Tradition
Indian
Indian philosophy is the thought of the Indian subcontinent, including the Vedanta, Nyaya, Mimamsa, Samkhya, Jain, Buddhist and Carvaka schools.
It begins with the Upanishads, in which sages such as Yājñavalkya and Uddālaka Āruṇi asked about the self and reality, and grew into classical schools (darshanas) that debated knowledge, logic, language and liberation. Key figures include Mahavira, Adi Shankara, Rāmānuja, Madhva, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, Udayana and Gangesa, with Bharata and Abhinavagupta on aesthetic experience (rasa). Modern thinkers include Rabindranath Tagore, B. R. Ambedkar and Matilal. Buddhist thinkers also have their own page. It answers questions on the sources of knowledge (2.2), inference, the self, causation, language and beauty.
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Rasa and ordinary emotion: why can grief in a play be a kind of delight?
Rasa theory seems to answer a question the emotion threads here haven't asked: why do we enjoy sad things? In Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra, rasa is produced when the causes of an emotion (the situation and characters), its outward expressions and its passing accompanying…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
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"), 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 who says objects…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Alston’s parity argument fails because rival mystical practices contradict each other
I want to defend a fairly standard objection, but coming from physics I want to state it carefully, because I think the usual version undersells Alston. Alston's move in Perceiving God (1991) is clever. We cannot justify trusting sense perception without relying…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here is my confusion. Buddhism teaches anattā, no self. Everything arises from causes and conditions; nothing is…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies -
If almost nothing the Cārvākas wrote survives, how do we know what they thought?
I've been reading about the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, the Indian materialists, and every introduction says something like "almost no Cārvāka text survives; the school is reconstructed from the summaries its opponents wrote." As someone who studies texts, this worries me. If…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
One source of knowledge, two, four, five or six? Why Indian schools argued over the count
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 knowledge (pramāṇa) there are, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
What is apoha, and how can a word mean something by excluding everything else?
Please be gentle; I'm new to formal philosophy. In a seminar on translation someone mentioned that the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga held that the word “cow” means something like “not non-cow”. Everyone nodded. I laughed, because it sounded like a riddle, and then…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
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 replies -
If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do?
Recently I started on Advaita Vedānta, and one idea has stopped me cold. As I understand it, the claim is that the self (ātman) already is ultimate reality (brahman). "Tat tvam asi", you are that, as Uddālaka tells his son in the…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Is the Sanskrit sahṛdaya the same ideal critic as Hume’s “true judge”?
In my poetics classes the ideal reader is the sahṛdaya, literally "one with heart", or one whose heart is in tune with the poet's. Abhinavagupta, commenting on Ānandavardhana, describes such readers as people whose minds have been made clear, like a polished…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
What is threshold deontology, and isn’t it just consequentialism with extra steps?
In my constitutional law seminar we discussed whether rights can ever be suspended in an emergency. I mentioned the ADM Jabalpur case from 1976, when our Supreme Court accepted that even the right to life could not be enforced during the Emergency,…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Vitaṇḍā is not always illegitimate: a critic with no thesis can still be doing philosophy
There is one problem in Nāgārjuna I have been chewing on for a long time. The Nyāya tradition calls vitaṇḍā illegitimate: one party only attacks and never defends a position, so they risk nothing and cannot be wrong. That seems fair as…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung7 replies -
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 replies -
Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
Editors think about endings more than is healthy. A film that never ends is not a better film. It is a worse one, and after a while not a film at all. Bernard Williams makes an argument like this about immortality, in…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam6 replies -
Does “wrong” mean the same thing in every language, or does each language build in a moral theory?
In the last year I have spent more time translating the word “wrong” than any other. In ordinary Vietnamese, the word we would use most often for “wrong”, sai, also means simply “incorrect”: a wrong answer on a test, a wrong turn.…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Frege said logic is not psychology. A materialist would like a word
In the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege lays down as his first principle that the psychological must be sharply separated from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Husserl later made the anti-psychologism case at length in the Prolegomena…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
Every day at work I meet words that the dictionary claims to define and that my clients use in ways the definition doesn't cover. Heimat is the famous German case, but the ordinary words are worse. “Fair” in English. Geist. The French…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Rāmānuja’s question ‘whose ignorance?’ is the objection Advaita never answered
I read Mīmāṃsā, which makes me a realist about the world of ritual, persons and things, and therefore no natural friend of either kind of Vedāntin. On one point, though, I side firmly with Rāmānuja against Śaṅkara. Advaita holds that brahman alone…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya6 replies -
A thousand years of Buddhists and Vedāntins arguing about the self: failure or success?
Here is a question I keep returning to on long evenings. Something I read recently put it starkly. Vedānta says the innermost self is identical with ultimate reality. Buddhism says there is no permanent self at all. Two traditions, the same region,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?
At work in Kuala Lumpur I evaluate text-generating systems for fairness. Last month a colleague said, half joking, that one of our models "meant" something offensive. Everyone laughed and then nobody could say whether that was false. The usual philosophical framing seems…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Nāgārjuna and the Vienna Circle both attacked metaphysics. Were they doing the same thing?
Recently a trekking client who studied philosophy in Vienna told me Nāgārjuna sounded like a logical positivist: someone who shows that metaphysical claims collapse under analysis. I can see the resemblance. Nāgārjuna takes every position, that things exist intrinsically, that they don't,…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies -
Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics
At the statue of Ibn Rushd near Córdoba's old walls I often tell visitors about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
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 replies -
Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6
Every year a student asks me whether mathematics "says anything about the world". Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic gives the boldest answer I know (no, it is all tautology) and the boldest dismissal of metaphysics. He was in his mid-twenties when he…
Started by Vikram Sethi6 replies -
Does it matter at the bedside whether the self is a soul, ātman or a process?
I've been reading comparative accounts of the self: a created soul accountable to God in Islam, the self identical with brahman in Vedānta, no permanent self in Buddhism, a rational soul in the Greeks, a contested thing in modern European thought. The…
Started by Omar Ragab6 replies