This paper examines two accounts of how Buddhist meditative practice has been seen as cultivating nonconceptual mental states. The first, exemplified in recent work by Evan Thompson, drawing on Dharmakīrti, views the representational contents of certain meditative states as nonconceptual. The second, found in Yogācāra texts like the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, suggests that meditation cultivates a type...
Abstract There has in recent years been a significant surge of interest in non‐materialist accounts of the mind. Property dualists hold that all substances (concrete particulars that persist over time) are material, but mental properties are distinct from physical properties. Substance dualists maintain that the mind or person is a non‐material substance. This article considers the prospects...
Abstract Recent years have seen a growing interest in Buddhist thought as a potential source of alternative conceptions of the nature of the mind and the relation between the mental and the physical. This article considers and assesses three different models of what contemporary philosophy of mind can learn from Buddhist thought. One model, advocated by Alan Wallace, holds that we can learn...