Has Candrakīrti refuted a Humean account of causation?

Abstract

Mādhyamikas frequently claim that the emptiness of all dharmas follows from the fact that they originate. This claim is in some tension with Madhyamaka’s alleged thesislessness, a stance that seems to entail that there can be no master argument for emptiness—that Madhyamaka can only refute specific formulations of realism about dharmas and cannot offer a definitive refutation of all possible realist positions. It is thus worth investigating whether the argument from origination actually succeeds in establishing emptiness. A crucial part of the argument seeks to show that origination from distinct cause and conditions is incoherent. The argument typically deploys the three-times strategy, relying on the point that effect succeeds cause, and pointing out that the entity h that is alleged to bring about the origination of the entity in question p cannot be said to be a cause—to perform the function of originating—when p does not yet exist, nor when p does exist, and that there is no third time that is somehow intermediate between the two. I assess this and other arguments deployed by Candrakīrti in his defense of the view (MAv 6.103) that all things lack intrinsic nature. In doing so, I try to respond to Westerhoff’s recent criticisms of a regularity theory of causation, a conception meant to evade the difficulties of the ‘power’ conception of causes.