Vasubandhu, painting on cotton, detail, 18th century, Tibet.
Speaker: Allison Aitken, Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Date & Time: Thursday, April 9, 2026, 5 p.m. Pacific
Venue: 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, Glorisun Global Buddhist Network
Contact Info: Sanjyot Mehendale, (510) 643-5104, buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu
Access Coordinator: Sanjyot Mehendale, buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-5104
Abstract: What, metaphysically speaking, qualifies an action as intentional? In other words, what in the nature of things entitles us to distinguish between two seemingly identical bodily movements, one intentional and the other involuntary?
In this talk, I examine Vasubandhu’s response to this question and show how his account of the nature and causal mechanics of intentional action exposes a tension between (i) a mereological nihilistic form of exdurantism and (ii) moral realism—namely, the difficulty of reconciling anti-realism about spatiotemporal composites with realism about moral facts concerning persons and their actions. Vasubandhu’s solution is to eliminatively reduce intentional bodily action to mental action, specifically the momentary mental act of intending a bodily movement. I show how this theory delivers notable payoffs, including its straightforward handling of cases involving causal deviance and negative actions. Yet even if all morally significant action is, strictly speaking, mental action, explanatory difficulties concerning mental causation remain regarding how precisely the mind causes the body to move and precipitate change in the world. I show how Vasubandhu ultimately leverages this puzzle to argue for metaphysical idealism. Eliminating matter sidesteps worries about mind→body causal interaction, but raises new questions about mind→mind interaction: how do our intentional actions affect other minds in the absence of a shared material world? I conclude with an analysis of Vasubandhu’s account of this process, which commits him to a surprisingly opaque picture of the mind for an idealist, characterized by qualified symmetrical access to mental states together with a form of externalism about mental content.
Speaker: Allison Aitken is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, she earned a PhD from Harvard University and was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. Her research centers on metaphysics in the history of philosophy, with a focus on Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. She is the author of Introduction to Reality: A Study of Śrīgupta’s Tattvāvatāravṛtti with a Critical Edition and Annotated Translation (Harvard Oriental Series), and her forthcoming monograph Neither One Nor Many, will be published by Oxford University Press. Her work has appeared in venues including Philosophers’ Imprint, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy East and West, Asian Journal of Philosophy, and the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History.
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