The practice of rational debate between philosophers from different traditions, especially between Hindu—Naiyāyika and Mīmāṃsaka—, Buddhist and Jain philosophers, is unique in classical India. Around the 7th c., a pan-Indian consensus was achieved on what counts as a satisfactory justification. The core of such discussions is an inferential reasoning whose structure is such that it ensures that its conclusions are recognised as knowledge statements, irrespective of the obedience of the interlocutor. In this line, stories of conversion following those philosophical debates (...) are commonplace in the narratives of the different traditions and regularly involve the conversion of a royal patron. Beside the influence of argumentative practices on social and political changes, theories of argumentation have deeply influenced the whole edifice of philosophy in pre modern India, since no philosopher can claim a thesis without being committed to defend it in this highly regulated dialogical framework. Moreover, the characterisation, as well as the methods to test the validity of this justification, raised the question of the existence of shared principles and was a battlefield for the different traditions to establish their own conceptions on the constitution of the world and on our ability to know it. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the contribution of the minority tradition that is Jainism to the framework of philosophical disputation in India. (shrink)

Two eight-century Jaina contemporaries, a Śvetāmbara philosopher Siddhasena Mahāmati and a Digambara Akalaṅka Bhaṭṭa revolutionised Jaina epistemology, by radically transforming basic epistemological concepts, which had been based on canonical tradition. The paper presents a brief historical outline of the developments of basic epistemological concepts in Jaina philolosophy such as the cognitive criterion and logical faculties as well as their fourteen typological models which serve as the backdrop of important innovations in epistemology introduced by Siddhasena, Pātrasvāmin and Akalaṅka. An important contribution (...) of these Jaina thinkers was to economize Indian logic and the rules of inference, first, by devising only one kind of logical reason called ‘inexplicability otherwise’, based on the single inseparable connection of the proving property with the inferable property, and, second, by limiting the necessary number of the members of the proof formula merely to two. These two innovations were related to the thinkers’ intention to devise a logic which would not primarily be based on empirical verification but its structural patterns would be valid irrespective of external observation. Further, the paper focuses on the nature of the epistemological shifts which Siddhasena and Akalaṅka introduced independently of each other and on the question how Siddhasena’s and Akalaṅka’s ideas were partly anchored in Buddhist concepts of the pramāṇa school of Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti. With the Buddhist background, Siddhasena sought to define the criteria essential to distinguish true from false cognitions and to provide a novel classification of the pramāṇas. He can further be accredited with formulating the first Jaina descriptive definition of the cognitive criterion. The final section of the paper explains how Akalaṅka applies novel epistemological ideas, first, to construct realistic ontology and objectivity of both the external world and the cognising subject, and, secondly, to combat fundamental Buddhist concepts such as idealism and momentariness. (shrink)