A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
Are words an instrument of knowledge? And, if so, what sort of? Are they an instance of inference insofar as one infers the meaning on the basis of the words used? Or are they are an independent instrument of knowledge, Continue reading Are words an instrument of knowledge?
Some authors tend to think that once upon a time there was one Yoga and that later this has been “altered” or has at least “evolved” into many forms. According to their own stand, they might look at this developments Continue reading Two (or three) different narratives on Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta etc.
In Part One, I explained the critiques of Dignāga’s epistemology offered by Candrakīrti and Jayarāśi. In Part Two, I’ll consider whether these arguments create serious problems for Dignāga’s epistemology. I suspect that the two arguments are different in that Candrakīrti Continue reading Candrakīrti and Jayarāśi on Dignāga’s Epistemology (Part Two)
Is Indian Philosophy “caste-ish”? Yes and no, in the sense that each philosophy is also the result of its sociological milieu, but it is not only that. Is Indian Philosophy only focused on “the Self”? Surely not.
In his Pramāṇasamuccaya, Dignāga claims that there are two means of knowledge (pramāṇas): perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna). Perception has as its object the particular (svalakṣana); inference has as its object the universal (sāmānyalakṣana). The key distinguishing feature between the two is Continue reading Candrakīrti and Jayarāśi on Dignāga’s Epistemology (Part One)
Our Anand Vaidya has recently raised a very intriguing discussion on modality in Indian philosophy. His post started with the suggestion that modality is less central in Indian philosophy than it is in Western thought. In the comments, several scholars Continue reading Necessity in Mīmāṃsā philosophy
The hardest part, I find, about the philosophical vocabulary of Sanskrit is not its enormity or its technicality, but the fact that it includes a couple of “basic” or even “common-sense” words whose import, in any given context, can be Continue reading Tricky words: prāp-
On the Indian Philosophy Blog, commenter Anthony S asked an important and difficult question: what are good resources for thinking through Indian political philosophy? . I’m interested not so much in comparative philosophy as comparative political thought/theory, specifically in terms Continue reading Is there Indian political philosophy?
The seventh and eighth centuries were, as Jean-Marie Verpoorten said, a “Golden Age” for Mīmāṃsā, when the two most important exponents of the system, Kumārila and Prabhākara, lived. But it was also a “Golden Age” for other systems. It was Continue reading Untangling the Golden Age
A while ago I referred to Śāntideva’s thought as “ethics without morality” – a deliberately provocative formulation based on Shyam Ranganathan’s eccentric definition of morality as that which conduces to anger. (I don’t agree with Shyam’s definition myself, but putting Continue reading Goodness as preventing suffering