ABSTRACT
J.L. Austin famously claimed that in every philosophical work there are two parts: the part where the author makes some outrageous claim, and the part where the author takes it back. In the first part of this book I sought to defend a Buddhist formulation of Reductionism about persons. I shall now, in this second part of the book, argue that Reductionism might nonetheless be wrong in important respects. But this is not additional evidence in support of Austin’s claim. For one thing, the reasons that I shall discuss for rejecting Reductionism rest on a kind of global antirealism that many readers will consider far more outrageous than anything claimed so far. More importantly, the view of persons that I shall now defend does not involve the blanket rejection of Reductionism, so I shall not be taking back all that was said in the first part. Thirdly, the argument of this work might be seen as having the following disjunctive structure:
1. Either realism is true or global antirealism is true. 2. If realism is true, then we ought to be Reductionists and hold that persons
are empty. 3. If global antirealism is true, then all things are empty. Therefore persons
are empty.
