Background: This year I taught again a class on Sanskrit philosophy (for the first time since 2021). I only had 12 meetings, of three hours each, hence I had do made drastic choices. The following is the result of these choices (alternative choices could have been possible, e.g., focusing on the Upaniṣads and their commentaries). Comments, as usual welcome!
There is a time within Sanskrit philosophy, approximately around 500 to 1000 CE, without which all later discussions do not make sense (whereas one can understand later discussions without referring to, e.g., the Brāhmaṇas, the Pāli canon etc.).
I am thinking of this core of Sanskrit philosophy as the period of time in which philosophers interacted with each other in a dialectical way, learning from each other and being compelled by each other’s points. In other words, as the time in which philosophy was constrained by the need to give reasons for each claim. In this sense, I am not focusing on the Pāli Canon or on the Upaniṣads.
At the core of this period lies the interaction between three schools, namely Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Buddhist epistemological school. No matter the topic, the interaction among these three is always at the center and always needs to be taken into account. According to the various topics, further schools might need to be taken into account. For instance, discussions about atomism will need to take into account the Vaiśeṣika school, discussions about language need to take into account the Vyākaraṇa school.
At the center of this core moment are discussions about epistemology and philosophy of language. It is interesting to note that ontology does not necessarily logically precede epistemology and that the opposite can be the case, especially in the case of Mīmāṃsā. This is particularly evident in the case of discussions about prāmāṇya `validity’.
Sanskrit philosophy developed through debates among thinkers commenting and responding to each other. In this way, they showed that ‘novelty’ is overestimated as a criterion to assess philosophical value and its consistent presence among the criteria reviewers of grants and projects are asked to assess is more the result of a fashion than of inner-philosophical reasons.
This does not mean that individual authors did not deliver substantial contribution to philosophy. Philosophy develops through its history and its history is made by individual thinkers. Nonetheless, these individual thinkers contribute under the garb of a school, downplaying their disagreements with their predecessors and often enveloping them within a commentary on a predecessor’s text, which is meant not just to explain it, but also to enfold all its potential meaning. Some scholars did move from one school to the other (e.g., possibly Vasubandhu or Maṇḍana), others just introduced in one school the elements of the other school they more strongly agreed with (e.g., Jayanta).
Key authors to be kept in mind:
• Dignāga (Buddhist epistemological school), introduced the threefold check, later accepted by all thinkers
• Kumārila (Mīmāṃsā), introduced the concept of intrinsic validity, explained that cognitions are not self-aware, challenged the Dignāga framework, systematised the discussions about absence and the other sources of knowledge (found already in his predecessor, Śabara).
• Dharmakīrti (Buddhist epistemological school), younger contemporary of Kumārila, adjusted the apoha theory and several other epistemological points in the light of Kumārila’s cricitism.
• Jayanta (Nyāya), modified the Nyāya epistemology in the light of Kumārila’s criticism, explained that cognitions are intrinsically doubtful, unless proven right, but that this does not lead to a paralysis, because one can act based on doubt.
May we get a peek at the syllabus?
I sent you a copy per email. Please don’t distribute through social media etc.
I would also like the syllabus 🙂
just sent
please send me .. if you can
I see your point, elisa: having earlier missed Jayanta and the epistemological turn, I was driven to assume that Sanskrit tradition had assimilated the sceptical probabilism of the later Greek Academics, which helped but didn’t quite fit. But it does rest easy with the conventional academic narrative of Indian astronomy developing from Greek roots, which sadly overlooks the Jains and sadly underestimates the Indic computational calculus. Yet it remains influential even among your readers here, who are probably missing this background and not even familiar with the threefold criterion.
With that all said, let me raise a logical difficulty: Kumarila’s position is vulnerable to the instability we call Russell’s paradox. Considered merely the thought of thoughts that are not aware of themselves, which is just the thought of the scope of Kumarila’s position. But is this thought itself not self-aware? If not, then it includes itself, and becomes in that way self-aware, but then excludes itself, in an endless unstable is oscillation.
The paradox Russell used to fault Frege’s arithmetic was certainly not original with him, but the background has not been thoroughly investigated. It came at a sensitive moment for the reception if Sanskrit philosophy in the West, and there was likely some discussion of Kumarila at the time: but all soon swept over by the triumphal march of the narrative of Western science.
Now is this difficulty at all familiar to you? One can say that the Buddhists ducked it by rejecting universals, and Jayanta split the difference by admitting that thoughts are in general doubtful, unless proven by additional resources. But we’re such moves at all reflected in the commentaries?
Thanks for your comment, Orwin. I am not sure that Kumārila’s position is vulnerable to the paradox, because in most cases you don’t need to know that you know that p, it is just enough to know that p.
As for your last question, it depends on which commentaries you are referring to. Surely most Sanskrit philosophical works are commentaries.
I was careful to state the paradox in relation to the scope of Kumārila’s position, which here evokes the Greek skopos, and the historic impact of the mass defection from Alexander’s army. But with Alex Watson one may simply remark that the philosophical initiative passed to Kaśmiri Śaivism, in the development Alex posed in his curriculum as Sāṅkhya, Yoga and Śaivism.
In consequence, as the epistemological wave passed, the many strains of Yogic interest could find expression in Viśiṣṭādvaita, Davaita, and Bhedābheda. In a further tribute to the legendary oandits of Kaśmir, we now find that in the epistemological current also there was a reflex avoidance of the possibility of paradox by appeal to an interesting variety of soft dualities. Having like Alex ventured into psychotherapy, I found a range if such options in object relations theory, posed as foundational. Yet the standard style representation of four positions, as variously in Jung, Wilber, or well before in Ampere’s late philosophy, seemed insufficient to the plasticity of human identity, reinventing itself as if by transposition of it’s own broken symmetries. Alex settling on six courses while insisting that the number was not set in stone, now tickled my philosophical itch and I can’t help laughing at myself. Six is the raw answer from combinatorial logic, and looking back through Ampere I did find recently a deep way with such patterns in the theorem Ptolemy gave to establish trigonometrical identities, as the Jains all along took for granted in their computations. But a geometrrical proof of computational identities has a very special appeal as a form somehow integral to thought, or the mental capacity.
So we come to a bedrock of difference, where Derrida took his stand as our world started to re-polaruze. The Greeks took an emphatic interest in paradoxes, as a resource in geometrical proof, where the Indians relied on intuitive clarify, and saved the effort for their philosophies. The Western tradition is accordingly haunted by the prospect of madness or paralysis, and aspires endlessly to philosophical systems which are never realized in anything like systematic form. And I can’t recommend that those following the Indic interest now try too hard to conform.
On the quirky note of symmetries and reinvention let me pass on with an anecdote from current science, reflecting Albert Einstein’s unsettling way with space and time. With a simply apparatus of reasoning about such extensions and how they may be observed, one can now recover his General Relativity from the blunt observation that two sides of the same page have the same area, observable only with opposite chirality or handedness. Who would have thought that was a grave matter?
As you acknowledge, there must be a selection of topics, schools and authors dut to lack of time. In my own “Introduction to Indian Philosophy” lessons (40 hours), and due to my own interests, I focus more on Metaphysics, Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. I also mention the other topics (Epistemology, Aesthetics, Logic, Philosophy of Language…), but the focus is completely different. Yours is quite similar to Ganeri’s. We might say, more “analitic”, while mine would be more “continental”?
Thank you for your wonderful work.
Thanks, Javier! I agree, one needs to make choices and these end up being at least in part arbitrary. I see your point regarding the fact that mine look “analytic”, although I would add to that a strong concern with the history of ideas (which is often absent in analytic approaches to philosophy). My main justification of my approach is that it’s impossible to read, e.g., Vedāntic discussions of theology without knowing about the theory of syllogism, whereas the opposite is not the case (both historically and thematically). But, of course, this indispensability rule does not need to be one’s guiding principle.