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Jay Garfield (1955–)

Garfield is the philosopher most responsible for making Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) accessible and philosophically productive for contemporary Western philosophy. His 1995 translation — The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way — is accompanied by a verse-by-verse philosophical commentary that reads Nāgārjuna alongside Wittgenstein, Hume, and the Western philosophical tradition, demonstrating that the arguments of the MMK engage questions that are live in analytic philosophy: the nature of causation, the status of the self, the relationship between language and reality, the coherence of conventional truth. The translation built on earlier work by Frederick Streng, T. R. V. Murti, and David Kalupahana, but Garfield’s combination of rigorous translation from the Tibetan, philosophical commentary informed by analytic philosophy, and explicit cross-cultural argumentation gave the text a presence in Western philosophy departments that earlier translations had not achieved.

Life

Born 1955. Educated at Oberlin College and the University of Pittsburgh (PhD in philosophy). Garfield’s early work was in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind — particularly on the modularity of reading and language processing — before he turned to Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural philosophy in the 1990s.

Taught at Hampshire College (1988–2012), where he built a programme in Buddhist and cross-cultural philosophy. Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities at Smith College and professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, with visiting positions at the National University of Singapore, the Central University of Tibetan Studies (Sarnath, India), and multiple universities in the US, Asia, and Australia. Garfield has worked extensively in Tibetan Buddhist philosophical traditions and reads both Tibetan and Sanskrit, giving him access to the commentarial literature that is indispensable for interpreting the MMK.

The Nāgārjuna translation and its philosophical stakes

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Oxford, 1995). The translation was made from the Tibetan text (the Sanskrit original, while extant, survives only in Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā quotations) and is informed by the Tibetan commentarial tradition, particularly the Gelug reading through Tsongkhapa. The philosophical commentary reads each chapter alongside Western philosophical parallels.

The cross-cultural method. Garfield’s approach is explicitly comparative but not reductive. He argues that Nāgārjuna’s arguments engage the same philosophical problems that Hume raised about causation, that Wittgenstein raised about the relationship between language and reality, and that Sextus Empiricus raised about the possibility of knowledge — but that the parallels are genuine philosophical engagements, not surface resemblances imposed by the commentator. The MMK’s argument that causation cannot be understood as a real relation between independently existing entities (chapter 1) parallels Hume’s argument that causation is not a perceivable necessary connection — but the conclusions differ: Hume arrives at regularity theory; Nāgārjuna arrives at dependent origination and emptiness. The parallel illuminates both without reducing either to the other.

Emptiness and conventional truth. Garfield’s interpretive emphasis falls on the relationship between emptiness and conventional truth. Emptiness is not a hidden reality behind appearances; it is the way things conventionally are. The table is empty of inherent existence — but this means that the table is dependently originated, not that it doesn’t exist. Garfield reads this as a philosophical position akin to (but not identical with) anti-foundationalism in the Western tradition: there is no bedrock of independently existing entities on which everything else rests; there is only the mutually dependent web of conventional reality. The reading has been influential but contested — some scholars argue that it over-assimilates Nāgārjuna to Western anti-foundationalism and understates the specifically Buddhist soteriological context.

Cross-cultural philosophy

Garfield has argued, in Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (Oxford, 2015) and in numerous essays, that the exclusion of non-Western philosophical traditions from the mainstream of academic philosophy is not merely an omission but a distortion. Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese philosophical traditions address the same questions that Western philosophy addresses — causation, the self, perception, ethics, the nature of reality — and they do so with arguments of comparable rigour and depth. The failure to engage them impoverishes philosophy and perpetuates a parochialism that is intellectually unjustifiable.

The argument is institutional as well as philosophical: Garfield has advocated for the inclusion of non-Western philosophy in standard philosophy curricula and has been a prominent voice in debates about the disciplinary boundaries of academic philosophy. The advocacy has been controversial — some philosophers have argued that the Western philosophical tradition has its own internal coherence that non-Western traditions do not share, and that “philosophy” names a specific intellectual tradition rather than a universal activity. Garfield’s counter-argument: the internal coherence is an artefact of exclusion, not a feature of the subject.

The dialetheist reading

Garfield’s most radical interpretive move, developed with the logician Graham Priest, is the argument that Nāgārjuna’s position involves true contradictions at the limits of thought. “Nāgārjuna and the Limits of Thought” (2003) argues that certain of Nāgārjuna’s claims — particularly concerning the ultimate status of emptiness itself (is emptiness empty?) and the relationship between the two truths — are best understood as dialetheia: statements that are both true and false. The reading draws on Priest’s paraconsistent logic, a formal system that allows true contradictions without the classical consequence that everything follows from a contradiction (ex contradictione quodlibet).

The claim is that Nāgārjuna is not confused or merely paradoxical but is operating at a point where thought reaches its own limits and the classical law of non-contradiction fails to hold. The dialetheist reading is more radical than the Hume or Wittgenstein parallels: it claims not that Nāgārjuna anticipates Western anti-foundationalism but that he occupies a philosophical position that Western logic was not equipped to formalise until the development of paraconsistent systems in the late twentieth century. The reading has been contested by Madhyamaka scholars — particularly those in the Tibetan-scholastic tradition — who argue that Nāgārjuna’s arguments are consistent and that the appearance of contradiction arises from failure to distinguish the two truths properly. Whether Nāgārjuna is a dialetheist or a consistent philosopher whose arguments are misread as contradictory is one of the sharpest interpretive disputes in contemporary Madhyamaka scholarship.

Where Garfield stops

The cross-cultural reading of Nāgārjuna has been questioned on several grounds. First, the translation from Tibetan rather than Sanskrit means that Garfield’s Nāgārjuna is filtered through the Tibetan commentarial tradition — particularly the Gelug-Prāsaṅgika reading that Tsongkhapa established. This is a specific interpretive lineage, not a neutral rendering of the Indian text. Scholars working from the Sanskrit (Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura’s 2013 translation, for example) have produced readings that differ from Garfield’s on significant points — particularly on the question of whether Nāgārjuna’s two truths are hierarchically ordered or co-equal.

Second, the Wittgensteinian and Humean parallels, while illuminating, risk making Nāgārjuna’s arguments more familiar than they are. The MMK is a text written within a specific philosophical and soteriological context — the Mahāyāna Buddhist path to liberation — and the arguments serve that context in ways that the Western parallels do not capture. Whether the cross-cultural reading enriches both traditions or domesticates one in the terms of the other is the central methodological question in Garfield’s reception.

Third, the broader argument for cross-cultural philosophy — that non-Western traditions do philosophy in the same sense that Western traditions do — depends on a definition of philosophy that is itself contested. If philosophy is the rigorous, argumentative investigation of fundamental questions, the argument is strong; if philosophy is a specific intellectual tradition with its own canonical texts, methods, and institutional history, the argument is less clear. The definitional question is not resolved by assertion; it is the ground on which the debate turns.

Key works

See also: Nāgārjuna · Candrakīrti · Wittgenstein · Hume