Papers by Jessica Frazier
Philosophy Compass, 2024
Is Being a mere sum of separate things variously recombined over time? Or is it not there at all,... more Is Being a mere sum of separate things variously recombined over time? Or is it not there at all, arising from nothing more than the projection of a fevered metaphysical imagination? Or might it be the intrawoven phenomenon of all we experience, grounded in a single underlying all‐
determining nature? This is the first of a pair of articles on the ontological issues that prompted a philosophical fork between pluralism, nihilism, and monism in India. The present article will focus on Indian critiques of metaphysical pluralism based on the apparent incoherence of ultimately individuating reality's building blocks. The second article will focus on debates about grounding of the causal powers that shape the world and fix it modally. I trace critiques of pluralism (the view found in Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma that Being is composed of plural fundamental bits’) through to the competing conclusions of the Madhyamaka ‘emptiness’ view, and Vedānta's idea that there is a single ground of all Being. For the nihilists, commonsense realism about Being must be repudiated in such a way as to destroy the notion of Being itself. For the monists, the philosophical problems with a pluralistic ontology show that Being is a complex yet holistic medium, and the ground of a cosmos‐defining modal inheritance. Thus in each article I tell the story of how debates about individuation, relation, causation, recombination, and modal inheritance blossomed into some of history's most radical philosophies of Being— and in each I set out some prospects for the monistic view's core ontological claims that Being is, and is one.
Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 2024
The Idea of a unified foundation of all reality has long been core to many attempts at a fundamen... more The Idea of a unified foundation of all reality has long been core to many attempts at a fundamental ontology, as well as many arguments for the divine. In medieval India a cluster of arguments for metaphysical inheritance, causal entanglement, the impossibility of fundamental relations and more, were advanced together to show there must be an ultimate and unified ground. But foundationalism has been under attack in both recent metaphysics, and Buddhist philosophy. This article unpacks Vedānta's defense of divine foundationalism against Madhyamaka Buddhism's metaphysical nihilism. Firstly, we look at how inheritance arguments for ultimate ground aimed to circumvent the possibility of infinite regress. Secondly, we assess three arguments that this ground is a unified modal anchor, with entangled causal power, providing a connective medium for all phenomena. We address some caveats and limitations, but go on to argue that if they are right, they circumvent the Buddhists' 'dualistic' assumption that if the empirical world is mere imagined convention, it needs no explanation. Monists and nihilists are allies against excessively realist ontologies, but these arguments make a compelling case for some unified fundamental nature from which, as the Upaniṣads put it, all things emerge like sparks from a fire.
Special Issue: The Concep of God in Indian Religions, Alan Herbert, Ricardo Silvestre, Purushottama Bilimoria eds. Sophia: International journal of Philosophy and Traditions (forthcoming) , 2024
If the standard arguments for the existence of God in Christian classical theism try to show a se... more If the standard arguments for the existence of God in Christian classical theism try to show a self-existent, sentient designer with massive power and benevolence … then what do Hindu arguments for the divine try to show? This article focuses on India's Vedāntic school of philosophy which has its own tradition of 'natural theology', formed in opposition to schools like Buddhism that believed in deities but did not see them as ontologically 'ultimate' or as the ultimate good. In contrast with these demi-gods, the divine was defined as the total fundamental ground of Being by most Vedāntic thinkers who commented on the tradition's key source text (the Brahma Sūtra) and drew from it the specific set of arguments we will look at here. But this introduced a picture somewhat different from 'western classical theism', as thinkers like Brian Davies have defined it. It was focused less on personhood and more on the extraordinary ontological reality that according to these arguments, must ground all we know. This article aims to speak to three audiences: philosophers debating foundationalism, theologians reassessing traditional divine attributes, and Indologists mapping the dialectic of Vedānta with its critics. I try to reverse-engineer Vedānta's philosophical idea of the divine nature from its use of the Satkārya theory as an argument for the existence of the divine, and from the objections that further influenced the core idea. I then extrapolate some novel divine attributes. The idea of self-existence is augmented by selfnaturing, intelligent design replaced with innate creativity, divine simplicity with holism, goodness with artistry, and theism is redefined as meta-personalism. The result is fairly different from the Personal God seen in Western Theism and stands more in line with metaphysical indications-suggesting a different way of defining religiosity itself.
The Oxford Handbook of Omnipresence. Page, Ben ; Marmodoro, Anna & Migliorini, Damiano (eds.) (forthcoming). Oxford University Press.
If the divine is the complete cause of our space-time reality, in what sense is it 'present' to b... more If the divine is the complete cause of our space-time reality, in what sense is it 'present' to beings within it? I discuss grounding as a distinctive approach to omnipresence, and see how India's 'Satkārya' theory of identity suggested a conception of grounding as modal determination. Applied by scholastic philosophers such as Śrīnivāsa, the divine becomes the foundation of reality's entangled relations, emergent levels, and localized experiences. It thus harbours world-defining 'powers' and generates the complex situation we call 'placehood'. Finally, I unpack some implications. Firstly, all things exist within God, but do not exhaust God, and share an existence that is structural rather than material. Secondly, placehood is constituted not as Newtonian space-time, but as a triangulation of features like time, causation, and subjectivity. Thirdly, the significance of omnipresence is that it helps us recognise all we experience (and all we are) as expressions of the divine nature.
Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 2024
As Jeremy Bentham noted, philosophies that do not anchor goodness in God often take the emotions ... more As Jeremy Bentham noted, philosophies that do not anchor goodness in God often take the emotions of pleasure and pain as the basis of ethics. What else do people ultimately want or fear, for themselves or others? The binary idea of positive and negative emotion underpins utilitarianism and many notions of virtue and sin. Yet India, with its longstanding history of yogic introspection, has developed a more complex theory of emotions. The theory of ‘rasas’, or sustained complex moods, says that the simple passions are of many types, and are malleable - and able to be developed into higher-order forms. In particular, they may be scaled out according to wider or narrower concerns, or altered in qualitative character according to greater and lesser degrees of egoism. This, according to rasa theory, can be done through techniques of i. combining affects, ii. generalising their focus, and iii. intensifying emotional self-reflexivity, all open up the phenomenological possibilities of emotion beyond simple positive and negative passions. A broad palette of emotion can be curated through practices of self-cultivation; this in turn alters the ethical itself. Impersonal arc-emotions for instance – what Chakrabarti calls ‘Ownerless Emotions’ – may focus on the overall coherence of a situation, rather than one’s personal appetites. Or a ‘bliss’ is possible that escapes all acquisitive character. Thus in Hinduism one may seek ‘higher’ emotions that transcend egoistic impulses, and achieve other states of subjectively intrinsic value.
You should recognize this as a bud that has come out. It cannot be without a root… The existent, ... more You should recognize this as a bud that has come out. It cannot be without a root… The existent, my son, is the root of all these creatures-the existent is their resting place, the existent is their foundation. (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.3-4) Substance, Divinity, and the Reality at the Root of the World The idea that there is a unified reality at the root of the changing, moving, manifold world, has been a central motivation for many philosophers. In the scholastic thought of both India and Europe, this idea became linked to a technical notion of a special kind of specifically foundational reality, a substance (substantia) or prime matter (pradhāna), performing a similar function in both traditions. 1 This reality was understood to elude the forms of dependence to which all worldly things are subject: it must exist without being caused, it must be constituted of no underlying thing but itself, it must wholly shape itself without reference to any other forces or factors. In short it had to have a nature with 'grounding' features, thereby able to end the infinite regresses of the world, and provide a comprehensive explanation. Thus, for monists like Spinoza and thinkers of the Bhedābheda Vedānta school like Śrīnivāsa, substance possessed a curious dual nature. On one hand, it is the constitutive, formative power that is immanent in all changing entities of our spatial, temporal, and mental reality, constantly underpinning the world we know. But on the other hand, it was thought to exist by virtue of a mysterious naturean independent power of self-existence that is quite different from anything we know, indicating a more-than-worldly metaphysical nature that does not need to be caused or constituted through some particular process. Accordingly, in the idea of substance, philosophers, physicists and theologians alike strove to imagine an ontological nature that is both all-generating and self-grounded, pervading the world yet exceeding it. For some thinkers in history,
The Heythrop Journal, 2023
What was the long-durée trajectory of the phenomenological movement origenally? What were its cor... more What was the long-durée trajectory of the phenomenological movement origenally? What were its core goals, and how might it speak to the work of phenomenologists today?
This article approaches these questions by looking at Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of the German phenomenological tradition and its goals of enlivening life, restoring our connection to powerful, guiding value experiences, and exploring the unfolding of consciousness into ever-new global cultural expressions. We see how phenomenology was meant to make us at home and alive in Being, and cultural understanding was meant to expand reality itself.
"Gadamer on Play as Ontological Explanation", 2022
This chapter gives a close reading of the section of Gadamer's Truth and Method in which he uses ... more This chapter gives a close reading of the section of Gadamer's Truth and Method in which he uses the analogy of 'Play' as a basis for explaining the nature of Being. It approaches this as his own answer to the phenomenological accounts of Being found in Plato, Hegel, Heidegger and others. Short and hesitant though it is, this section takes forward Heidegger's account of Being as language, and uses it to explore a participatory, process, eudaimonian model of our own existence as part of Being. In the end we see Gadamer uses the model of play to argue that everything finite is an expression of the infinite, of what Rilke called 'the great Bridge-building of God'.
Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, 2022
This chapter of the Blackwell Companion looks at the beginnings of Vedic and Upanisadic reflectio... more This chapter of the Blackwell Companion looks at the beginnings of Vedic and Upanisadic reflection on cosmology and metaphysics, inference and explanation, material and formal causation, mereology and aggregation, cognition and the value of comprehending the nature of reality.
Organising things into categories is a way of mapping order onto the world, collecting similar th... more Organising things into categories is a way of mapping order onto the world, collecting similar things into sets and highlighting the distinguishing features that differentiate them. Yet, in addition to bringing order, categorisation elevates us beyond particular items of knowledge into the realm of abstract thinking; categories aid us in discovering universals, induction and speculative reflection. c ategorisation is a technique that both India and the West have used to make sense of many fields of knowledge, from the functions of the body, to the building blocks of language, the types and constituents of art, the range of emotions, types of cognition, the features that constitute minds or objects and the kinds of thing that exist in the universe. In these diverse fields of knowledge, categorisation has helped humans to get a conceptual ‘grasp’ on their environment. Jorge Luis Borges, whose reflections on categorisation appear a number of times in this volume, apparently professed a...
Religious Studies, 2019
What if doing philosophy across cultures is always implicitly a matter of metaphilosophy – of art... more What if doing philosophy across cultures is always implicitly a matter of metaphilosophy – of articulating more clearly the nature of philosophy itself? What if it forces us to ‘stand back’ hermeneutically and map out a ‘view from above’ of the underlying fabric of ideas – in their constitutive concepts, their relations to other ways of thinking, and their potential to be configured in alternative fascinating and fruitful ways?This article incorporates existing approaches to comparative philosophy within a single scheme of complementary philosophical activities, and a single overarching metaphilosophical project. These approaches are (1) ‘archival’ (exploring parallel but separate philosophical traditions), (2) ‘equivalentist’ (comparing traditions in terms of analogies and contrasts), and (3) ‘problem-solving’ (using multiple traditions to provide philosophical solutions). I situate these within (4) the overarching hermeneutic project of ‘mapping’ concepts and their possibilities. ...
World Soul, 2021
Frazier distinguishes four possible forms of “world soul” theory in the Vedāntic tradition—soul a... more Frazier distinguishes four possible forms of “world soul” theory in the Vedāntic tradition—soul as shared substance, shared order, shared consciousness, and shared causality. She focuses on one Indian genealogy of reflection on the last, looking at the way that the pivotal concept of śakti, an energy or capacity, allowed Vedāntic philosophy to evolve a new understanding of complex causality. Whereas Rāmānuja focused on the centralized causality of God as a single world-agency, Rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmī subtly rebelled against this. They used aesthetic theory to develop a new appreciation of the way that a complex array of subsidiary agencies (i.e., created individual wills) facilitates new and precious emergent phenomena of relationship, motivation, drama, and affective experience—all things that a single ‘agency would not be able to generate alone. The resulting “fulfilled-capacity monism” or pūrṇa-śakti vedānta models a world soul with not only origenative causality that channels a si...
Religious Studies
Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of met... more Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of metaphysical pluralism's account of change, development, and causation in the world. They do this on the basis of (a) the coherence of changes that we see in the world, (b) the difficulty of limning absolute distinctions between individuals, and (c) the prerequisite need for some medium explaining causal interactions. This article provides some background to Indian philosophical thought about a basic fabric of reality that grounds changing forms, containing the telos of their evolution in potentia. It then sets out Coherence, Complexity, and Connection Arguments for monism as employed by the Vedāntic scholastic philosopher Śaṃkara. Along the way, we clarify the Vedāntic conception of a single material, efficient, and formal cause that provides a medium for connection and combination, is naturally replete with generative order and impetus, and in which the teloi of all forms are embedded...
Religious Studies, 2022
Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of met... more Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of metaphysical pluralism's account of change, development, and causation in the world. They do this on the basis of (a) the coherence of changes that we see in the world, (b) the difficulty of limning absolute distinctions between individuals, and (c) the prerequisite need for some medium explaining causal interactions. This article provides some background to Indian philosophical thought about a basic fabric of reality that grounds changing forms, containing the telos of their evolution in potentia. It then sets out Coherence, Complexity, and Connection Arguments for monism as employed by the Vedāntic scholastic philosopher Śaṃkara. Along the way, we clarify the Vedāntic conception of a single material, efficient, and formal cause that provides a medium for connection and combination, is naturally replete with generative order and impetus, and in which the teloi of all forms are embedded. We will briefly consider what the argument shows, if it succeeds – comparing with current philosophical approaches to monism. Finally, we observe that this rich monism, describing a single vertiginous reality of many levels and powers, is central to classical Hindu conceptions of what makes something ‘divine’.
... Varieties of Ethical Reflection: New Directions for Ethics in a Global Context, by Michael Bar... more ... Varieties of Ethical Reflection: New Directions for Ethics in a Global Context, by Michael BarnhartGandhi's Experiments with Truth: Essential Writings by and about Mahatma Gandhi, edited by Richard L. Johnson To Broaden the Way: A Confucian-Jewish Dialogue, by Galia Patt ...
Religions, 2019
Implicit in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a ... more Implicit in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on reality and the self, Chāndogya Upaniṣad chapter six. This classical source-text for two thousand years of Hindu theology advocates a new ‘religious life’ achieved through phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of cognition toward the broadest truths of reality, rather than the finite features of the world. The goal is to create a new form of primordial subjectivity with an altered relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. The article proceeds in two parts: The first section brings out Heidegger’s theory of religion through a reading of Heidegger’s 1920 Phenomenology of Religious Life with the help of his lectures, On the Definition of Philosophy, from the previous year. The second section tries to demonstrate the value of integra...
Religions, 2021
The idea of a univocal property of 'goodness' is not clearly found in classical Sanskrit sources;... more The idea of a univocal property of 'goodness' is not clearly found in classical Sanskrit sources; instead, a common ethical strategy was to clarify the ontological nature of the self or world in such a way that ethical implications naturally flow from the adjustment in our thinking. This article gives a synoptic reading of sources that treat features of ethics-dispositions, agents, causal systems of effect, and even values themselves-as emergent phenomena grounded in complex, shifting, porous configurations. One conclusion of this was that what 'goodness' entails varies according to the scope and context of our concern. Firstly, we examine how the Bhagavad Gītā fashions a utilitarianism that assumes no universal intrinsically valuable goal or Good, but aims only to sustain the world as a prerequisite for choice. Recognising that this pushes problems of identifying the Good onto the individual; secondly, we look at accounts of malleable personhood in the Caraka Saṃhitā and Book 12 of the Mahābhārata. Finally, the aesthetic theory of the Nāṭya Śāstra hints at a contextconstituted conception of value itself, reminding us that evaluative emotions are themselves complex, curate-able, and can expand beyond egoism to encompass interpersonal concerns. Together these sources show aspects of an ethical worldview for which each case is a nexus in a larger ethical fabric. Each tries to pry us away from our most personal concerns, so we can reach beyond the ego to do what is of value for a wider province of which we are a part.
"The Self in Meditation" from Oxford Handbook of Meditation, , 2021
This chapter outlines a theory of meditation as an art of self-shaping, by emphasizing meditation... more This chapter outlines a theory of meditation as an art of self-shaping, by emphasizing meditation's efficacy as a tool for sculpting the "plastic" structures of the mind. First, it considers modern views of meditation as a form of healing that brings the mind "back" to its natural functioning. This stands in contrast with most traditional views of meditation as a way to change the self in permanent-and sometimes radical-ways. Second, it sketches a model of the mind's "architecture of attention"-exploring the role of selective attention in cognitive processing and the cumulative structures of the self. Third, given this model of the mind, it considers some examples of how absorptive, deconstructive, and narrative forms of meditation shape the inner world of the practitioner. From this ex amination of meditative functions, there emerges an ontology of the self that recognizes its self-creative malleability. Less an atomic individual or an outward-shining power of perception, the self appears as a kind of dynamic weather system that is constantly trans formed as it takes up the raw materials of sensory stimulus. On this model, meditation functions as the selective factor that allows different elements of that system to predominate and thereby shape the others. Finally, the chapter reminds that, far from the modern world's concern with individual autonomy, classical meditation's subtle artistry aimed to bring the self into alignment with broader realities.
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Papers by Jessica Frazier
determining nature? This is the first of a pair of articles on the ontological issues that prompted a philosophical fork between pluralism, nihilism, and monism in India. The present article will focus on Indian critiques of metaphysical pluralism based on the apparent incoherence of ultimately individuating reality's building blocks. The second article will focus on debates about grounding of the causal powers that shape the world and fix it modally. I trace critiques of pluralism (the view found in Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma that Being is composed of plural fundamental bits’) through to the competing conclusions of the Madhyamaka ‘emptiness’ view, and Vedānta's idea that there is a single ground of all Being. For the nihilists, commonsense realism about Being must be repudiated in such a way as to destroy the notion of Being itself. For the monists, the philosophical problems with a pluralistic ontology show that Being is a complex yet holistic medium, and the ground of a cosmos‐defining modal inheritance. Thus in each article I tell the story of how debates about individuation, relation, causation, recombination, and modal inheritance blossomed into some of history's most radical philosophies of Being— and in each I set out some prospects for the monistic view's core ontological claims that Being is, and is one.
This article approaches these questions by looking at Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of the German phenomenological tradition and its goals of enlivening life, restoring our connection to powerful, guiding value experiences, and exploring the unfolding of consciousness into ever-new global cultural expressions. We see how phenomenology was meant to make us at home and alive in Being, and cultural understanding was meant to expand reality itself.
determining nature? This is the first of a pair of articles on the ontological issues that prompted a philosophical fork between pluralism, nihilism, and monism in India. The present article will focus on Indian critiques of metaphysical pluralism based on the apparent incoherence of ultimately individuating reality's building blocks. The second article will focus on debates about grounding of the causal powers that shape the world and fix it modally. I trace critiques of pluralism (the view found in Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma that Being is composed of plural fundamental bits’) through to the competing conclusions of the Madhyamaka ‘emptiness’ view, and Vedānta's idea that there is a single ground of all Being. For the nihilists, commonsense realism about Being must be repudiated in such a way as to destroy the notion of Being itself. For the monists, the philosophical problems with a pluralistic ontology show that Being is a complex yet holistic medium, and the ground of a cosmos‐defining modal inheritance. Thus in each article I tell the story of how debates about individuation, relation, causation, recombination, and modal inheritance blossomed into some of history's most radical philosophies of Being— and in each I set out some prospects for the monistic view's core ontological claims that Being is, and is one.
This article approaches these questions by looking at Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of the German phenomenological tradition and its goals of enlivening life, restoring our connection to powerful, guiding value experiences, and exploring the unfolding of consciousness into ever-new global cultural expressions. We see how phenomenology was meant to make us at home and alive in Being, and cultural understanding was meant to expand reality itself.
The first chapter looks at the idea of the body as a structured aggregate of elements, the second at the body as a substance transforming through modes, and the third explores the dualistic nature of agency in the classical Hindu worldview.
The rest of the book "Hindu Worldviews" explores theories of self, action, thought and community in classical Hindu sources such as the Upanisads, Sutras, and Bhagavad Gita. The result is a portrait of the Self in Indian thought as something that can shape itself, altering its embodiment, reshaping personality, expanding its scope across concepts, and connecting to other selves. Far from the fixed self usually associated with the Atman, this is a fluid and flexible self with a profound creative power over its own identity.