Position summary
Williams’s principal Madhyamaka work is Altruism and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (Curzon, 1998). The wiki holds it at second hand through Siderits’s feature review in Philosophy East and West 50.3 (see siderits-reality-altruism-2000). Across five chapter-length studies of BCA chapters 8–9, Williams subjects key Śāntideva arguments to analytic-philosophical scrutiny and finds them wanting. His chapter 5, provocatively titled “How Śāntideva Destroyed the Bodhisattva Path”, presses the most aggressive line. Śāntideva’s argument from impartial benevolence (BCA 8.101–103) requires that persons be conventionally as well as ultimately unreal; but that, Williams argues, destroys the bodhisattva’s ability to identify whose pain to relieve. The wider polemical core is a footnoted remark: “this Madhyamaka view [that nothing bears its own intrinsic nature] is incoherent”. Williams accepts Abhidharma-style Reductionism — pains have svabhāva, are “found under analysis” — but refuses Madhyamaka’s extension of niḥsvabhāvavāda to the dharmas themselves.
Hermeneutical approach
Williams engages the framework partially. He retains the Two Truths as a level-distinction and treats the Indo-Tibetan commentators by name (he is a serious Buddhologist, not a parachute philosopher). Where he defects is the universal-emptiness step: the move from “persons lack svabhāva” to “everything, including pain itself, lacks svabhāva.” This defection is the structural cousin of Burton’s framework-removal in burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 (Burton was Williams’s doctoral student). Both accept Abhidharma’s items as ultimately real, and both then read Madhyamaka’s further extension as a collapse into nihilism or incoherence. Williams’s failure mode sits between Burton’s full removal and the commentarial tradition’s full retention. He keeps the framework as formal scaffolding but not as ontological content, and the result is a localised collapse on one item (pain) rather than the global collapse Burton diagnoses.
Key claims
The following are reconstructed from Siderits’s review, since the monograph itself reaches the wiki at one remove.
- Williams’s dilemma for Śāntideva on rebirth (BCA 8.97–98). Either annihilationism (one person dies, another is reborn — moral nihilism) or orthodox personal identity (then self-interest is reaffirmed). Either horn defeats Śāntideva. (siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 413–414)
- Bodily continuity grounds intra-life self-interest (refraining from smoking now → healthy lungs later, etc.) but cannot ground a “we-construction” that extends concern across distinct causal series. (p. 413)
- Reductionist construction of persons is question-begging. Causal connections “of the right sort” smuggle in the concept of a person we already have. (pp. 416–417)
- Persons are conventionally real, even on the Reductionist view. Śāntideva’s argument cannot deny conventional persons without destroying the path. (pp. 415–416)
- Pains have intrinsic phenomenal character (“what-it-is-like-ness”) and necessarily have a subject. (siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 418–420; Williams quotes Melzack on the functional role of pain)
- Madhyamaka’s claim that nothing bears intrinsic nature is incoherent and “equivalent to metaphysical nihilism.” (Williams Altruism and Reality p. 222 n. 26, cited at siderits-reality-altruism-2000 fn. 10)
- Mountains exist independently of minds; the Buddhist Reductionist denial of wholes is absurd. (Williams 1998 p. 120; rebutted at siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 420–421)
Related scholars
- Siderits — principal interlocutor; Siderits’s feature review and Williams’s response form a tight closed exchange in PEW 50.3.
- Burton — Williams’s doctoral student; institutional descendant of the Williams reading. Burton presses the framework-removal further (full removal, full nihilism); Williams stops at partial removal and partial nihilism.
- Westerhoff — direct counter-witness on the nihilism question. Westerhoff’s westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 is the principled defence of a framework-engaging sophisticated nihilism that rebuts the Burton-via-Williams line; engages Williams by name.
- Kalupahana — opposite framework-revisionist. Where Williams defects on emptiness and toward nihilism, Kalupahana defects on Mahāyāna systematisation and toward pragmatism. Both are partial framework-removers.