NĀGĀRJUNA'S MADHYAMAKA: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION . By Jan Westerhoff . New York : Oxford University Press , 2009 . Pp . xiii + 242 . Cloth, $99.00; paper, $24.95 .
摘要
Westerhoff's lucid overview considers Nāgārjuna's thought “from a systematic perspective,” taking the various texts attributed to Madhyamaka's founder as “part of a coherent philosophical argument and [as] express[ing] a unified philosophical position.” Among other things, Westerhoff illuminatingly attends to the varying senses of svabhāva. The chief target of all of Nāgārjuna's arguments, svabhāva, alternately picks out such arguably distinct ideas as “substance” and “essence.” Westerhoff notes a related conflation of distinct kinds of dependence relations (viz., causal and notional), a conflation that can be seen, in Westerhoff's treatment of Nāgārjuna on causation, as revealing what may be Madhyamaka's principal concern. Thus, if the merely notional interdependence of cause and effect fails to capture the asymmetry that characterizes causation (i.e., if it is hard to see how one could think causes depend for their existence on their effects), the point looks different in light of ineliminable reference to someone's perspective on the instances of causation that can be in view. The very existence of causes, then, may after all be at stake even given merely “notional” relations, as it is “our cognitive act of cutting up the world of phenomena in the first place” that necessarily individuates the events that can be thought to require causal explanation. While some may complain that attributing a “systematic” project to Nāgārjuna gives short shrift to possible readings of him as an anti‐systematic thinker, Westerhoff's is a clear and cogent case for a philosophically sophisticated reading of Madhyamaka.
