ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up two sets of objections, from two leading 20th-century analytic philosophers, Gilbert Ryle and Robert Nozick, against what may be considered foundational assumptions in the emerging discipline that this Handbook is exploring, namely, the “philosophy of meditation”. Against introspection, Ryle argued that the concept is either incoherent, ineffective, or impossible to complete. And against the philosophical importance, value, or implications of reports about deep meditative states, Nozick argues that practitioners’ descriptions of deep meditative trances, on analysis, lack cognitive content, though the practitioners’ claims may be considered sincere (they had some such experiences). This chapter examines both sets of objections in detail, and finds Ryle’s inadequate to their purpose, but not necessarily Nozick’s. To defend against Nozick’s objections, Alvin Plantinga’s foundationalist epistemology, originally developed to defend religious claims, is exapted and brought to bear on such meditative claims, proposing that they may be considered epistemologically “basic”, meaning, in need of no claim-extrinsic justification, akin to other self-evident claims, such as “I am conscious”. After making a strong case for this approach, however, Roderick Chisholm’s foundationalism is brought to bear on this Plantinga-style defense, revealing ways in which the Plantinga-style approach is less than persuasive.
