Thesis / main argument
Garfield’s earliest piece in the wiki’s corpus (1990 — five years before The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, four before garfield-dependent-arising-1994), and the seed of the whole later reading. Its single governing thesis is therapeutic: skepticism — Sextus Empiricus, Hume, Wittgenstein, Kripke in the West; the Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa in India — is not a nihilistic attack on our cognitive life but a form of philosophical therapy, a via media between two dogmatic extremes that cures the diseases born of metaphysical excess. The Western and Buddhist traditions are “startlingly akin” in aim, method, and problematic; Garfield reads them together so that the more explicit Prāsaṅgika formulation can illuminate the obscurer European one.
The argument’s spine, which every later Garfield work inherits: for each philosophical problem (the external world, the self, meaning, causation) there are two dogmatic positions — reificationism (asserting the ultimate reality of what the skeptic denies) and nihilism (denying the existence or warrant of what clearly exists). These apparent opposites share a single metaphysical presupposition. The skeptic/Mādhyamika rejects neither side but the shared presupposition of both — “making peace by rejecting both… and not in favor of a third dogmatism.” This is “suspension of judgment” (epoché) or “positionlessness”: refusing to assent to a thesis while refusing to assert its negation, because either would commit one to the same false metaphysics. The constructive remainder is the recovery of ordinary practice as grounded in convention rather than in any “occult” foundation.
Crucially, the therapy is self-consuming. Garfield reaches for Sextus’ image of the laxative that purges itself along with the illness, and pairs it with the Buddhist counterpart he takes to be exact: the Ratnakūṭa simile of the sick man whose medicine cures the disease but, if not itself expelled, makes him worse — Candrakīrti’s gloss that “the one for whom the absence of being itself becomes a fixed belief, I call incurable.” This is the emptiness of emptiness stated as therapeutic method: emptiness is itself empty, the cure must not become a new disease, and the goal is not a counter-theory but contentment with conventional practice on its own terms.
The paper’s second half (Parts II–V) applies the medicine to one contemporary “dogmatist,” Jerry Fodor, deflating his causal realism in the philosophy of cognitive science into a conventionalist regularism about causation (Nāgārjuna’s distinction of conditions from causal powers, read alongside Hume). This is the same deflationary causation reading developed in garfield-causality-2001, here in its first form; it is secondary to the therapeutic thesis and is treated as such below.
Key claims
- Skepticism is therapy, not nihilism. Following Sextus’ medical metaphors (and Wittgenstein’s “the philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness”), the skeptical/Madhyamaka enterprise aims to cure the philosopher of dogmatism, not to establish a rival doctrine. “The goal is not simply the search for truth for its own sake… [but] to cure the philosopher of the confusion attendant upon… dogmatism” (pp. 294–295). This is the modern Western analogue of the framework’s therapeutic purpose (the pacification of prapañca).
- The reificationism/nihilism taxonomy. Garfield credits the Prāsaṅgika tradition with being more explicit than its European counterparts about three things: (i) the relation of skeptical to dogmatic positions (the reificationist/nihilist pair); (ii) the nature of “positionlessness”/suspension of belief; (iii) the role of convention. The two dogmatic extremes share a buried metaphysical thesis; the skeptic rejects “exactly the thesis that the apparently diametrically opposed dogmatic positions share” (p. 290) — “the decisive move in the conjuring trick.”
- Positionlessness = reject the shared presupposition, not pick a side. To suspend judgment “is to refuse to enter into a misguided discourse” (p. 291), not to shrug between rival claims. Garfield reads this as constructive, not “wholly negative.” He anchors it in Tsongkhapa via Thurman’s Speech of Gold: “since I have no position there is no fault for me” (the VV 29 no-thesis material), set beside Sextus’ self-cancelling “all things are false.”
- The self-consuming cure (emptiness of emptiness). Sextus’ self-purging laxative and the Ratnakūṭa/Kāśyapa “incurable sick man” simile (quoted by Candrakīrti) are presented as the same move: the medicine that becomes a fixed belief is itself a disease. “The pill is skeptical inquiry. But when the poison is purged, the inquiry is no longer necessary” (p. 294). This is the direct modern counterpart of MMK 13:8 (“those for whom emptiness is a view are called incurable”).
- The “skeptical inversion” + appeal to convention. The constructive strategy has two moves: invert the order of explanation (regularities ground causal-talk, not vice versa; word-use grounds meaning, not private semantic facts), and ground the conventional in social convention. He cites Tsongkhapa (Thurman) on “mere nominality” — the undiscoverability of anything under analysis, which “does not mean that names exist and things do not.”
- Conventionalist regularism about causation (the Fodor case study). Nāgārjuna’s opening verses (MMK 1, in Kalupahana’s translation) defend a middle way between causal nihilism and causal realism: there are natural regularities exploited in explanation, but no “cement of the universe,” no occult causal power binding cause to effect. Causal power talk reduces to “explanatorily useful regularities.” Applied against Fodor’s Psychosemantics, this dissolves the demand that psychological taxonomy be individualistic. (Secondary; fully developed in garfield-causality-2001.)
Methodology
Cross-cultural comparative philosophy in the analytic idiom — Sextus, Hume, Wittgenstein (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus), Kripke’s “skeptical solution,” with the philosophy of science and mind (Fodor, Burge, Cartwright) as the live field. Garfield treats Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa as a single “Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamika” school (his note 1) and reads them through translations: Komito on the Śūnyatāsaptati, Sprung on the Prasannapadā, Thurman on Tsongkhapa’s Speech of Gold, Kalupahana on the MMK. The register is wholly Western and the primary philosophical work is comparative; the Buddhist material is enlisted to clarify the Western skeptical tradition, not expounded in its own commentarial terms. This is the most Western-register of the four Garfield pieces in the wiki — which is exactly why it corroborates rather than revises the placement (see below).
Notable quote
“The pill is skeptical inquiry. But when the poison is purged, the inquiry is no longer necessary.” (p. 294)
Connections
- Garfield’s own corpus. The earliest statement of the architecture later set out in garfield-dependent-arising-1994 (read Ch 1 through Ch 24 holding the emptiness of emptiness, so negations come out self-consuming not nihilist) and garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995 (twin-distortion anti-nihilism at 24:16; self-consuming negation at 24:18 / 27:30). The conventionalist regularism is the first form of garfield-causality-2001.
- Supports nihilism-charge-refuted (Field 1: the non-affirming negation is not existential denial; the “cement of the universe” instinct; the self-consuming negation of Field 3) and madhyamaka-is-method-not-standalone-system (rejecting the shared presupposition; no positive ontology).
- Engages the same Western skeptical sources (Sprung’s Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian Prasannapadā is the translation Garfield leans on) — and sits near Sprung’s deflationary register on the quietism axis, which is precisely the tension the Garfield page flags.
- Tsongkhapa via Thurman’s Speech of Gold (not yet a wiki source page) — distinct from the Ocean of Reasoning base (tsongkhapa-ocean-of-reasoning-1408) Garfield later co-translated.