The catuṣkoṭi or tetralemma is an argumentative figure familiar to any reader of Buddhist philosophical literature. Roughly speaking it consists of the enumeration of four alternatives: that some propositions holds, that it fails to hold, that it both holds and fails to hold, that it neither holds nor fails to hold. The tetralemma also constitutes one of the more puzzling features of Buddhist philosophy as the use to which it is put in arguments is not immediately obvious and certainly not (...) uniform: sometimes one of the four possibilities is selected as ‘the right one’, sometimes all four are rejected, sometimes all four are affirmed. It seems that this confusion is only exacerbated by the plethora of treatments we find in the modern commentarial literature, many of which try to analyze the tetralemma by recourse to notions of modern logic. Despite some important work done during the last decades a comprehensive study of the origin and development of the catuṣkoṭi from its use in the earliest Buddhist literature up to its later employment in the Buddhist philosophical works of Tibet, China, and Japan remains yet to be written. The present paper is obviously not intended to fill this gap, but has the specific objective of giving an interpretation of Nāgārrjuna’s employment of the tetralemma which makes both logical sense and is in accordance with his general philosophical position. (shrink)

The theory of negation developed in the grammatical-philosophical system of later Vyākaraṇa remains almost entirely unstudied, despite its close links with the (widely studied) approaches to negation found in other philosophical schools such as Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā, and despite its consequent importance for a comprehensive understanding of the theory of negation in ancient India. In this paper we present an edition, translation and commentary of the relevant sections of Nāgeśa’s _Paramalaghumañjūṣā_, a concise presentation by the final authority of the Pāṇinian (...) tradition, together with an explanatory introduction outlining the grammarians’ theory of negation and its relations particularly with the Nyāya theory of negation. (shrink)

The logical analysis of Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi has remained a heated topic for logicians in Western academia for nearly a century. At the heart of the catuṣkoṭi, the four corners’ formalization typically appears as: A, Not A, Both, and Neither. The pulse of the controversy is the repetition of negations in the catuṣkoṭi. Westerhoff argues that Nāgārjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā uses two different negations: paryudāsa and prasajya-pratiṣedha. This paper builds off Westerhoff’s account and presents some subtleties of Nāgārjuna’s use of these (...) negations regarding their scope. This is achieved through an analysis of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Madhyamaka commentarial tradition and through a grammatical analysis of Nāgārjuna’s use of na and a- within a diverse variety of the catuṣkoṭi within the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. (shrink)

I discuss two critiques of Dignāga’s epistemology, one from Candrakīrti and another from Jayarāśi. I argue that they are two versions of what I call the core problem: if the content of Dignāga’s epistemology were correct, two fundamental beliefs within this epistemological theory could not be established or known to be true, as Dignāga claims they are. In response to objections found within the classical Indian tradition as well as several plausible contemporary objections, I then argue that the core problem (...) remains a serious issue with which those sympathetic to Dignāga ought to contend. (shrink)