![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41A3RY7Z0GL._SL500_AA240_.jpg\")
<\/a>This is the title of the third chapter of Dan Arnold\u2019s book, Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in South Asian Religion<\/span><\/a>.<\/span> New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 318 pp. Index. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13280-0.<\/span><\/p>\nI am currently working my way through the Journal of Buddhist Ethics review<\/a> of this book by Roy Tzohar<\/a> (Columbia University) and came across a section worth digging into a tiny bit, as it relates to the correspondence between Buddhist and Kantian metaphysics (understanding of the fundamental nature of reality)<\/span> and heightens the prospects of developing coherent comparative work in their ethics (my job).<\/p>\n \u2026 By this [transcendental argument] Arnold does not mean to argue that Candrak\u012brti was a sort of crypto-essentialist. Rather, arguing in op-position to some readings of the Madhyamaka as a form of global skep-ticism and antirealism, Arnold\u2019s point is that the school\u2019s radical appeal to conventionalism should be considered a bedrock presupposition (120, 127-130). This presupposition is that the only way anything can exist is conventionally and interdependently or in its epistemic version, that there cannot be anything more true than the world conventionally de-scribed (120, 140).<\/p>\n This claim, Arnold argues, is presented via a transcendental argu-ment (in the West classically associated with Kant) framed in such a way that one cannot argue against its claims without already presupposing them (124). Applied by the Madhyamaka, it demonstrates that there can be no explanation of our interdependent conventions that does not itself exemplify the same conditions (of interdependence).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, as it turns out, I don\u2019t really have the time I\u2019d hoped to dig into the issue, so I\u2019ll leave it to you to tell me what you<\/span> think it means! <\/span>Unschoooled in Buddhism<\/a> and Philosophy? Eh, give it a try anyhow \u2013 your answer can\u2019t possibly be further off than those of some well-studied folks.<\/p>\n