Matilal

Bimal Krishna Matilal was an Indian philosopher, trained in Sanskrit learning in Calcutta and at Harvard, who held the Spalding Professorship of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford from 1976 until his death. He presented classical Indian logic and epistemology, especially Nyāya and its debates with Buddhist thinkers, in terms that analytic philosophers could engage with as live positions rather than as history.

Key ideas

• Classical Indian philosophy contains rigorous arguments in logic, epistemology and philosophy of language that can be assessed by contemporary standards.
• Navya-Nyāya developed a precise technical language for relations, absence and negation.
• Indian debates on perception, between Nyāya realists and Buddhist critics, bear directly on modern questions about perception and knowledge.
• Indian logic was concerned with sound argument in debate and knowledge-gathering, not only with formal validity.

Major works

• The Navya-Nyāya Doctrine of Negation (1968)
• Epistemology, Logic, and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis (1971)
• Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (1986)
• The Character of Logic in India (1998, posthumous)

In the conversation

• Discussion Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske Meera Kulkarni · 3 replies
• Reading group Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary Vikram Sethi · 6 replies
• Question What are the seven “in some respect” predications of syādvāda, and is it really a many-valued logic? Tomasz Szewczak · 4 replies
• Debate The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else Arvind Poojary · 6 replies
• Discussion Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do Meera Kulkarni · 5 replies