star formation, and art, which spontaneously generate new clusters of emergent order. From this perspective the open-ended dynamism and chaotic creativity of dreaming can be seen as provoking the conscious mind into a greater understanding of itself and the world.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“…[C]ontemporary philosophical and scientific literature has affirmed [the] ancient notion of the dream as prognostication, if this is understood not merely as foretelling the future, but as giving shape to the reality that will come to pass.”—Elliot R. Wolfson

“In our times [the] quest for meaning is part of a larger Euro-American movement of investing dreams with existential meaning, which in turn occurs in the context of the erosion of the magical garden and the death of god.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The tales of dreams suggest…that dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“The dream ether is the warp that myths are woven on; the weft is individual experience and art. Myths reflect our desire to believe that people really can dream the same dream, a desire that is a deep hope—a dream, if you will—that we all share. The myths that describe such experiences are shared dreams about shared dreams.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[O]ne can justifiably assert that Freud discovered psychoanalysis, or at least its central features, through his own dreams….”—Sigmund Freud

“[I]n spite of [the] self-criticisms, and in spite of the depression which followed the almost total neglect of the book by the outside world—only 35 copies were sold in the first six years after publication—The Interpretation of Dreams was always regarded by Freud as his most important work: ‘Insight such as this,’ he wrote in his preface to the third English edition, ‘falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’”—James Strachey

“Anyone who has failed to explain the origin of dream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusion or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them.”—James Strachey

“It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life.”—Sigmund Freud

“Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams.”—Sigmund Freud

“[T]he emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous…to the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it.”—Sigmund Freud

“I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgment of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.”—Sigmund Freud

Regarding the psychological preparation of the subject for dream interpretation in psychoanalysis: “We must aim at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his own psychical perception and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally shifts the thoughts that occur to him.” [These are uncannily similar to preliminary practices for meditation instruction.]—Sigmund Freud

“I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of those forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.”—Sigmund Freud

A dream can both express and gratify a wish.

Anxiety dreams are a sub-species of dreams with a distressing content, the anxiety being superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it. Freud concedes that anxiety dreams are “dream structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory.”

“Freud eventually abandoned the idea that every dream was the gratification of a wish. In particular, he left open the possibility that a dream might be a manifestation—and representation of anxiety. And anxiety can be a realistic response to the world.”—Jonathan Lear

With regard to the manifest content of dreams: “(1) [D]reams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days; (2) they make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed; [and] (3) they have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.”—Sigmund Freud

Displacement refers to what occurs when “ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were intensely cathected [charged with psychical energy] and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness.”—Sigmund Freud

“Censorship is served by processes such as displacement, whereby intensity and apparent importance are detached from a significant idea and passed along, by associative paths, to an insignificant idea. Displacement, along with condensation and other aspects of primary process constitutive of unconscious processing, are formal, syntactically characterisable operations. They account for the dream-work’s success in disguising desire, in the negative sense of making the content of wishes inaccessible.”—Sebastian Gardner

“Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles. The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyze them.”—Sigmund Freud

The latent content of dreams refers to the “dream-thoughts” one arrives at through dream-work.

The process of condensation permits us to see how dreams are “meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream formation, and it is a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the [latent] dream-thoughts come about.”—Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are completely egotistical” insofar as “every dream deals with the dreamer himself.”—Sigmund Freud

In describing the interpretation of dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud is referring, in Jonathan Lear’s words, to “the conscious waking activity of interpreting dream-memories in the analytic situation.”

If one takes Freud’s principles of dream interpretation seriously, it “emerges that the interpretation of dreams is an ethical activity.”—Jonathan Lear

“More than any other psychic phenomenon, dreams reveal so regularly and so graphically the variety of unconscious forces, including the unconscious ego and superego as well as dynamic and genetic factors. As compromise formations rather than mere wish fulfillments, dreams prove crucial for indicating the nature of pathology and defensive structure.”—Patrick J. Mahony

“What is meant by lucid dreaming? The French dream theorist Michel Jouvet puts it thus: ‘A dream is lucid when the subject, while dreaming, knows he or she is dreaming. This peculiar state allows the dreamer a certain measure of control over the actual unfolding of the dream and a sense of freedom through being able to explore the dream world according to his or her own inclinations’ [The Paradox of Sleep (Laurence Garey, trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 761]. What is striking about lucid dreaming is that, like its Buddhist and Hindu precursors, it provides technologies for disciplining oneself in order to dream lucidly. A detailed account of these technologies is found in the work of an important theorist, Stephen LeBerge, whose pioneering work Lucid Dreaming [1987] was followed by Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming [1990], written with his collaborator Howard Rheingold.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“In the West, mentions of lucid dreaming can be found in the writing of philosophers Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, Pierre Gassendi and the first mention in Europe was in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Perhaps the awareness of lucid dreaming in Western academic circles [first] occurred with the publication of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a Sinologist who published Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations or often translated as Dreams and How to Guide Them). He documented more than twenty years of personal investigation into lucid dreams. Although working with dreams was not at the centre of his career, his book influenced and inspired many in the arts and literature including the surrealist André Breton. The name ‘lucid dreaming’ was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederick van Eden in 1913.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Research and first-person accounts show that in lucid dreaming, different levels of intentionality can be carried out, such as transforming a self-image, ego-splitting; spiritual experiences; meeting the deceased; witnessing, entering hyperspace; healing, and encountering inner light.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“[W]hile lucid dream theory claims to have been influenced by Tibetan dream yoga, the latter has little affinity with lucid dreams.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The boundaries between waking and dreaming are more permeable in the Hindu, specifically Upanishadic thought.”—Sudhir Kakar

In the Mahābhārata, we find “a set of contrasting dreams on the eve of a great battle: nightmares in those who are about to be defeated, auspicious dreams in those who are about to conquer.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[I]t is argued in the Yogavāsistha, when we take the material universe to be the ultimate reality, we make a mistake comparable to the mistake someone makes when he thinks he sees his head cut off in a dream, a traditional image in Indian dream books.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

In the Advaita Vedānta school of classical Indic philosophy, “a good deal of importance [is attached] to the phenomenology of dream consciousness [svapna-sthāna] in order to show the continuity of consciousness and the persistence of self-awareness throughout all states of consciousness.”—Eliot Deutsch

“According to the Vedānta, the three kośas or sheaths associated with the dream state of consciousness and that constitute the ‘subtle body’ (sūksma-śarīra) of the self are the prānamayakośa, the sheath of ‘vitality,’ the manomayakośa, the sheath of ‘mind,’ and the vijñānamayakośa, the sheath of ‘understanding.’ [….] Both the manomayakośa and the vijñānamayakośa form the antahkarana or ‘internal organ,’ which is the psychological expression for the totality of mental functions in waking-dream consciousness, [and, as such, are subject to a pervasive avidyā (ignorance)].”—Eliot Deutsch

In addition to the states of consciousness associated with the waking state and the dream state, there is the third state of consciousness found in “deep sleep” (susupti). Only turīya (lit., ‘the fourth’), the fourth state of consciousness recognized by Vedānta, is characterized as the “transcendental” or a “pure” state of consciousness. Later in the tradition, we find not one but two states of consciousness beyond deep sleep: savikalpa samādhi and nirvikalpa samādhi, the former still a “determinate” spiritual experience, “but unlike in susupti, the deep-sleep state, the emphasis here is not so much on the absence of duality as it is on the presence of non-duality.” This might be described as a liminal state betwixt and between the jīva and the Ātman, the self poised on the precipice, as it were, of nirvikalpa samādhi, the awareness of nirguna Brahman. As Deutsch explains, the waking and dreaming states of consciousness correspond to the phenomenal world of gross and subtle bodies; the states of deep sleep and savikalpa samādhi correspond to saguna (‘qualified’) Brahman, while turīya or transcendental consciousness and nirvikalpa samādhi correspond to Ultimate Reality or nirguna Brahman (recalling the equation Ātman = Brahman).

Just as the dream state is “subrated” (disvalued, contradicted, and transcended) by the state of waking consciousness, so too nirguna Brahman, as “ultimate reality” subrates all prior experience, while nothing else is capable of subrating Brahman, defined as spiritual experience utterly bereft of distinction or determination (nirvikalpa samādhi), and described as an immediate (hence unmediated) consciousness or awareness on the order of complete or absolute self-knowledge and self-realization.

Vasubandhu, a Yogācāra (or Vijñānavāda) Buddhist, argued that dreams were evidence of the possibility of experience without an external world. Śankara, the Advaita Vedāntin philosopher, “provides a refutation of this argument, based on its inability to meet the requirements (accepted by Vasubandhu) of the pramāna theory for knowledge. Vasubandhu’s crucial move in his use of the analogy of dreaming is to point to the lack of externality in dreaming when the experience of dreaming otherwise resembles that of waking. Śankara points out a fallacy in this form of reasoning. In order to deny externality in dreaming, Vasubandhu borrows the concept of it from waking in the first place, and so cannot deny it altogether. [….] Śankara also has a wider argument against any idealist denial of externality in the account of experience. He points out that externality is a feature of experience [within the domain of ‘provisional reality’ in light of nirguna Brahman], and while an idealist account may reduce every other feature of experience to a mental construct without losing its claim to be veridical, the same cannot be said of externality. Reducing the feature of externality to mental construction results in denying that that feature of experience is veridical. So experience cannot be entirely veridical in seeming to be of an external world, if the idealist is correct. But the idealist does want to say that experience is veridical, even if mentally constructed; in this he differs from a sceptic who denies that experience is veridical. Śankara’s argument shows that idealism cannot but collapse into scepticism about the external world. However, Śankara does agree that dreaming has a role to play: it alerts one to the possibility that this current experience may be overruled [‘subrated’] by some other type of consciousness [as we saw above]. [….] It has been observed that dreaming itself can make sense only in the context of being awake. There must in general be veridical experience for error to occur; there must be real coins for there to be counterfeits.”—Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

“Nothing that is available in our experience, that is to say, no knowledge-claim which can meet the standards of the pramānas, allows us to claim that what is currently experienced can never be invalidated. This is the real lesson of the analogy of dreams. Dreams teach us that even within a consistent system for the validation of knowledge-claims, nothing in what is experienced will license the non-invalidable assertion that what is currently experienced is the sole reality. Consequently, the soteriological claim, that this world is indeed subsumed by the reality of brahman, cannot be gainsaid. The system for the validation of claims arising from experience itself derives its authority from what is experienced. The system of validation is legitimately applicable so long as that to which it is applied is the very same experienced world from which the system’s authority is derived. Since the pramāna theory is understood as being about the world from which its causal authority is derived, the legitimacy of the theory is limited to the currently experienced world. If all claims are valid or invalid because they succeed in or fail the tests of the pramāna theory (the system of validation), the validity of experiential claims is circumscribed by their being about the world that is experienced. The reality putatively behind the world [i.e., nirguna Brahman] would legitimately and coherently be known only according to standards derived from it—but those standards, the standards of the liberated self [i.e., Ātman]—are currently unavailable to ordinary subjects.”—Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

“According to the Tibetan view of the human body dreams arise from the movement of consciousness through the body together with the life-sustaining breath. As some dreams are said to be the result of the blockage of different channels in which this breath is supposed to travel, which are in turn caused by humoral imbalances, the study of such dreams is of considerable diagnostic importance.”—Jan Westerhoff

Nāropa, an eleventh-century Indian saint, “was known as a great scholar at the Buddhist university at Nālandā in northern India but also as a mahasiddha, a tantric practitioner.” The Six Yogas of Nāropa include the well-known meditation practice of tummo (inner heat) but also a practice concerning dreams (mi-lam), “a set of exercises that are supposed to enable the practitioner to influence the contents of his own dreams. [….]

[Nāropa thought of dreams] as the foremost of all the [twelve canonical] examples of illusion.”—Jan Westerhoff

“The study of lucid dreams in the Tibetan tradition is regarded by way of illustrating two important philosophical points: that of the insubstantiality of the external world, and that of the insubstantiality of the self.”—Jan Westerhoff

Prior to the practice of dream yoga in the Tibetan (Vajrayāna) Buddhist tradition, one must perform both general and specific “tantric preliminaries.” The former is owing to the fact that the transmission of doctrinal practices is part of a living tradition in which one receives “initiation” (an ‘empowerment’) from a lineage master, meaning “the trainee must receive the tantric initiations appropriate to the system to be undertaken; second, the or she must become firmly established in the tantric samaya or ‘sacred oaths.’ [….] The preliminaries specific to dream yoga are those of the Six Yogas system generally and “are comprised of two principal practices: the meditation and mantra recitations of Vajrasattva; and the practice of guru yoga, which includes the mandala offering symbolic of the universe. [….] What is unique in the Six Yogas system is the tradition of how the Vajrasattva and Guru Yoga practices are done in retreat or semi-retreat [a month to six weeks] as five sets of 100,000. These are comprised of 100,000 refuge mantras, 100,000 physical prostrations, 100,000 mandala offerings, 100,000 Vajrasattva mantras, and 100,000 guru mantras.”—Glenn H. Mullin

Lama Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) taught dream yoga as one of the three stages of illusory body-yoga, the latter involving training on “how to meditate on all appearances as illusory; how to meditate on dream illusions; and how to meditate on the illusory nature of the bardo experience.”—Glenn H. Mullin

The meditation of dream illusions in particular “involves four trainings: learning to retain conscious presence during dreams; controlling and increasing the content of dreams; overcoming fear in dreams and training in the illusory nature of dreams; and meditating on suchness [i.e., ‘emptiness’] in dreams.”—Glenn H. Mullin

Progress in dream yoga presumes accomplishments or energy control involving “inner heat” practices, and “most manuals on Nāropa’s Six Yogas place the explanation of dream yoga in the section on the illusory body doctrine, and place the sleep yoga in the section on the clear light doctrine. Consequently, because the illusory body doctrine is generally presented in manuals prior to the presentation of the clear light doctrine, dream yoga often ends up taught before sleep yoga. However, in the actual training one would have to become proficient in meditating on the clear light of sleep before succeeding in the dream yogas.”—Glenn H. Mullin

Plenty Coups (or ‘Many Achievements’) was the last geat chief of the Crow nation, a nomadic, hunting, and warrior tribe. His name was result of a dream-vision of his grandfather. “For the Crow, the visions one had in a dream could provide access to the order of the world beyond anything available to ordinary conscious understanding. Young Plenty Coups took the traditional resource of seeking a dream-vision, and with some help of the elders in the tribe, he put it to a new use. This gave the tribe resources for thought—for practical reasoning—that would not have been available to them in any other way.”—Jonathan Lear

“The Crow, like other American tribes, had a theory of dreams. They took dreams to be meaningful: revealing—often in enigmatic form—an order of the universe that was typically hidden from ordinary conscious life. They recognized that dreams were related to their wishes. Indeed, they sought dreams as a means of getting some authoritative word on whether or not their wishes would be gratified. According to Two Leggings, the Crow distinguished four different levels of dreams: (1) ‘No-account dream,’ in which one merely saw some incident. (2) ‘Wish-dreams,’ which saw some hoped-for circumstance coming true. These did have spiritual power—‘medicine’—but they did not always come true. (3) ‘Property dreams,’ in which a person would see horses, blankets, or the like, which he would later acquire through actual events. (4) ‘Medicine dreams’ or visions. These gave powerful insight into the future.”—Jonathan Lear

“So the Crow, like Freud, thought that dreams were responses to human wishes. They also, like Freud, thought that the deeper meaning of dreams was often not transparent—and thus that important dreams required the interpretation of wiser, older members of the tribe. Within the context of our inquiry, the most important difference between Freud and the Crow is that Freud thought humans were alone in the universe, and the Crow did not and do not.”—Jonathan Lear

“What is striking about young Plenty Coups’s dream—and the interpretation the tribe gave to it—is that it was used not merely to predict a future event; it was used by the tribe to struggle the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand. Dreams were regularly used by the Crow to predict the future. [….] Plenty Coups’s dream was of a different order. It did not predict any particular event, but the change of the world order. It was prophetic in the sense that the tribe used it to face up to a radically different future.”—Jonathan Lear

“Plenty Coups had his dream in the context of a communal sense of anxiety. A way of life was anxious about its ability to go forward into an unfathomable future. The dream was a manifestation of radical hope—in that it enabled them to go forward hopefully into a future they would be able to grasp only retrospectively, when they could reemerge with concepts by which to understand themselves and their experiences.”—Jonathan Lear

Early Islamicate societies shared the assumption found “in many pre-modern cultural settings…that dreams constituted a potential means for the communication of truth,” as well as the belief that dreams revealed the “possibilities of an insight into an unseen world, of contact with those beyond the grave, of visions of the afterlife, of communications from forces and beings invested with supreme, transformative wisdom and truth.”—Louise Marlow

“[J]ust as prophetic hadīth established the veracity of Prophetic dreams [ru’yā], dreams could affirm or reject the authenticity of hadīth.”—Louise Marlow

“A widely circulated prophetic hadīth states that the vision of the Prophet [Muhammad] in a dream is deemed equal to his actual appearance.”—Leah Kinberg

A “theology of dreams,” and the proliferation of dream manuals as a consequence, was made possible by the fact that dreams were considered “first and foremost as successors of Qur’ānic revelation” in the Islamic world. “Reports of dreams are common in different genres of medieval Arabic literature: biography and autobiography, history, hadīth collections and manuals of dream interpretation.”—John C. Lamoreaux

According to Abū Hamīd al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), “Sleep and dream are guarantors of the reality of prophecy. A prophet is one in whom the inner eye [beyond the senses and intellect] has become fully open and who sees what others cannot. He sees with the ‘eyes of the heart.’ The inference is clear: we who are not prophets still possess a token of that visionary state in our dreams. In sleep we all become, momentarily, small prophets.”—Eric Ormsby

“The vast corpus of mystical literature in general, and Sūfī biographies in particular, are replete with dream-related allusions, often in direct interaction with both learned and popular exegetical literature.”—Mohammed J. Mahallati

“Some medieval thinkers asked: Is our mundane life a dream in itself? According to hadīth stemming from the Prophet Muhammad, and frequently alluded to by major Sūfī figures, this seems to be the case.”—Mohammed J. Mahallati

Addendum: I neglected to cite the titles from which some of the above material was taken but which are not found in the bibliography (most of them I was able to read only after formatting the bibliography and so they will be included in the next draft):

• Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1969.
• Lamoreaux, John C. The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Marlow, Louise, ed. Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands. Boston, MA: Ilex Foundation/Washington, DC: Center for Hellenistic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2008.
• Mullin, Glenn H., tr. and ed. Readings on the Six Yogas of Naropa. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1997.
• Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Awakened Ones: The Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
• Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa (Glenn H. Mullin, tr.). The Six Yogas of Naropa: Tsongkhapa’s Commentary…. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2005.

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part III)

This is the third and final installment in our series. Part I is here, and Part II is here.

‘Recently Iris Murdoch has put forward the view that the whole “fact/value” dichotomy stems from a faulty moral psychology: from the metaphysical picture of “the neutral facts” (apprehended by a totally uncaring faculty of reason) and the will which, having learned the neutral facts, must “choose values” either arbitrarily (the existentialist picture) or on the basis of “instinct.” I think she is right; but setting this moral psychology right will involve deep philosophical work involving the notions of “reason” and “fact” (as she, of course, recognizes).’—Hilary Putnam

‘The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.’—David Wiggins

‘A predicate stands for a natural property if it is indispensable to the exposition or development of some natural science (or to some similarly strictly empirical-cum-explanatory mode of investigation). A non-natural property is simply one that is not like that. It is a myth and the opposite of the truth that our grasp of properties that are natural in this sense is better than our grasp of the non-natural.’—David Wiggins

‘Consider the ethical predicate “considerate.” That which marks out or delimits or decries or discriminates the property of considerateness in acts or attitudes or human characters is an essentially ethical interest, in pursuit of which we can deploy any mode of investigation or and associated concept that suits the case. The presence of such properties, that is, of value properties, is ascertained by all the multifarious means that are called for by the exercise of our grasp of this or that ethical concept. Such properties are to be conceived in light of what it takes to exercise that grasp—not vice versa. A particular ethical property, we might say, is to be identified or singled out as the property which the reasonable exercise of the grasp of such and such a concept, as regulated by criticism, hunts down.’—David Wiggins

‘Objectivity calls for putting one’s idiosyncratic predilections and parochial preferences aside in forming one’s beliefs, evaluations and choices. It is a matter of proceeding in line not with one’s inclinations but with the dictates of impartial reason. The universality of reason must be recognized: What is rational for one person to do, to believe, or to value will thereby also of necessity be equally rational for all the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same circumstances. For rationality is inherently “objective:” it does not reconfigure itself to meet the idiosyncratic predilections of particular individuals. To be sure, objectivity will have to take context into account, seeing that different individuals and groups confront very different objective situations. Rationality is universal, but it is circumstantially universal—and objectivity with it. It is a matter of what “any of us” would do in one’s place. [….] The contextuality of good reasons can be reconciled with the universality of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic (and uniform) conception of ideal rationality is thought to bear context differently, on the resolution of concrete cases and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are…flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called “open texture.”’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, “radically non-epistemic;” that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.

‘Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case.[….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such facts is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth…is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.’—Michael P. Lynch

Core Folk Truisms (there may be other truisms): 1. Objectivity: ‘The belief that p is true if, and only if with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be…is a central truism about truth.’ 2. Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true.’ 3. Warrant of Independence: ‘Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true.’ 4. End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by “truth” that all and only true propositions share.’ The theory should also be ‘able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and “truth” rigidly names that property.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is an immanent functional property that is variably manifested.’—Michael P. Lynch

An atomic proposition of some domain is true, if and only if, it has the particular property that manifests true for propositions in that domain. The truth-value of compounds supervenes on the truth-value of atomic propositions.

‘In the denial that artwork can or should make truth claims I see formalism joining hands with romanticism, to yield an aestheticism that renders art autonomous, to be sure, and perhaps even pleasantly anarchic, but also cut off from the rest of life, deracinated, robbed of its claim upon conscience or consciousness, and so transformed into little more than the toy of decadence.’—Lenn E. Goodman

‘I think artworks do make truth claims, even if not always propositionally. But no truth claim is self-validating, and artistic claims are not made true by virtue of their medium. Perhaps the most suspect of pretensions in behalf of artistic truth is the idea that art’s higher truth is somehow exempt from the demands of human understanding, critical thought, or moral judgment. That makes artists into hit-and-run oracles. Surely, even a higher truth, if it really is truth, is worthy and capable of scrutiny. That means that works of artistic fancy can and should he held accountable for their veracity, on whatever level they can make good their claims.’—Lenn E. Goodman

‘[A] uniformitarian absolutism at the high-generality level of “what rationality is” is perfectly consonant with a pluralism and relativism at the lower level of concrete resolutions regarding “what is rational” within the contextual setting of particular cases. The ruling principles of rationality never uniquely constrain their more specific circumstantial implementations. At each step along the way we repeat the same basic situation: delimitation, yes; determination, no. The sought-for reconciliation between the universalistic absoluteness of rationality and the variability and relativity of its particular rulings is thus provided for by the consideration that the absolutism of principles operates at the highest level of the hierarchy of rational development, while there is ever “slack” and variability as one moves towards the lowest level of concrete determinations. The variability and relativity of good reasons at the level of our actual operations can indeed be reconciled with the absolutism of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic conception of ideal rationality is brought to bear on the resolution of concrete circumstances and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher
‘In characterizing a belief as objectively rational we are certainly not claiming that there is a universal consensus about it. No matter how sensible a contention on any significant issue may be, there is an ever-present prospect that some people—perhaps even many—will nevertheless quite defensibly and appropriately dissent from it. The validity of our judgments is emphatically not destroyed by finding that there are people who reject them.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘We have to come to terms with epistemic realities, which include: 1) the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations; 2) the variation of “available data;” 3) the underdetermination of facts by data (all too frequently insufficient); 4) the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.); 5) the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art.” Such factors—and others like them—make for an unavoidable difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise “perfectly rational” people.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘If we are going to be rational we must take—and have no responsible choice but to take—the stance that our own standards (of truth, value, and choice) are the appropriate ones. Be it in employing or in evaluating them, we ourselves must see our own standards as authoritative because this, exactly, is what it is for them to be our own standards—their being our standards consists in our seeing them in this light. We have to see our standards in an absolutistic light—as the uniquely right appropriately valid ones—because this is what is at issue in their being our standards of authentic truth, value, or whatever. To insist that we should view them with indifference is to deny us all prospects of having any standards at all. Commitment at this level is simply unavoidable. Our cognitive or evaluative perspective would not be our perspective did we not deem it rationally superior to others.’—Nicholas Rescher
‘What people think to be true is clearly something that is person-variable and thus relative. We can take the line that “What is true?” is a question that different people can quite appropriately answer differently because of the interpersonal variability of available information. But what truth is all about is something that is…altogether definite and fixed. The evidentiation at issue in the epistemic sector is doubtless interpersonally and intercommunally variable. But variability on the side of information does not make for variation on the side of concepts.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[W]e can (quite appropriately) disagree about what it is that is true and what good reasons are at hand, while yet maintaining an (appropriately) absolutistic view of what truth and good reasons are. The ideal nature of actual truth and of actual good reasons that inhere in our (defining) conceptions of inquiry establishes a clear limit to the implications of cognitive relativism. To re-emphasize: a pluralistic contextualism of potential basis-diversity is altogether compatible with an absolutistic commitment to our own basis. One can accept the prospect of alternatives as available to the community at large without seeing more than one of them appropriate for oneself. One can combine a pluralism of possible alternatives with an absolutistic position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in light of the cognitive values we in actual fact endorse. The crux of the pluralism issue lies in the question of just what it is that one is being pluralistic about.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The immense success of quantitative techniques in the mathematicizing-sciences has misled people into thinking that quantification is the only viable road to objectively cogent information. But think—is it really so? Where is it written that numbers alone yield genuine understanding—that judgment based on structural analysis or qualitative harmonization is unhelpful and uninformative, so that where numbers cannot enter, intelligibility flies away? (Modern mathematics itself is not all that quantitative, since it is deeply concerned with issues such as those of topology and group theory that deal with structures in a way that puts quantitative issues aside.) [….] To be sure, to acknowledge the limits of measurability is not to downgrade the whole process, let alone to propose its total abandonment. It is precisely because we are well advised to push the cause of measurement as far as we legitimately can that we need to be mindful of the line between meaningful measurement and meaningless quantifications. That we cannot draw this line better than seems to be the case at present is—or should be—a proper cause for justified chagrin. But for present purposes the salient point is that quantification does not carry measurability in its wake nor necessarily indicate objectivity. Polls quantify public opinion, but need they indicate anything objective? The sales price of entries in an art auction are perfectly good quantities, but they reflect no more than the elusive fashion and passion of the moment. There is nothing about quantities as such to indicate that they measure anything objective. Three lessons emerge:

a) While measurement requires quantification, quantification is not sufficient for measurement. b) Quantification is neither necessary to nor sufficient for objectivity. c) Actual measurement, while indeed sufficient for objectivity, is not necessary for it. The long and short of it is that the linkage between objectivity and quantification is more distant and more complex than is commonly envisioned.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘Any adequate worldview must recognize that the ongoing process of scientific inquiry is a process of conceptual innovation that always leaves various facts about the things of this world wholly outside the cognitive range of the inquirers of any particular period.’ —Nicholas Rescher

‘There is no more evidence that science converges to one final worldview than there is that literature or morality converge to one final worldview.’—Hilary Putnam

‘…[The] “scientific” is not coextensive with “rational.” There are many perfectly rational beliefs that cannot be tested ‘scientifically.’ But more than that, …there are whole domains of fact with respect to which present-day science tells us nothing at all, not even that the facts in question exist. These domains are not new or strange. Three of them are (1) the domain of objective values; (2) the domain of freedom; (3) the domain of rationality itself.’—Hilary Putnam

‘[F]ailures of objectivity—wishful thinking, self-deception, bias-indulgence, and similar departures from the path of reason—may be convenient and even, in some degree, psychologically comforting. But they are ultimately indefensible. For if it is a viable defense of a position that we want, it is bound to be a rational one. In the final analysis, “Why be rational?” must be answered with the only rationally appropriate response: “Because rationality itself obliges us to be so.” In providing a rational justification of objectivity—and what other kind would we want?—the best we can do is to follow the essentially circular (but nonviciously circular!) line of establishing that reason herself endorses taking this course. The only validation of rationality’s recommendations that can reasonably be asked for—and the only one worth having—must lie in the consideration of the systemic self-sufficiency of reason. Reason’s self-recommendation is an important and necessary aspect of the legitimation of the rational enterprise. And in those matters where rationality counts, objectivity is the best policy by virtue of this very fact itself.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘Heeding the strictures of morality is part and parcel of a rational being’s cultivation of the good. For us rational creatures morality (the due care for the interests of rational beings) is an integral component of reason’s commitment to the enhancement of value. Reason’s commitment to the value of rationality accordingly carries in its wake a commitment to morality. The obligatoriness of morality ultimately roots in an ontological imperative to value realization with respect to self and world that is incumbent on free agents as such. On this ontological perspective, the ultimate basis of moral duty roots in the obligation we have as rational agents (toward ourselves and the world at large) to make the most and best of our opportunities for self-development. Moral obligation ultimately inheres in this ontological obligation to the realization of values in one’s own life.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[T]he crucial question for rationality is not that of what we prefer but of what is in our best interests; not simply what we happen to desire but what is good for us in the sense of contributing to the realization of our true interests. The pursuit of what we want is rational only insofar as we have objectively sound reasons for deeming this to be want-deserving. The question of whether what we prefer is preferable, in the sense of deserving this preference, is always relevant. Ends can and (in the context of rationality) must be evaluated. It is not just beliefs that can be stupid, ill-advised, and inappropriate—that is to say, irrational—but ends as well. [….] What separates evaluations from mere preferences is that the former involves standards. In evaluating we bring criteria to bear on whose basis the ideas in question are rated as good or bad, superior or inferior, just or unjust, etc. Evaluations will, as such, have to be backed by reasons articulated in terms of the relevant norms—norms which ultimately inhere in the architecture of our generalizable needs.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘To proceed objectively is…to render oneself perspicuous to others by doing what any reasonable and normally constituted person would do in one’s place, thereby rendering one’s proceedings intelligible to anyone. When the members of a group are objective, they secure great advantages thereby: they lay the groundwork for community by paving the way for mutual understanding, communication, collaboration. And in cognitive matters they also sideline sources of error. For the essence of objectivity lies in its factoring out of one’s deliberations personal predilections, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, and the like that would stand in the way of intelligent people’s reaching the same result. Objectivity follows in reason’s wake because of its effectiveness as a means of averting both isolation and error.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘We learn most of what we know about what makes life worth living, and how to live it well, from non-scientific [or, if you prefer, non-legal] sources–biography, narrative history, serious journalism, and religious texts [I would add ‘philosophy’], not to mention novels, poetry, drama and the visual arts. For Europeans at least, there is more insight to be got from a single volume by Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert than a whole shelf of treatises on the social psychology of bourgeois love and marriage.’—John Ziman

‘The question of truth and the question of life’s meaning are among the most fundamental questions of moral philosophy. [….] The question of life’s meaning does, as the untheoretical suppose, lead into the question of truth—and conversely.”—David Wiggins

‘To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate “true” metaphysical descriptions of the world does not…necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this “real” or “true” world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [....] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.’—Nandini Iyer

‘The propounder of non-absolutism…admits both non-absolutism and absolutism in their proper perspective.’—Ācārya Mahāprajñā (a Jain philosopher)

‘I think that the idealist “picture” calls our attention to vitally important features of our practice—and what is the point of having “pictures” if we are not interested in seeing how well they represent what we actually think and do? That we do not, in practice, actually construct a unique vision of the world, but only a vast number of versions (not all of them equivalent…) is something that “realism” hides from us.’—Hilary Putnam

Sources & Further Reading:

• Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Frankena, William K. Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973.
• Goldie, Peter. On Personality. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Goldie, Peter. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Goodman, Lenn E. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books/Prometheus Books, 2001.
• Iyer, Nandini. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed. Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson. Leiden: Brill, 2005: 99-127.
• Kupperman, Joel. Value…And What Follows. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity & Diversity of the Human Mind. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2007.
• Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
• Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
• Lynch, Michael P. Truth as One and Many. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Lynch, Michael P., ed. The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Mason, Elinor, “Value Pluralism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/value-pluralism/.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Central Philosophy of Jainism: Anekāntavāda. Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology, 1981.
• Mou, Bo, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2001.
• Mulhall, Stephen. “Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed. Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 255-277.
• Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1991.
• Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1993.
• Newell, R.W. Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
• Norton, David. Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• O’Hear, Anthony, ed. Philosophy, the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Putnam, Hilary (James Conant, ed.). Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Validity of Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
• Sen, Amartya. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988.
• Stocker, Michael. Plural and Conflicting Values. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Stocker, Michael (with Elizabeth Hegeman). Valuing Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Thakchoe, Sonam, “The Theory of Two Truths in India,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/twotruths-india/.
• Thakchoe, Sonam, “The Theory of Two Truths in Tibet,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/twotruths-tibet/.
• Warner, Martin. Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2009.
• Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Wiggins, David. Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Zimmerman, Michael J. The Nature of Intrinsic Value. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
• Zimmerman, Michael J., “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/.