Asking the Buddha for Help: Overcoming the Bifurcation and Coloniality of Philosophy Through an Engagement With the Madhyamaka Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis seeks to address two pressing issues. The first is philosophy’s bifurcation. Contemporary philosophy, having been stripped of the spiritual exercises so central to its Ancient traditions, has been reduced to mere discourse. This thesis aims to explore the Buddha’s teachings for potential methodological insights—specifically looking at how the Madhyamaka tradition relates to the teachings of the Buddha—that may establish philosophy as a way of life, along with its spiritual exercises, as an option open to us today, as well as elaborating on what that option looks like for contemporary philosophy. The second issue relates to the centrality of reason in modern Western philosophy, which, while it a consequence of its encounter with Christianity, also played an important role in the consistent dismissing of non-western traditions as non-philosophical on the grounds that they are insufficiently committed to the standards of rational enquiry. By understanding the significant role that reason takes on in the Prasangika Madhyamaka approach, the aim will be to question the ‘divine reason’ construct so central to contemporary Western philosophy’s self-understanding and expose the ways it is particular to the European milieu.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".