Explanation or Insight?

Abstract

Abstract Plato and classical Buddhist philosophers are united in their conviction that true knowledge of an impersonal reality is transformative, and is that without which there is no real liberation. While they are conspicuously opposed on what that reality is, their more significant difference for the would-be knower is in their accounts of what true knowledge is. Plato offers (in the Republic and Philebus, for instance) an explanation-based account of knowledge, trenchantly criticizing (especially in the Theaetetus) the epistemic pretensions of perception. Buddhist epistemology reverses this, favouring experiential, perception-like cognition as the ideal. Dignāga even offers (in the first chapter of his Compendium of Means of Valid Cognition) an account of perception on which it has precisely those characteristics that Plato thinks make it vulnerable to critique. Examining how the pursuit of ideal knowledge effects different ethical transformations on these different accounts of it offers a basis for evaluating these competing versions of ideal epistemological ethics in terms of the plausibility and desirability of the transformations each effects or omits.