How Things Are

Most people know that Buddhism denies a permanent self, but the tradition's thinkers also took positions on many other basic questions about what exists. These include how complex things can be explained in terms of simpler ones, and what it means for one thing to cause another.

Buddhist philosophers also took part in a long-running dispute over global anti-realism. Faced with the nominalist rejection of universals and genuine resemblances between things, they developed an original response. Some defend presentism, the view that only the present is real, while others favor eternalism, on which past and future things are just as real. Siderits lays out the arguments these thinkers developed on these questions and several others.

The book is meant for readers of metaphysics who want fresh ideas about what Buddhist thinkers had to say on such matters, and it assumes no earlier acquaintance with the tradition. Much existing scholarship on Indian Buddhist philosophy concentrates on historical detail, takes familiarity with the main schools and their leading figures for granted, and relies on many untranslated Sanskrit technical terms, which leaves philosophers who want to work on metaphysical problems with little easy access. This book addresses that gap by setting aside history and textual study and focusing instead on the metaphysical puzzles themselves and the strategies proposed for solving them.