Ethan Mills
I am Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). I earned my PhD in philosophy from the University of New Mexico after earning an MA in philosophy from the University of Hawai'i and a BA in philosophy from Hamline University.
My areas of specialization are Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, and Ancient and Modern Skepticism (including skepticism in classical India). I am also interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Hellenistic philosophy, contemporary epistemology, philosophy of religion, early modern European philosophy, ethics, Chinese philosophy, philosophy and science fiction, and philosophy and horror.
I am also currently the Book Review Editor at The Indian Philosophy Blog (www.indianphilosophyblog.org) and President of the Tennessee Philosophical Association (www.tpaweb.org).
Please see my personal website for more information: http://ethan-mills.weebly.com
Address: Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
My areas of specialization are Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, and Ancient and Modern Skepticism (including skepticism in classical India). I am also interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Hellenistic philosophy, contemporary epistemology, philosophy of religion, early modern European philosophy, ethics, Chinese philosophy, philosophy and science fiction, and philosophy and horror.
I am also currently the Book Review Editor at The Indian Philosophy Blog (www.indianphilosophyblog.org) and President of the Tennessee Philosophical Association (www.tpaweb.org).
Please see my personal website for more information: http://ethan-mills.weebly.com
Address: Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
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(https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/05/02/incorporating-student-film-making-in-a-course-on-horror-and-philosophy/ )
Tentative description:
This will be a single-volume inquiry into the major features of skepticism within India, meant to be accessible to non-Indologist philosophers while informed by and responsive to current historical and philological research.
A welcome trend in contemporary academic epistemology is an increased willingness to take seriously thinkers and traditions outside of the Western canon. This is especially the case for classical Indian philosophy, which has exceptionally rich developments in theories of justification, a family of “knowledge source” approaches to epistemology with natural resonances with contemporary reliablism and externalism, and millennia of sustained attention to the nature of cognition, both from a phenomenological perspective and from the standpoint of justificatory practices.
Within the classical Indian scene, there were also a number of challengers to the notion that we can identify discrete knowledge sources (perception, inference, testimony, etc.) and then build up an objective, settled conception of the world by reliance upon such sources. The historical Buddha was likely one such challenger, but there were many others, with varied motivations. Some were mystics, distrustful of the urge to capture reality with our cognitive faculties; others were materialists and hedonists who scoffed at religiosity and those who sought to justify a world beyond what was right in front of their own faces.
Recent scholarship on Indian skeptics has often been devoted to making sense of where to place them in a philosophical taxonomy. Are some of the most important figures in Indian skepticism better thought of as anti-realists or idealists? Other scholarship has attempted to understand how the skeptics try to make sense of ordinary, uncritical life, if we are to abandon the search for objective, settled claims on the world.
It is as difficult to summarize Indian skeptics in a single, clean definition as it would be to summarize “Western” skeptics. But to gesture toward some distinguishing characteristics, let us note a few. As noted above, epistemology in India is centered on the identification and analysis of knowledge sources (pramāṇa). While such epistemology has internalist shadings, its dominant orientation is reliablist. Because of this, skeptics in India tend to concern themselves with undermining attempts to justify claims by appeal to mechanisms that consistently generate knowledge. A second feature of skepticism in India is that it is often (although not always) a form of conceptual skepticism; that is, skeptics attempt to demonstrate, often by means of a form of argument called prasaṅga (unwanted consequences), that their opponents’ conceptions of the knowledge sources or other philosophical concepts are either internally inconsistent or at odds with the opponents’ other commitments. Another characteristic is a widespread (though definitely not universal) notion of “two truths” that is prevalent in Buddhist thought and some of the Hindu schools, which recognize higher and lower orientations toward reality. Buddhist skeptics, most famously Nāgārjuna (c. 200) CE and his followers, use a precise skeptical dialectic to undermine clams to objective, settled truth. What then to say about life as understood normally? And is it possible to gain access to knowledge that is indeed non-contextualized and settled? Or is there no ultimate distinction between the two tiers, with the “higher” tier being nothing more than a futile – even harmful – abstraction?