Śaṅkaran Monism and the Limits of Thought

Abstract

Abstract A growing movement in contemporary philosophy of mind is looking back on Indian thought to gain new insights into the problem of consciousness. This paper weighs the prospects of thinking about mentality through the lenses of Śaṅkaran Advaita Vedānta. To start, I outline micropsychist and cosmopsychist accounts of consciousness, introduce Śaṅkaran monism, and describe a potential reason of attraction of the framework over micropsychist and cosmopsychist alternatives. I then show that the eliminativist commitments of the view threaten to yield a self-defeating account of ordinary experience, and that Advaitins took the accommodation of the issue to be beyond the reach of rational inquiry. Finally, I discuss how the analytical debate over Śaṅkaran monism might proceed based on these premises.