Can Emptiness Be Known Without Fullness? A Dialogue on Reality with Prof. Garfield. AMA 227

In this dialogue, Professor Jay Garfield, a leading scholar and expert on Buddhist philosophy, joins Firas Zahabi to explore a fundamental question: can emptiness be known without prior knowledge of fullness or essence?

Professor Garfield presents the Madhyamaka Buddhist account of emptiness as interdependence and convention. Firas challenges this view by pressing an epistemic issue: whether absence, illusion, or failure can be recognized at all without contrast with something given, real, and non-empty.

Using thought experiments involving mirages, darkness, pain, constant conditions, agency, and moral responsibility, the discussion examines whether emptiness can be known purely through projection or dependent cognition—or whether recognition itself presupposes grounding in lived experience.

The conversation ranges across consciousness, reason, free will, functionalism, moral status, and the origin of the idea of the Divine, asking not only which views are internally consistent, but which philosophy best corresponds with reality as it is actually known and experienced.

At stake is a deeper issue: does philosophy illuminate reality, or does it explain it away?