The Debate on Ontology Among the New Logicians in Early Modern India
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Redrawing the Map of Reality: The Debate on Ontology among the New Logicians in Early Modern India The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Madhavan, Gokul. 2017. Redrawing the Map of Reality: The Debate on Ontology among the New Logicians in Early Modern India. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42061480 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ©2017 — Gokul Madhavan all rights reserved. Advisor: Parimal G. Patil Gokul Madhavan Redrawing the Map of Reality: The Debate on Ontology among the New Logicians in Early Modern India Abstract In this dissertation, I examine some of the ways in which different ontological schemata were developed, critiqued, and defended in the Sanskritic intellectual tradition of late pre-modern India. I do so by focusing specifically on the stream of thought known as Navya Nyāya, whose adherents displayed a commitment to realism and rigorous analysis and a willingness to subject long-standing ideas to withering critique. I look at three major ontological schemata: 1. the so-called “Standard Model”, particularly as exemplified in Jagadīśa Tarkâlaṅkāra’s Tarkâmṛta, which developed out of an earlier period of creative synthesis of the older Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika traditions 2. the “Radical Revision” proposed by the brilliant Raghunātha Śiromaṇi in his Padârtha-tattva-nirūpaṇa 3. Veṇīdatta’s “Attempted Synthesis” of the Standard Model and the Radical Revision in his Padârtha-maṇḍana I also examine two other texts that provide innovative perspectives on the debate on ontological schemata and on the language in which this debate was conducted: 1. Gaṅgādhara Sūrī’s Kāṇāda-siddhānta-candrikā, in which he presents a “sed- imentary” account of the ontological debate in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, describ- iii Advisor: Parimal G. Patil Gokul Madhavan ing the key features of the Standard Model while pointing out the ma- jor loci of dispute with the Radical Revision and with other Naiyāyika- Vaiśeṣika ontological schemata 2. Maheśacandra Nyāyaratna’s Navyanyāya-bhāṣā-pradīpa, in which he ex- plains the key features of the technical language of Navya Nyāya without a strong commitment to specific ontological positions These schemata are all usually described in Navya Nyāya texts using the peculiar but astonishingly powerful technical language developed by Navya Nyāya philosophers. I also “translate” these traditional schemata into the lan- guage of modern mathematics, using tools developed in fields like category theory to model the formulations of the Navya Nyāya language. Using this, I show that the developments in the Navya Nyāya ontological schemata over time are increasingly more conducive to representation in category-theoretical terms. Finally, I indicate some important ways in which the trajectory of this set of debates continues to be of relevance to us even now. This project is as much about the intellectual history of Nyāya–Vaiśeṣika as it is about the intellectual future of some of its core philosophical ideas. iv Contents 1 Preliminaries: Texts, Models, Methods 1 1.1 Introduction .............................. 2 1.2 Impact ................................. 6 1.3 Audiences ............................... 14 1.4 Ontology in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika: on the padârthas .......... 15 1.5 Three properties ........................... 18 1.6 Three texts .............................. 26 1.7 Three ontological schemata ..................... 39 1.8 Organization of the dissertation ................... 49 1.9 A footnote on the translations .................... 51 2 Nyāya Categorizations 55 2.1 Introduction .............................. 55 2.2 Before the synthesis ......................... 56 2.3 The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika Synthesis ................... 66 2.4 The development of Navya Nyāya ................. 68 3 Category theory and Navya Nyāya 86 3.1 Introduction .............................. 88 3.2 Different tools for Navya Nyāya ................... 89 v 3.3 A brief introduction to category theory ............... 95 3.4 Higher-order category theory ....................108 3.5 Navya Nyāya and category theory .................109 3.6 Modeling substances .........................111 3.7 Modeling tropes and motions ....................112 3.8 Modeling absences ..........................117 3.9 Category-theoretical representations of relations .........119 3.10 Classes and imposed properties ...................125 3.11 Relational properties .........................130 3.12 Cognitions ...............................136 3.13 On doubt and certainty in cognitions ................145 4 Substances and Particularizers 149 4.1 Introduction ..............................150 4.2 Generally accepted substances ...................152 4.3 Debates on space and time .....................154 4.4 Debates on ether ...........................183 4.5 Debates on mind ...........................195 4.6 Spatial extension ...........................206 4.7 Particularizers ............................218 4.8 The Lamp’s alternative approach to ontology ...........228 4.9 Summary ...............................232 5 Tropes and motions 239 5.1 Introduction ..............................240 5.2 An overview of tropes ........................243 5.3 Debates on individuality .......................248 5.4 Debates on numbers .........................260 vi 5.5 Debates on measure .........................268 5.6 Debates on proximality and distality ................275 5.7 Debates on unmanifest colors and touches .............279 5.8 Variegated tropes and locus-pervasion ...............285 5.9 Motions ................................302 5.10 Summary ...............................303 6 Class-properties 309 6.1 Introduction ..............................310 6.2 Class-properties in Nyāya ......................311 6.3 Udayana’s study of universals ....................330 6.4 Debates on universals ........................333 6.5 Debates on existence .........................334 6.6 Do tropes form a genuine category? ................341 6.7 Debates on experiential cognitions .................347 6.8 Debates on bhūtatva and mūrtatva ..................353 6.9 On causal potency and the argument from universals .......361 6.10 Summary ...............................367 7 Relations 371 7.1 Introduction ..............................372 7.2 The place of relations in an ontological schema ..........373 7.3 How many relations are there? ...................376 7.4 Relations in (Navya) Nyāya .....................377 7.5 Components of a relation ......................380 7.6 Debates on inherence ........................394 7.7 “Self-linking” relations ........................402 7.8 Temporal relations ..........................414 vii 7.9 Completion ..............................417 7.10 Self-linking relations and relational properties ..........420 7.11 A coda on absences ..........................433 7.12 Summary ...............................442 8 Conclusion 448 8.1 Summing up .............................448 8.2 Where to next? ............................467 8.3 Conclusion ..............................470 A The Tarkâmṛta 471 A.1 Benediction ..............................472 A.2 Purpose of text ............................473 A.3 The categories in brief ........................475 A.4 Substances ..............................475 A.5 Tropes .................................490 A.6 Motions ................................506 A.7 Classes .................................506 A.8 Particularizers ............................507 A.9 Inherence ...............................508 A.10 On the completeness of this schema ................508 A.11 Absence ................................508 A.12 Knowledge-generating experiential cognitive episodes ......509 A.13 Perception ...............................509 A.14 Inference ...............................514 A.15 Analogy ................................522 A.16 Language ...............................523 viii B The Padârtha-maṇḍana 536 B.1 Benediction ..............................540 B.2 The purpose of the text .......................541 B.3 Time, space, ether ..........................541 B.4 God and individual self .......................548 B.5 The manas ...............................552 B.6 Atoms, dyads, and measure .....................555 B.7 Bodies, substantiality, embodiedness ................562 B.8 Cleaning up tropes: individuality ..................570 B.9 Cleaning up tropes: proximality and distality ...........574 B.10 Particularizers ............................578 B.11 Tropes, actions, and their loci ....................581 B.12 Perception of substances .......................601 B.13 Cleaning up universals ........................616 B.14 Cleaning up absences ........................627 B.15 Recognition, doubt, and certainty ..................632 B.16 Momentariness ............................635 B.17 The linguistic cognition of words like “Daśaratha” and “demon” is through imagination .......................639 B.18 On property ..............................642 B.19 śakti as a category ..........................648 B.20 Additional categories .........................654 B.21 A concluding summary of the author’s position ..........658