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Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. By Jay L. Garfield. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xxii + 376. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-020434-1.
For as long as scholars have been presenting Asian thinkers to readers of European languages, efforts have been made to present the presumably less familiar Asian thinkers as having points of commonality with the presumably more familiar European thinkers. In presenting classical Indian Buddhist philosophers to his readers in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Stcherbatsky portrayed them as anticipating important features of European philosophers. In his study of Madhyamaka, Nagarjuna and Candrakirti are depicted as adumbrating the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. In the works of other scholars, the presentation of early Buddhism as an anticipation of aspects of Hume became commonplace. A number of scholars have suggested that some Buddhists had important resemblances to some of the American Pragmatists, while others have pointed out resemblances to some of the Logical Positivists. In some cases these comparisons, as stated above, have been to present something less familiar in terms of something more familiar. In other cases, there has been a more pointed agenda of arguing that the classical thinkers of areas colonized by European powers were every bit as worthy of attention as the thinkers that were part of the cultural heritage of the colonizers - a point that colonizers have not always appreciated. In yet other cases, one example of which is Archie J. Bahm, it has been suggested that unless one has a basic familiarity with the philosophical traditions of Europe, India, and China, then one cannot claim to be well educated in philosophy. Most of the early efforts to show points of commonality between Asian and Western thinkers were relatively limited in scope. It has been only in the current generation of philosophers that one finds Asian thinkers compared with a fairly wide range of Western philosophers. One of the most ambitious efforts to do this is the work under review here.
In Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy Jay Garfield states that his intention is "to show that we in the West can talk with, not about, philosophers and texts in the Buddhist tradition" (p. 15). His approach is that of a philosopher...