Epistemology in Classical India

The Knowledge Sources of the Nyaya School

Stephen H Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136518980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Epistemologie in der Philosophie

In this book, Phillips gives an overview of the contribution of Nyaya--the classical Indian school that defends an externalist position about knowledge as well as an internalist position about justification. Nyaya literature extends almost two thousand years and comprises hundreds of texts, and in this book, Phillips presents a useful overview of the under-studied system of thought. For the philosopher rather than the scholar of Sanskrit, the book makes a whole range of Nyaya positions and arguments accessible to students of epistemology who are unfamiliar with classical Indian systems.

1 Historical and Conceptual Introduction

This book is written for philosophers and students of philosophy, not for specialists in classical Indian thought. An historical stage is set in this first chapter for a philosophic spectacle to follow. And even here the main aim is not historical but to introduce key concepts of the theory of knowledge that will be engaged throughout, that of the Nyāya school. Nyāya's epistemological concepts were pretty much shared across school or system, but my intention in this book is not to present a common classical Indian epistemology but rather only the Nyāya version. Competing Buddhist and other theories will be surveyed, but mainly from the Nyāya perspective. I try to avoid using Sanskrit words, but those I do use are defined in an appended glossary, the first part of which gives dates of texts and authors as well as the names of the major schools together with their most important positions.

In this book I attempt to draw on as much of Nyāya history as I command to creatively reconstruct Nyāya epistemology in the philosophic terms of English. While an individual author may or may not have had his own distinct views and arguments, every Nyāya philosopher takes himself to speak for the school. Although there are “camps” in contemporary philosophy, there is little that is similar to the classical Indian school. The established view of a school is called siddhānta, as is too the portion of a text where an author presents his own views and arguments as opposed to pūrva-pak

a, text devoted to prima facie views or opponents' reasonings. My point is that textual siddhānta is always to be taken as expressing more than the views of an individual thinker, as expressing what the author takes to be the truth as discerned in Nyāya in general. Although some of the later philosophers have important differences with earlier Nyāya positions, differences they point out, usually these are not very radical and more a matter of refinement than revolution. Originality is downplayed, as authors strive to perfect the system and answer objections from other schools. Thus to try to find a single coherent theory, which is admittedly an abstraction from a long series of texts, is in accord with the dominant attitude within Nyāya itself. To be sure, the school's later history is marked by innovative arguments and a few novel positions, mainly in ontology. And to some extent, every major author, including those belonging to what comes to be called Old Nyāya and of early New Nyāya (Ga

geśa and company, fourteenth century), is creative in representing the philosophy and responding to challenges from Buddhists and others, sometimes fellow realists of distinct schools. But the Nyāya mainstream changes hardly at all. Moreover, innovations and divergences should be understood against that background, it seems to me. This mainstream the tradition takes to be defined by the Nyāya-sūtra and its core commentaries (c. 200–1000) and then in the New Nyāya period by those works plus Ga

geśa's Tattvacintā-ma

i (c. 1325).

The outline of the Nyāya theory of knowledge should be plain by the end of this chapter, but let me say right away that all knowledge is produced by delineable knowledge sources according to Nyāya, and it is through theorizing about how we know that the sources are in place that Nyāya philosophers provide a theory of justification. It is my contention that, details aside, Nyāya's project can be generalized as an epistemological theory according to which, first, there are two types of knowledge, unreflective and certified, and, second, there are signs of knowledge sources (and their imitators such as fallacious reasoning) recognizing which we turn our unreflective knowledge into knowledge certified. By knowing the sources of our beliefs, we come to have epistemic justification.

NYĀYA WITHIN CLASSICAL INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

Sanskrit philosophical literature as defined by a prominence of self-conscious argument (a criterion ruling out very old proto-philosophical texts such as the Upanishads) runs from about 200 bce to 1900+. Some philosophy is still written today in Sanskrit by the traditionally learned. Nyāya is one of a dozen or so prominent classical schools using Sanskrit as its medium. Sanskrit was an intellectual lingua franca across India for more than two thousand years, with extensive literatures in grammar, medicine, poetry, drama, aesthetics, astrology, jurisprudence, and other fields in addition to more well-known traditions of religion and philosophy (Buddhist as well as Hindu and Jaina). In 1835, the British Parliament declared that no government funds would go to schools using Sanskrit, and Sanskrit traditions and literatures other than those such as Vedānta sustained by popular religion have given way to modern cultures and the media of the regional languages and English.

In Sanskrit, the word ‘nyāya’ is a proper name, the name of the school, but the word can also mean “logical or investigative procedure.” Sometimes translators say the school of “Logic.” In the system itself, the word is given a technical meaning as the method or methods, both evidential and conceptual, to be employed to end controversy and alleviate doubt, in a word, philosophic procedure.¹ Nyāya proves its appellation apt by probing the concept of knowledge, repelling skepticism, and championing right procedures in both debate and inquiry. Its methods were picked up by other schools, and were used in other areas and literatures such as jurisprudence and aesthetics. And there was a long mutual exchange and development between Nyāya and Buddhist Yogācāra in particular on topics of logic and informal reasoning.

Nyāya emerges as a school of philosophy, a worldview to be sustained by generations of contributors, together with six or seven competing philosophies, around the second century ce (some of the classical schools are not so old). It has a root text, the Nyāya-sūtra, which is attributed to Gautama, a legendary but entirely human figure about whom we know nothing much in particular. Scholars have claimed to find a manual of debate and informal logic as a subset of the whole.² Since the Nyāya-sūtra includes much more than logic, probably the text should be regarded as having been gradually filled out in its earliest years, with the logical portions the oldest. But for our purposes there is no point in dividing it and assuming other authors than Gautama, the “sūtra-kāra.”

Alongside Nyāya's celebrated epistemology is a complex ontology (concerning what is real and interrelations among realities), ethics, philosophy of language (to be surveyed by us under the epistemological category of testimony), and an extensive arsenal of arguments, both constructive and destructive, aimed at opponent positions, on metaphysical topics such as personal identity, the reality of universals, the relationship of properties and property-bearers, and so on, almost all of which were debated across school. Historically, Nyāya comes to be, for example, the target of Buddhist polemics (very highly refined Buddhist polemics, I might add, in Dharmakīrti,

āntarak

ita, Ratnakīrti, and other Buddhist Sanskrit authors). However, Mīmāmsā, “Exegesis,” a school bent on defending Vedic revelation with its own subtle positions in the epistemology of testimony, assumes the role of the main adversary, and not the Buddhist, in most later Nyāya treatises.

Absolutely central to the Buddhist debate is Nyāya's commitment to realism, that is, to the metaphysical thesis that things are what they are independently of our knowings and perceivings, which are themselves conceived in objectivist terms. Nyāya embraces an empiricism that connects with its realism: without perception, which is our principal link with the world, none of the other sources could operate. In all periods—and no matter who the opponent targeted—Nyāya philosophers try to make plain the connections between the operations of knowledge sources and the things and facts known. Sometimes its principles of epistemology are defensible independently of ontology, it seems to me, but sometimes not. Similarly, some of the ontological theses are suitably abstract and plausible, while others are inadequate. For example, similarity is analyzed as a property supervenient on other properties and defined as one thing having many properties in common with something else—a view that has merit independently of Nyāya's theory of four types of atom, for instance, or sound as a quality. In any case, the worldview is progressively refined and expanded by Nyāya-sūtra commentators and by philosophers writing non-commentarial works over almost a score of centuries. A series of commentaries written from about 400 to around 1000, with four contributors (in addition to Gautama, the “sūtra-maker,” they are Vātsyāyana, Uddyotakara, Vācaspati Miśra, and Udayana) form a few thousand pages of classical Nyāya-sūtra (NyS) literature. During the period—called Old Nyāya—there are also a few non-commentarial texts by Jayanta Bhatta and Bhāsarvajña among others. These rarely diverge from views of the NyS commentaries, but some of the outlier positions and arguments are interesting in their own right and will be taken up by us in later chapters.

So-called New Nyāya, Navya Nyāya, emerges in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and flourishes in the later part of the classical or pre-modern age, well into the period of Muslim rule in North India. New techniques of analysis become standardized and more sophisticated positions ironed out. The New Naiyāyikas profited not only from study of Old Nyāya but also, in particular, of the competing positions of Buddhist Yogācāra and Mīmāmsā. In later years, Navya-Nyāya texts become numerous, and the philosophic sophistication of its advocates—who are learned, we should stress, not only in Nyāya tradition but in controversies across school—is extraordinary by any measure. Along with new techniques of logical and linguistic analysis, there are new arguments and argument strategies. But there is little change in basic outlook or core positio...