Circle of philosophy

We have included in this site several essays exploring (among others) a certain 'school' or approach to philosophy which might be briefly described as one based primarily on the direct (unedited) reflection of consciousness upon itself. Our major thesis was that the core elements for such a philosophy are found in the ancient Pali suttas as well in many places in the history of both western and eastern philosophy.  Almost everything that is of value in Husserl's 'transcendental phenomenology' is to be found in previous philosophical works and the ideal of a  'reduction' and 'epokhê' is found in its most correct and thorough form in the Pali suttas (which have a strange agreement with several elements of Aristotle's De Anima and even the first Ennead).  A complex and interesting issue is whether Hume or Kant came closest to the kind of transcendental awareness required for this approach to philosophy.

Another major approach to philosophy is skepticism as exemplified by what accounts we can collect the 'skeptical' phase of the Academy, Pyrrho and most importantly the extant works of Sextus Empiricus together with the works of Nagârjuna.  We argue for a substantial affinity between Sextus' Pyrrhonism and the Madhyamaka, just as the Yogacara (and specially some later analytical works of this school) is an important example of a consciousness-based philosophy. But paradoxically there is also an intriguing correspondence with late neoplatonism as well, with the apophaticism of Damaskios, Pseudo-Dionysus and others. We can discern in varying degrees the same kind of  equipollent amphibolous 'dialectic' in many important figures of modern philosophy such as Kant and Hegel.

Finally we have an approach to philosophy based on analytical atomism, and this 'atomism' maybe (perhaps even simultaneously) physical, psychological and logical-conceptual.  Obvious examples are Leucippus, Democritus, the Vaisheshika and the various schools of pre-or-non-Mahâyâna  Abidharmma as well as the strikingly important case of Hume. There are also many examples of 'logical atomism' from ancient times to the present. In a way any doctrine of categories - specially those based on an analysis of language (cf. the Stoic lekta or the Proclean logoi) - tends towards a theory of logical atomism. One of our approaches involves a theory of categories based on finitism and computability (Turing completeness and Church's thesis) allied to a formal combinatory analysis of logic and language. Any theory of deduction or inference is at least implicitly involved with computability.

Now a remarkable fact is that not only are these three approaches are in no wise  plainly  'contradictory' or 'incompatible' but they appear to be deeply entangled and dependent on each other (even if only in a negative sense, such as when atomism is taken as a starting point for refutation). This is patent for instance in the literature on the relationship between the Madhyamaka and Yogacara on in the text of Hume' Treatise  itself which is remarkable for containing at once elements of all three approaches.  A major issue is the relationship between these schools and ethics, the consistency with and indeed implication of a moral compassionate realism along the lines of Schopenhauer and the ancient Buddhist precepts. Notice that if we look at the best ancient representatives of all three approaches we see that the ethical spirit in fact imbues everything !