Introduction

The Reductionist view of persons espoused by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons has provoked a great deal of controversy. While it is difficult to count heads on such matters, it seems unlikely that most anglophone philosophers working on the issue of personal identity today accept that view. The use of certain Buddhist philosophical resources thus enables Parfit to answer his many critics. This does not, however, yield a definitive vindication of Reductionism. Buddhist Reductionism had its own critics within the Buddhist tradition. The footnotes contain the usual sorts of information concerning references, contextual matters, and the like - but only of a sort that might be found in other works in the area of analytic metaphysics. This was a strategy of nineteenth-century apologists wishing to explain the material ascendancy of Europe: while the West might have perfected material technologies that conferred certain military and economic advantages, Asia had instead devoted itself to supposedly higher ends.