The Paradox of Philosophical Disagreement: A Study of Nagarjuna, Haribhadra, and Gadamer

Abstract

Taking direction from contemporary epistemology and its recent focus on the question of how to react rationally to peer disagreement, this dissertation explores the related topic of philosophical disagreement in a comparative key. A close examination of some controversial assumptions at work in the current epistemological debate about disagreement reveals a tension, in philosophical discourse and disagreement, between interestedness and disinterestedness. After allowing this tension to be highlighted by the controversiality of those assumptions, this dissertation offers reconstructions of how Nāgārjuna, Haribhadra, and Hans-Georg Gadamer might alternatively illuminate or resolve the tension between interestedness and disinterestedness in philosophical discourse. Through these reconstructions, the dissertation also articulates a shared subject matter between four distinct traditions — i.e., contemporary epistemology, Indian Buddhism, Jainism, and hermeneutics — whose distinct assumptions are otherwise apparently incommensurable. The dissertation consists of five chapters. The introductory chapter problematizes the phenomenon of disagreement as framed in recent literature and articulates the underlying tension between interestedness and disinterestedness in a paradox: the Paradox of Philosophical Disagreement. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 explore alternative resolutions to that paradox — the dialectical refutationism of Nāgārjuna, the nonabsolutism of Haribhadra, and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chapter 5 situates this expansion of the contemporary debate within a larger debate in comparative philosophy about voices relevant in philosophical discourse.