Laura Weed

Through the Enlightenment, Western Epistemology focused on either cognitive knowledge, in rationalism, or perceptual knowledge, in empiricism. More recently, epistemologists have begun to explore social knowledge, (A. Goldman, J. Searle, L. Cozolino), ecological locatedness (H. Ralston), emotional knowledge, (D. Goleman, J. Herman), and self-consciousness ( D. Chalmers, P. Davies), as forms of knowledge. While epistemologists have sometimes argued for the supremacy of one of these categories of knowledge over others, or the reduction of some to others, I will argue in the first section of this paper, that all are equally important and that there is sometimes mutual interplay among all of them. So, I will briefly argue for the importance of each of these expanded categories of knowledge, and for some interrelations among them. In addition, I will argue in the second section of the paper, that some of these categories of knowledge can be informed in conversation with the Buddha's notion that humans are aggregates of five skandas: five ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship with our world. The Buddha's five skandas are form, sensations, mental formations, feelings and consciousness. I will argue that form roughly corresponds to physical structure in rationalism, sensation roughly corresponds to perception in empiricism, mental formations, especially Thich Nhat Hanh's notion of them as 'Interbeing,' roughly corresponds with social and ecological knowledge, and can be informed by Hanh's mindfulness trainings. Mindfulness trainings are also very helpful with knowledge of emotions, which, until recently, were largely ignored as sources of knowledge in epistemology. Of course, awareness of consciousness, especially of what John Searle called background consciousness, has always been central in Buddhist teachings and practice (F. Varela). There are, of course, important differences between the Buddist and western epistemological approaches to understanding human thinking. The Buddha considered all mental activity ultimately delusional, and was not a realist about the existence of the self or the external world, so he had no real interest in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, regardless of how one was to seek it. Thus, the examination of these categories of understanding within Buddhist schools has been aimed primarily at their erasure. Buddhism's focus on experiential knowledge in the present moment also precludes any project of grand theoretical reasoning. That said, Buddhist have spent thousands of years exploring phenomena which have only recently begun to interest epistemologists. While the methodologies and categories of Buddhism and epistemology do not line up closely, I will argue that the there is considerable room for complementary conversation between the disciplines. I plan to develop some groundwork for that conversation in this paper.

I retired after 29 years as Professor of Philosophy at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY.  I'm now the Chair of an Interfaith Lectureship Board at Siena University.  My books include The Structure of Thinking (2003) Introduction to Field Being Philosophy co-editor, 2022, and Mysticism, Ineffability and Silence in Philosophy of Religion, editor, (2023).  I have presented and published numerous papers on panpsychism, process philosophy, Asian philosophy, comparative philosophy, embodied mentality, epistemology and mental processes.