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Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philoso- phy. By Christian Coseru. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 356. isbn 978-0-19-984338-1.
In Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Phi- losophy, Christian Coseru makes the innovative and ambitious argument that the project of Indian Buddhist epistemology, as represented by thinkers in the Yogacara tradition of Dignaga and Dharmakirti, is continuous in many of its methods and conclusions with the phenomenological theories of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as with recent naturalistic approaches in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. In Coseru's reading, Buddhism shares with phenomenology the attitude that metaphysical and epistemological questions cannot be treated in isolation from questions concerning the nature of conscious awareness and the manner in which objects are experientially disclosed. As for naturalism, Coseru claims that Buddhist epistemology is amenable to the view that a proper account of the acquisition and justification of knowledge must rest on a scientifically informed understanding of the causal processes involved in generating cognitions. Thus, the aim of this book is threefold: to elaborate the central tenets of Buddhist epistemology as a form of "phenomenological naturalism," to show that Buddhist theories of per- ception and self-awareness resolve certain dilemmas in epistemology and philoso- phy of mind, and ultimately to suggest ways in which Buddhist insights can be integrated into the contemporary study of cognition and consciousness.
After introducing the broad outlines of phenomenological naturalism in the first chapter, Coseru uses the second chapter to give a wide-ranging introduction to clas- sical Indian methods of philosophical reasoning, addressing metatheoretical issues of translation and interpretation that lie in the background of his comparative project. In arguing that the relevance of Buddhist philosophical concerns can be extended beyond their historical and soteriological context, Coseru briefly addresses ways in which Buddhist theories of inference, concepts, and meditative insight can all be aligned with empirically informed psychological accounts. These parallels are devel- oped in later chapters: a "psychologistic" account of the Buddhist theory of inference is suggested in chapter 4; in chapters 6 and 7, Coseru mentions how the Buddhist apoha theory of concept formation resonates with empirical research on the role of prototypes and imagery in conceptual thought; and in chapters 8...