The Scripps College Humanities Institute hosted a conference on Varieties of Self on March 6 and March 7, 2015, which examined the concept of self as it appears in different cultures and traditions, through philosophical, anthropological, psychological, and historical perspectives. Six leading scholars of traditions ranging from classical China and India to contemporary America presented work and discussed among themselves and with the audience.
The cardinal doctrine of Indian Buddhism — the claim from which all other Buddhist systematic thinking arguably follows — is anÄtmavÄda, or the “No-self doctrine.” Getting clear on what Indian Buddhists mean in saying that we are not (or do not have) “selves” requires getting clear on the soteriological problem that Buddhists, along with a great many of their contemporaries among other Indian religious and philosophical traditions, took themselves to be addressing. This widely shared Indian soteriological problematic explains much about just what kind of thing Buddhists were denying in arguing against the reality of “selves.” While their arguments in this vein have interesting affinities with the projects of some modern and contemporary philosophers (David Hume and Derek Parfit are perhaps most often invoked), there are important considerations that complicate such comparisons, and some contemporary philosophers have reasonably wondered whether the “self” targeted by Buddhists really amounts to a straw man. I would especially like to focus, though, on the counter-intuitive sense it makes to think that the constitutively Buddhist denial of selves is aptly characterized as having its place in a project worth the name self-transformation.
