Thinker · TH-0174
Gangesa
Gangesa was an Indian logician and epistemologist from Mithila, active around the fourteenth century, whose Tattvacintamani founded the 'new' school of Nyaya, Navya-Nyaya. Organised…
गङ्गेश
Also known as Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, Gangesha
c. 14th century CE · Mithila (Bihar)
Traditions: Indian
Schools: Nyaya
Gangesa was an Indian logician and epistemologist from Mithila, active around the fourteenth century, whose Tattvacintamani founded the 'new' school of Nyaya, Navya-Nyaya. Organised around the Nyaya means of knowledge, the work developed a highly technical vocabulary for analysing relations, negation and the qualifier structure of cognition. That apparatus became the standard technical language of later Indian philosophy across many schools. His precise dates are not securely known.
Key ideas
- Knowledge has four sources: perception, inference, comparison and testimony.
- Inference rests on pervasion (vyapti), an invariable relation between the reason and what is inferred, which must be precisely defined.
- Cognitions have a structure of qualifier and qualified that can be specified with technical exactness.
- Absences and negations are real objects of cognition and come in distinguishable kinds.
Major works
- Tattvacintāmaṇi (The Jewel of Reflection on Reality, c. 14th century)
- Dīdhiti of Raghunātha Śiromaṇi (c. 16th century): the most influential later commentary on the Tattvacintāmaṇi, through which much of it was studied
In the conversation
- Question If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
- Question Is Nyāya tarka a kind of counterfactual reasoning, and does it need possible worlds?
- Question Śrīharṣa against the Naiyāyikas: can every definition be refuted, and how did Nyāya answer him?
- Discussion Kumārila said a cognition is valid until shown otherwise. Is that internalism or externalism?
- Debate The self-defeat charge against the Cārvākas attacks a position they probably did not hold
- Discussion Navya-Nyāya’s language of limitors, and what it was built to do
- Debate Every cognition should be trusted until something defeats it: the Mīmāṃsakas were right
- Question If syllogistic logic couldn’t handle relations, why did it last two thousand years?
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Gangesa takes a place.
- 4.1 Formal Logic What makes an argument work, regardless of its subject?
- 4.1.3 Syllogistic Logic What follows from two statements about classes of things?