242 NONMONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSempiricists have officially treated them as trivial. The present chapter
will be concerned with appeal to argument; the next chapter will deal
with appeal to experience.
Advaita Vedanta
It looks as if Advaita wants to hold all of a set of logically inconsistent
theses. In particular, it begins with the claim that something exists but
altogether lacks properties, and that something that altogether lacks
properties can be identical to a variety of things that have properties
and are distinct from one another. The dodge that nirguna Brahman is
ineffable has its own enormous problems, and in any case if we have no
idea what properties Brahman has, and can form no concept of them,
how could we possibly know that Brahman is qualityless or with what
Brahman was or was not identical?
Ramanuja,^1 for example, held that it was contradictory to hold that
There is an X such that for any property P, X lacks P. (Or, if existence
itself is a property, There is an X such that for any property P other
than existence, X lacks P.) Thus to claim that Brahman, or anything else,
is qualityless is to claim that it exists and deny an entailment of that
very claim. Hence Advaita Vedanta metaphysics is not even possibly
true. Ramanuja’s critique seems decisive, and there is no point in
lingering over logical impossibilities.
Jainism and Buddhism on persons
The philosophical context: three exclusive but non-exhaustive
alternatives^2
Three alternatives regarding the nature of mind and body are
idealism, materialism, and dualism. Idealism holds that having a mental
property is kind-defining relative to the only kind of substances there
are; materialism gives that status to having a physical property;
dualism holds that having a mental property and having a physical
property are kind-defining relative to two distinct kinds of substances.^3
Thus each of these views is substantival and essentialist: each holds that
there are substances that belong to a kind and hence have essences.
Among mind-body dualists, some suppose minds or souls to exist
without depending on anything else whatever, and so as inherently
immortal; others take souls to exist dependent upon God, and as
immortal only in the sense that God alone could annihilate them by