Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…How has Hinduism shaped your metaphysics? I remember walking into a Yale metaphysics class. Yale has this shopping period, like lots of US universities. I didn’t end up taking this class. Part of the reason I didn’t end up taking this class was because — I don’t remember exactly how the professor started — but very soon into the class, there was a description of the common sense that everyone had. Everyone in the class surely believes that there are middle-sized objects. There are tables and chairs here. There are people. Maybe the people are somehow special and different from the tables and chairs. We live in this material universe, and this is reality. Maybe there’s a higher reality as well, but this is the common-sense view. I was just shocked because that wasn’t my view at all. It wasn’t the view I had been raised to have. I quite literally believed that material reality was Maya, was illusion, and that the separateness of persons was also an important illusion. I believe in some sort of metaphysical monism, and this is why I’ve never really done analytic metaphysics, even though I’ve done a huge amount of epistemology. The metaphysics has always seemed to me a starting point that I just find very difficult to get behind. What are my metaphysics now? I don’t have a worked-out metaphysics. I think I’m more inclined now — I’ve been bedded into what Peter van Inwagen called the common Western metaphysics, the kind of common sense — there are middle-sized dry goods. There are chairs and tables. I’m sitting on one. At the same time, I think that, roughly speaking, Hindu perspective is very much with me. I just don’t think it can really be philosophically articulated. I don’t think it’s fair — at least, for me, not interestingly put into conversation with analytic arguments about what there is. What’s the biggest influence of Bernard Williams on you?…

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