Research

Abstract This thesis reconstructs the Nyāya-Buddhist debate over the perception of composite objects in connection with the Problem of Perceptual Presence (PPP) in the contemporary philosophy of perception. PPP is the problem of reconciling Presence, the notion that our perceptual or visual perceptual experience seems to present these objects as if we are aware of them in their entirety, and Perspective, the idea that our perceptual experience is limited, where we are aware only of certain parts of an object. In the Nyāya-Buddhist debate, Nyāya holds that composite wholes exist and that we can directly perceive them, while some Buddhists argue that wholes do not exist, and that what appears to be the perceptual awareness of wholes is actually inferential. PPP raises two concerns for this debate: First, the wholeness of voluminous objects can be doubted if our perceptual experience does not present them in their entirety. Second, the possibility of amodal completion needs to be justified, that is, our perceptual experience allows us to perceive a whole even if we do not directly sense all its parts. In this paper, I will argue that the answers to these two concerns provided by Buddhists, when critiqued by Nyāya, are not plausible.