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"Westerhoff, Jan"
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Reality : a very short introduction
'What is real?' has been one of the key questions of philosophy since its beginning in antiquity. But it is not just a question that philosophers ask. This Very Short Introduction discusses what reality is by looking at a variety of arguments, theories, and thought-experiments from philosophy, physics, and cognitive science.
Book
Idealist Implications of Contemporary Science
Recent developments in contemporary natural science (including the evolutionary study of perception, cognitive science, and interpretations of quantum physics) incorporate central idealist positions relating to the nature of representation, the role our minds play in structuring our experience of the world, and the properties of the world behind our representations. This paper first describes what these positions are, and how they are introduced in the relevant theories in terms of precisely formulated scientific analogues. I subsequently consider how this way of looking at philosophical idealism through selected parts of contemporary science can help us to pursue new ways of developing key idealist questions in a way that is integrated with a naturalistically supported endeavour to understand central features of reality.
Journal Article
Nāgārjuna and the Philosophy of Language
The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the key points of Nāgārjuna's discussion of problems relating to the philosophy of language. We will focus on two works from Nāgārjuna's yukti-corpus that address these matters most explicitly, the Vigrahavyāvartanī (VV) and the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (VP). The discussion will concentrate on four topics: Nāgārjuna's views on semantics, the problem of empty names, the relation between language and momentariness, and the implications of Madhyamaka views on parts and wholes for the existence of language.
Journal Article
On the Nihilist Interpretation of Madhyamaka
Madhyamaka philosophy has been frequently characterized as nihilism, not just by its Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents, but also by some contemporary Buddhologists. This characterization might well strike us as surprising. First, nihilism appears to be straightforwardly inconsistent (\"if there is nothing, there is still the fact that there is nothing, so there is something\"). It would be curious if a philosophical school holding such an obviously deficient view would have acquired the kind of importance Madhyamaka has acquired in the Asian intellectual landscape over the last two millenia. Second, Madhyamaka by its very name proclaims to tread the \"middle way\", and what if anything would count as an extreme position but the view that there is nothing? This essay addresses both the systematic status of nihilist theories as well as the historical contexts in which Madhyamaka has been characterized as nihilistic, aiming to throw some light on plausible and implausible ways of understanding the Madhyamaka intellectual enterprise.
Journal Article
What it Means to Live in a Virtual World Generated by Our Brain
Recent discussions in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have defended a theory according to which we live in a virtual world akin to a computer simulation, generated by our brain. It is argued that our brain creates a model world from a variety of stimuli; this model is perceived as if it was external and perception-independent, even though it is neither of the two. The view of the mind, brain, and world, entailed by this theory (here called \"virtual world theory\") has some peculiar consequences which have rarely been explored in detail. This paper sets out virtual world theory (1.1) and relates it to various central philosophical problems (indirect realism (1.2), the role of the perceiver (1.3) and the problem of the existence of the external world (1.4)). The second part suggests three interpretations of virtual world theory, two familiar ones (a strong and a weak one, 2.1) and a somewhat less familiar one (the irrealist interpretation, 2.2). The remainder of the paper argues that the irrealist interpretation is the one we should adopt (2.3–2.6).
Journal Article
Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka : a philosophical introduction
This book contains a discussion of thought of the 2nd-century Indian Buddhist philosophy Nāgārjuna, the founder of the ‘Middle Way’ (Madhyamaka) school of Buddhist thought. The discussion is based on Nāgārjuna’s main philosophical works preserved either in the original Sanskrit or in Tibetan translation. It offers a synoptic presentation of the main philosophical topics Nāgārjuna investigates, focusing on the central notion of emptiness (sūnyatā). Particular emphasis is put on an analysis of the philosophical content of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. Apart from discussing the soundness of Nāgārjuna’s arguments for particular conclusions the book also examines to which extent Nāgārjuna’s philosophy forms a coherent philosophical system rather than a collection of individual ideas.
eBook
A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early Modern Wunderkammer
Concentrating on the works of German authors during from the last three quarters of the 17th Century, Westerhoff argues that there existed a prominent view of signs and signification in late 16th and 17th century Europe which can help to understand several puzzling aspects of baroque culture. The view, known as \"pansemioticism,\" constituted a fundamental part of the baroque conception of the world.
Journal Article
The Incompleteness of the World and Its Consequences
In the recent literature we find various arguments against the possibility of absolutely general quantification. Far from being merely a technical question in the philosophy of logic, the impossibility of absolutely general quantification (if established) would have severe consequence for ontology, for it would imply the non-existence of the world as traditionally conceived. This paper will investigate these implications for ontology and consider some possible ways of addressing them.
Journal Article
Logical Relations between Pictures
Westerhoff examines the logical relations between depictions. He notes the difficulty of codifying logical relations between objects with dissimilar syntactic structures, as well exploring whether pictures can be truth-bearing objects. Westerhoff asserts that assuming that neither of the above criteria are true is incorrect.
Journal Article
Nāgārjuna's Arguments on Motion Revisited
This paper discusses a somewhat neglected reading of the second chapter of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, arguing that the main focus of a crucial part is a particular theory of properties and their relation to individuals they instantiate, rather than the refutation of specific assumptions about the nature of space and time. Some of Nāgārjuna's key arguments about motion should be understood as argument templates in which notions other than mover, motion, and so forth could be substituted. The remainder of the discussion of motion does not serve quasi-Zenonian purposes either but uses motion as a principal example of change and considers the soteriological problems of the subject moving (gati) through transmigratory existence (saṃsāra). I attempt to show how this interpretation coheres with Nāgārjuna's overall philosophical project.
Journal Article