ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 25, 2018

Talking Past Each Other? Reply to Rick Repetti

Karin Meyers
Insight Meditation Society

This essay is a response to Rick Repetti’s “It Wasn’t Me: Reply to Karin Meyers,” in respect to my article, “False Friends: Dependent Origination and the Perils of Analogy in Cross-Cultural Philosophy.” My article was written—at Repetti’s invitation—in response to his edited volume of essays on the topic of free will in Buddhism, Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will: Agentless Agency?—to which I am also a contributor (“Grasping”). In the article (for which Repetti was also the editor), I compliment Repetti’s analysis of the topic and his own substantive account of a Buddhist theory of free will, but am critical of the way he frames an affirmative answer to the question of why there should be a Buddhist theory of free will. My arguments concern comparative and historical method—namely, the importance of considering critical differences between Buddhist and Western ideas and what Buddhists have said when imagining what they can say about a topic. In his reply, Repetti wonders whether we have been talking past each other. Here I attempt to clarify the nature and scope of my critique and to correct some of the points on which Repetti seems to have misread it. Read article