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.
-
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 -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t
At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Reading group: the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapters on rasa and bhāva
Everyone in my literature classes mentions rasa, almost nobody has read the chapters where the theory is actually set out. I'd like to read them with company, and with people who know more Sanskrit than I do. Translation: Manomohan Ghosh's English translation…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?
I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
What are the Nyāya hetvābhāsas, and do they line up with the Western list of fallacies?
I've 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 terms, with an example of each…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies -
What exactly was new about al-Khwarizmi’s algebra?
The word "algorithm" comes from the Latin form of al-Khwārizmī's name. “Algebra” comes from the al-jabr in the title of his book. So he is everywhere in my working vocabulary. But when I read about him, I get two stories. One says…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I study 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 the thinker of thinking,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
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 Upadhyaya4 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
What is apoha, and does defining by exclusion help with the frog-and-fly problem?
I teach philosophy at an upper-secondary school in Lund, and my hobby is reading Sanskrit philosophers in translation and noticing where they reached our problems first. I would like a clear explanation of one idea I only half understand. Dignāga, the fifth-…
Started by Oskar Nyberg4 replies -
My cousin’s wedding was moved because of a horoscope. What would a Cārvāka say, and would it be fair?
My cousin's wedding was set for December. Last week an astrologer compared the two horoscopes again and found a problem, so it has moved to April, at real cost to both families. Everybody is calm about it except me. The easy move…
Started by Arvind Poojary3 replies -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
What are the pramāṇas, and how do the schools disagree about them?
I grew up hearing words like "pramāṇa" in family discussions without really knowing what they meant. I've started reading Indian philosophy properly and keep running into lists of pramāṇas that differ between schools. What are they, and why does the number matter?
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Gandhi’s satyagraha as philosophy, not just a tactic
Gandhi coined the word satyāgraha, "holding firmly to truth", in South Africa around 1906–08. He distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as the weapon of the weak. Satyāgraha requires the resister to accept suffering without retaliating, aiming to convert the…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Dream arguments East and West: Descartes, Zhuangzi and the Yoga Vasistha
Three treatments of the same worry. Descartes, Meditations I (1641): there are no sure signs to distinguish waking from dreaming, so the senses can't give certain knowledge. He uses it as a method, a step towards certainty. Zhuangzi, chapter 2: Zhuangzi dreams…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
Did Indian mathematicians have a philosophy of zero?
Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE) gives rules for arithmetic with zero as a number: adding zero to a number leaves it unchanged, multiplying by zero gives zero, and so on. He also tried to define division by zero, not quite successfully. Earlier, the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Can someone explain Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita fairly, from an Advaitin’s point of view?
I confess I have never given Rāmānuja the attention he deserves. My Vaishnava friends tell me I misrepresent him whenever I speak about him. So I ask, in good faith: what exactly is Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism"? How does it differ from Advaita…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
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 replies -
Can a baby or an animal have a right if it cannot claim it? Interest theory versus will theory
I think about the ethics of drug trials on animals more than most of our customers would like. Someone at a talk recently said there are two main theories of what a right is: the "will" theory and the "interest" theory, and…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
I've been reading about early Chinese philosophy for fun. Several books mention that Mozi proposed "three tests" or "three standards" for judging a doctrine, and one claims this was the first explicit methodology in Chinese thought. I'd like to know what the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Why did the Vaiśeṣikas count direction as a substance?
I teach physics and spend weekends exposing miracle tricks for a rationalist association, so I like the Indian schools that tried to describe the world piece by piece. The Vaiśeṣika list of nine substances is a favourite of mine: earth, water, fire,…
Started by Arvind Poojary3 replies -
Filial duty, but whose? In most families I know, the daughter-in-law pays it
In my family, and in almost every family I know, when parents grow old the care is done by a woman who is not their daughter. The son has the duty; the son's wife does the work. Nobody says this out loud.…
Started by Thamarai Raman2 replies -
Did Indian epistemologists anticipate the Gettier problem?
In 1963 Edmund Gettier's three-page paper showed that justified true belief isn't sufficient for knowledge. You can have a justified belief that's true by luck. Indian philosophers seem to have discussed cases like this centuries earlier. The Buddhist Dharmottara (eighth century) is…
Started by Meera Kulkarni2 replies -
Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)
Rabindranath Tagore gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, and they were published the next year as The Religion of Man. It isn't a work of systematic philosophy but an extended reflection on the human being as the meeting point of…
Started by Kavya Menon2 replies -
If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
I've been reading an introduction to Buddhist epistemology on the train, and I'm stuck on Dignāga's definition of perception (pratyakṣa) as "free from conceptual construction". As I understand it, the object of perception is the bare particular, and anything general, like "cup",…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen1 reply -
Karma as moral causation: does the theory hold together?
The doctrine of karma says that actions have consequences for the agent that go beyond their visible effects, ripening in this life or future lives. It is shared, in different forms, by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. As an engineer I want…
Started by Arjun Iyer1 reply -
Sanskrit grammar as philosophy: Bhartṛhari on word and meaning
Bhartṛhari (around the fifth century) wrote the Vākyapadīya, "On Sentences and Words", a work of grammar that became a full philosophy of language. Some key ideas: Sphoṭa: meaning isn't built up from individual sounds; there's an indivisible linguistic unit, manifested by the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni1 reply -
Is rest something you have to earn? Aristotle, the Gita and the Sabbath give three answers
I've had some months away from work, and the strangest part is not the free time. It's the feeling that I owe someone an explanation for it. Rest feels like a loan. Three texts I keep carrying around, which seem to disagree:…
Started by Rohan DesaiReply first (no replies yet) -
Yājñavalkya
Yājñavalkya is a Vedic sage who appears as a leading teacher in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, debating at the court of…