a constant level of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, changing if at all by accre-
tion of concrete contents in its systems of divination and correspondence.- Cases emerging from the analytical camp include Robert Nozick’s Philosophical
Explanations (1981) and David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), which
turns possible-worlds logic into a metaphysics of “modal realism”—all possible
worlds really exist. - I am using the term “skepticism” in the specific sense of an omni-critical view
against the possibility of knowledge, a stance often manifested in the display of
unresolvable paradoxes. I do not use “skepticism” in the loose sense of opposition
to magical superstition or religious supernaturalism; it is better to reserve the term
“secular rationalism” or “naturalism” for such attitudes. - Krishna (1991: 42) notes that the conception of doubt, as it arises in debates, is
integral to the very definition of philosophy in the Indian tradition. “Doubt or
samshaya arises because there is vipratipatti, i.e. two opposite positions seem to
be supported by equally weighty arguments. It is true that the word ‘philosophy’
is not a Sanskrit word, but there is no reason to suppose there is no Sanskrit
analogue to it in the Indian tradition.” - The question of possible transmission of influences is not a significant one for our
purposes, since the cogito is used in different contexts and for different purposes. - In Kant’s case, the backdrop is Hume’s more limited skepticism regarding causality.
In Royce’s, the catalyst is Peirce’s criticism that Cartesian doubt is impossible, since
human consciousness is always in the midst of a chain of sensations and signs,
within which clear-cut doubt is an artificial construction. - Unlike other deep troubles, especially the problems of being and plurality, or
substance and its relations, which are discovered quite early in the network se-
quences and recycle repeatedly thereafter at each higher level of abstraction, the
cogito starts off in the mid-periods of these sequences. That is because the cogito
hinges on the recognition not merely of abstract concepts, but of a considerable
degree of reflexivity. - This is a theme not much explored in the West, where Platonic influence labeled
negation mere privation of being. After the collapse of Neoplatonic influence,
negation was finally made prominent in the dialectic of Fichte and Hegel, paving
the way for the ontological use of negation by Heidegger’s and Sartre’s existential-
ism. An episodic parallel to Dignaga is the medieval Christian philosopher Henry
of Ghent, who in order to avoid using matter as the source of individuation
described individuation as a double negation: negation of all differences within the
particular thing, and negation of identity with other things. A generation later
Eckhart made negation central to his non-Platonic formulation of Christian mys-
ticism: God is so far above being that we can say nothing about him; human
existence is so low that it is virtually nothing; and these two nothings converge
in a divine spark. Apart from these ontological uses of negation, a parallel to
Bhartrihari’s and Dignaga’s theories of language shows up in the structuralism of
Saussure, in which words are arbitrary markers of difference within a system of
language. (There is a further parallel insofar as Bhartrihari gives ontological
precedence to what Saussure called parole, the acts of speaking, over langue, the
1028 •^ Notes to Pages 810–822