Nyāya is one of the six schools of Indian philosophy (ca. 500 BCE to 1500 CE). It represents reasoning or logic, nyāya, into the ideals of adhyātma (treating of things elusive, such as Being and Self), and hetu (reason, treating of things conventional and empirical) (Halbfass 1992: 32). While the former inquiry is reminiscent of the medieval reconfiguration of Aristotelian metaphysics from Aquinas to Dun Scotus, Nyāya metaphysic does not easily fit this frame. Rather, the goal of enquiry is niḥśreyasa or the greatest good of wisdom and liberation from ignorance and suffering or duḥkha. Thus, this prāçiṇa or “ancient” school of Brāhmaṇic thought is enlisted in the service of the erstwhile Vedic orthodoxy (śruti) to bolster defense against the “negative ontology” of a threatening Buddhist antirealism. However, the Nyāya is better known for continuing a certain development of the realist thrust of a prior system known as Vaiśeṣika, that is described as “physics,” or “rigorous descriptive...
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Notes
- 1.
Gautama's date is given by Vidyābhusan as circa 553 BCE, but this may be way off the mark; Jacobi places the date of Nyāyāsūtra between 200 CE and 450 CE, but then there is controversy as to whether this is not the date for the later redaction of the śāstras by one Akṣapāda. 7) and See Bijalwan (1977): Daya Krishna (1991: 133).
- 2.
Matilal (1935–1991) was a rare kind of thinker, a philosopher of sensibility who embodied east and west in balanced proportions and who demonstrated that Indian thought, even in its most metaphysical and soteriological concerns, was rigorously analytical and logical as well as discursive. His work has found broad endorsement and inspired lively debate not only among many contemporary Indian philosophers and Indologists, but also in international philosophical circles.
- 3.
Mukhopadhaya, whose reconstruction of the division between restricted categories (of which he admits only three) and the open-ended concepts that Mohanty is questioning, nevertheless is confident that the controversy is settled by his own conceptual intervention in just this manner, and further that his liberalization of concepts assures progress of knowledge and new epistemes and dimensions of experience. Explorations 212.
- 4.
Although, Śaṅkara approbatingly cites Gautama from N.S. IV.ii.35 where this issue is discussed, under Brahmasūtra I.i.iv, because the Advaitin Adiguru also believes that in this state the self has no further contact with the mind, sense-organs, antaḥkaraṇa, or inner unifying sense, much less with the world of objects outside. The difference between apavarga and ātmatattva in Śaṅkara's ideology is that for the latter there is knowledge of the self by the self, in Nyāya there is no knowledge of it as it is not necessary. For other Vedāntins of course, this state of mokṣa is full of all kinds of knowledge, including sarvajñāna or omniscience (except at its very peak, since Brahman has no name and distinction from the self, Brahman is not an object of knowledge whatever kind of “knowingness” this might involve). Later Nyāya writers introduce sarvajñāna via yogic pratyakṣa (mystic perception) in one of its two types. On some problems with Śaṅkara's treatment of self, its knowledge and ānandas, see two articles on Saṅkara in the Matilal Memorial Volume I (Bibliography), Bilimoria 2003 (252–277) and Julius Lipner, “Śaṅkara on Satyam, Jñānam Anantam Brahma” (301–335).
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Bilimoria, P. (2008). Nyāya . In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9280
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