Introduction

This is an essay in fusion philosophy. What is fusion philosophy? The term ‘fusion’ is now applied to everything from cooking to styles of tattooing, but my first encounter with the relevant use of the term was in the area of music. Perhaps today the label ‘fusion music’ seems little more than a marketing device. But the original idea was that the musicians involved in such an undertaking (typically including representatives from each of two distinct musical traditions) were making a serious and sustained effort to use elements from one tradition in order to try to solve problems arising in another. The enterprise of fusion philosophy is meant to be a successor to the practice of what has been called comparative philosophy. It is the centrality of problem-solving to the original conception of a fusion in music that recommends the term to those seeking a new name for the philosophical enterprise. Comparative philosophy has always involved the comparison of elements drawn from two distinct philosophical traditions. (The comparison has usually been between the Western tradition and either the South Asian or the East Asian tradition.) But the point of the comparison has often seemed to be just to bring out similarities and differences that might be of interest to scholars of one or the other tradition. To those who see problem-solving as central to philosophy, and who also believe that the counterpoising of distinct traditions can yield useful results in this endeavor, the name ‘fusion philosophy’ seems appropriate. (But for those who find the term problematic I should add that the term ‘confluence’ now seems to be gaining some traction.)

The Reductionist view of persons espoused by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) 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. Still, Parfit has not recanted. He himself was well aware that the Buddha once held a view similar to his own. What neither Parfit nor his many critics seem to have realized, however, is that in the classical Indian controversy over the Buddha’s view of persons, philosophical tools were forged that might help us adjudicate the dispute between Parfit and his many critics. I propose to use the present dispute as a kind of test case for the project of fusion philosophy. What I hope to show is that we can sometimes make progress toward solving philosophical problems by looking at what traditions distinct from our own have had to say about the issues with which we are concerned.