In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 1983 days ago.
Keywords: digitization, Buddhist epistemology, representationalism

Little is needed to make me enthusiastic about the possibilities that the internet offers for researchers, but today’s occasion for enthusiasm deserves special mention.

The seventh century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti works with a model of sensory perception where an external object causes a perception that resembles it, that bears its shape (Sanskrit ākāra), or, in still other words, has its appearance (Sanskrit ābhāsa/_pratibhāsa_).

For studying this model, I thought it would be useful to know more about related models in Western theories of perception, and in general about philosophical theories that either work with such resemblances or are critical of the whole notion.

I started to skim through some entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and sooner or later ended up at Henrik Lagerlund’s entry on Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy.

Lagerlund repeatedly refers to a forthcoming paper by Peter King that sounds extremely interesting, not only because it offers detailed factual information about various theories about a resemblance between mental images and cognised objects, but also because it analyses them with the help of sophisticated theoretical vocabulary. In other words, this seemed to be just what I needed.

The paper is to appear in a collection of articles on representation, alas, it does not yet appear on the publisher’s website, nor in any library catalogue.

Disillusioned, I did a Google search for the author. Bingo: not only does he have a website, but he also makes available this very paper in PDF format.