Past Event: SEMPY: Allison Aitken (Columbia)

Title: “Vasubandhu on the Mind-Body Problem"

Abstract: A central challenge for dualists in Early Modern European philosophy—famously epitomized in the Descartes-Princess Elisabeth correspondence—concerns how to explain causal commerce between the mind and body when conceived as substances that are different in kind. In this talk, I will analyze this “mind-body heterogeneity problem” in a different intellectual context: Abhidharma Buddhist scholasticism. Despite the fact that the mind-body problem is not explicitly thematized as such in classical Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy, the mechanics of mind-body interaction comprise a central topic of dispute among Abhidharma philosophers. In his Treasury of Abhidharma, Vasubandhu (4th–5th century) details a host of debates over explanatory puzzles concerning body→mind causal interaction in the case of sense perception and mind→body causal interaction in the case of volitional action. I will show how these disagreements between competing Abhidharma schools of thought turn on the nature and function of contact (sparśa). Vasubandhu exhibits an inclination to favor ontologically lighter-weight characterizations of contact. Yet, as he himself acknowledges, this move resolves certain problems only to raise new explanatory challenges. I will show how Vasubandhu exploits the dualists’ unresolved “contact problem” to motivate his argument for the more parsimonious Yogācāra idealist ontology in his Twenty Verses. Nevertheless, while this move to idealism obviates worries about mind-body interaction, it does so only to expose new puzzles in explaining mind-mind interaction.