School
Nyaya
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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 -
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 replies275 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 -
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 -
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 replies177 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 -
Every cognition should be trusted until something defeats it: the Mīmāṃsakas were right
I teach Pūrva Mīmāṃsā in Varanasi. One of our school's central doctrines is svataḥ prāmāṇya, the intrinsic validity of cognition. Kumārila Bhaṭṭa argued that when a cognition arises, its validity arises with it. We do not need a second cognition to certify…
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra6 replies278 views