Vaisheshika

Vaisheshika is the Indian school of natural philosophy that sorts reality into categories and holds that physical things are made of eternal atoms.

Its founding text, the Vaisheshika Sutra, is attributed to the sage Kanada and dates from around the turn of the common era. Prashastapada, around the sixth century CE, systematised its categories: substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity and inherence, to which later writers added absence. Vaisheshika later merged with Nyaya into a single realist system and argued at length against Buddhist views. Its treatment of atoms, space and time is its best-known contribution. On this site it answers questions on the philosophy of space (1.5).