School
Nyaya
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If only the transformed can know, how could a mystic ever be shown to be wrong?
I teach science in Mangaluru and campaign against superstition, so let me say first that I'm not asking this to sneer. I read Sufi poetry with real pleasure, and I've learned from discussions here that the Sufi claim is subtler than "feelings…
Started by Arvind Poojary0 replies103 views -
Are the words of the Veda abstract objects? Mīmāṃsā’s eternal language and Frege’s third realm
I teach Pūrva Mīmāṃsā in Varanasi. My tradition holds that the Veda is authorless (apauruṣeya), that words (śabda) are eternal, and that the relation between a word and its meaning is not created by anyone. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra says early on that…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies177 views -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
I farm eleven acres of cocoa near Kumasi and sell through a cooperative. My son is at university and sends me articles from his course, and I send him back proverbs. Last week he sent one that said most of what any…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies207 views -
Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske
I've been reading Dretske for a seminar alongside the Nyāya Sūtra, and I think they illuminate each other on testimony in a way neither does alone. Nyāya counts four means of knowing (pramāṇa): perception, inference, comparison, and śabda, word or testimony. The…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies112 views -
Reading group: the first book of the Nyāya Sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s commentary
The Nyāya Sūtra, traditionally attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda and dated around the second century CE in its current form, is the root text of the school that made Indian logic and debate into a system. About three centuries later Vātsyāyana wrote the…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies207 views -
Is Aristotle’s “final cause” an explanation, or just a story about purpose?
I make cedar doors in the old Andalusian style. When I first read Aristotle's four causes I recognised my trade immediately. The material cause of a door is the cedar. The formal cause is the pattern, the geometry my father taught me.…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies260 views -
Udayana, Ibn Sina and Leibniz: three arguments for a first cause that do not need a beginning
People often assume that arguments for a first cause depend on the universe having a beginning. I want to compare three that don't, from three traditions. Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century). In the Nyāyakusumāñjali he gives a series of inferences for Īśvara, starting…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies231 views -
Is it irrational to have no precise credence at all about something like life on Europa?
A science journalist asked me last month, for a piece about the Europa missions, what probability I would put on there being life in its ocean. I said I had no idea. She pushed: “Just a number, roughly.” I said somewhere between…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies235 views -
Is Nyāya tarka a kind of counterfactual reasoning, and does it need possible worlds?
I teach mathematics, and when I read Nyāya I am always delighted by how close their techniques are to the proofs I teach. One that puzzles me is tarka, which I have seen translated as "hypothetical reasoning", "suppositional reasoning" or "reductio". The…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies228 views -
Nāgārjuna asked what proves the means of knowledge. Is that Agrippa’s trilemma in Sanskrit?
I have been translating parts of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī (often rendered "The Dispeller of Disputes") for my MA, and one argument keeps reminding me of the Agrippan problem people discuss under foundationalism and coherentism. The opponent is a realist of the Nyāya type…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies252 views -
One source of knowledge, two, four, five or six? Why Indian schools argued over the count
I build credit-scoring models, and my working epistemology is Bayesian: there is one way to learn, which is to update on evidence. So I was surprised to find that classical Indian philosophers organised epistemology around a different question, how many sources of…
Started by Wanjiru Kamau5 replies151 views -
Is it fair to call Nāgārjuna or Śrīharṣa a sceptic at all?
In English books on Indian philosophy two names are regularly filed under "scepticism": Nāgārjuna, the Buddhist founder of Madhyamaka, and Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin whose Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (roughly "The Sweets of Refutation") takes apart the Nyāya definitions of valid cognition one after another.…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies258 views -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
I guide trekkers on the Annapurna circuit and read in tea houses in the evenings. A monk in Manang gave me a commentary on Nāgārjuna, and I've been chewing on one problem since. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies205 views -
Reading group: the Nyāya-sūtra on debate, from the sixteen categories to the points of defeat
Several threads here have touched on the Nyāya distinction between vāda, jalpa and vitaṇḍā. I'd like to read the primary text together, since most of us (me included, honestly) know it through summaries. Text. The Nyāya-sūtra attributed to Gautama (Akṣapāda), with Vātsyāyana's…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies215 views -
How is apoha supposed to work? ‘Cow’ means ‘not non-cow’ sounds circular to me
I teach mathematics, and when I read that Dignāga's theory of meaning says a word like "cow" works by exclusion, meaning roughly "not non-cow", my first reaction was the one I would have to a student's proof: this is circular. To exclude…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies194 views -
Śrīharṣa against the Naiyāyikas: can every definition be refuted, and how did Nyāya answer him?
I teach mathematics in Delhi, so definitions are my bread and butter. A good definition in geometry settles what you are talking about, and then the proofs can begin. I recently came across Śrīharṣa, the twelfth-century Advaitin, whose great work has a…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies219 views -
Dignāga cut the Nyāya inference from five members to three. What did the example member become?
I have been translating some passages on Buddhist logic for a seminar in Pune and keep getting stuck on one question. The Nyāya inference for others has five members: thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion ("this hill has fire, because it has smoke,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies206 views -
The deviant causal chain shows the causal theory of action cannot be repaired
I'm a logician, so I care about analyses that can be stated precisely, and this one, I'll argue, can't be. Davidson's causal theory: a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a belief–desire pair.…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies274 views -
Memory preserves knowledge but never produces it: the Indian schools were right to exclude it
For forty years of reading Śaṅkara I have accepted, almost without noticing, a rule that most of the classical Indian schools share: memory is not a pramāṇa, not a means of valid knowledge in its own right. The Nyāya divide cognition into…
Started by Arjun Iyer5 replies221 views -
Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth?
I teach the final-year philosophy class in a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. Every year a student asks me some version of this: "Is logic universal, or is it just how Europeans think?" The…
Started by Khady Faye5 replies161 views -
The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
I'm a cognitive scientist in Bengaluru, and a materialist with a soft spot for Indian epistemology. In epistemic logic, positive introspection (the KK principle) says: if you know P, you know that you know P. Hintikka built it into his system. It's…
Started by Priya Raghavan5 replies226 views -
Reading group: Prior Analytics I.1–7, slowly, with a Nyāya inference on the table
I teach Greek, and every year I tell students that Aristotle invented formal logic, and every year I realise I have never read the Prior Analytics closely in company. So here is a proposal: the first seven chapters of Book I, over…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies280 views -
What are the Nyāya hetvābhāsas, and do they line up with the Western list of fallacies?
I teach maths in Delhi and have been reading about Nyāya logic on weekends. I keep meeting the word hetvābhāsa, usually translated "fallacy" or "pseudo-reason", and a list of five kinds. My questions, as a non-specialist: What are the five, in plain…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies202 views -
Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
In our school we teach the Mīmāṃsā doctrine called svataḥ prāmāṇya, intrinsic validity. I have been reading the internalism and externalism debate in English, and I would like to know whether this doctrine belongs on one side, or whether the map does…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra5 replies204 views -
What are Udayana’s arguments for God, and whom was he arguing against?
I am an atheist and a physics teacher, and I spend weekends with a rationalist association showing villagers how "miracles" are done. I am also tired of Western debates about God being treated as the only debates. India had a long, sophisticated…
Started by Arvind Poojary5 replies154 views -
Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails
I teach physics and spend my weekends with a rationalist association, so I'm biased towards Locke. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies176 views -
The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
I teach physics and spend my weekends with a rationalist association, so I have a soft spot for the Cārvākas, India's materialists, who accepted perception as the only independent means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and rejected rebirth, the soul and the authority of…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies219 views -
Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do
My MA is on Nyāya, and every few months someone tells me that Navya-Nyāya was "Indian predicate logic". I'd like to test that claim with people who know Frege better than I do. The school is usually dated from Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi in…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies279 views -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I am doing an MA in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies202 views -
A scripture with no author: what Mīmāṃsā does to the intention debate
The Western argument about artistic intention assumes there is an author whose mind we either consult or ignore. My tradition has a case where, on its own account, there is no author at all. Pūrva Mīmāṃsā holds that the Veda is apauruṣeya:…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra4 replies208 views