A vital point of dispute within both classical Indian thought and contemporary analytic ontology is the following: which facts are brute so that they are, so to speak, beyond any need of civilizing through logical transformations, conceptual revisions, or linguistic reformulations? In this article, we discuss certain strands of the debate in these fields with two central purposes in mind. Firstly, we shall argue that metaphysical debates are seemingly interminable partly because disputing parties carve up the ontological landscape in such (...) a manner that what one party views as primitive, basic, or fundamental is regarded by an opponent as derivative, imagined, or constructed and vice versa. Second, unlike debates over these themes in contemporary analytic ontology, the classical Indian counterparts were usually located within a soteriological context, where it was claimed that an individual should develop meditative praxis on the way towards the goal of ultimate liberation. While it might seem that one could appeal to “experience” in this manner to settle the debate over whether universals were fundamental ingredients of the fabric of reality or merely conceptual artefacts, we shall argue that this approach is complicated by the fact that aspirants in these traditions would interpret their experiences in accordance with their doctrinal schemes. Therefore, the question of whether or not this appeal succeeds leads us to an ongoing dispute in religious epistemology over whether experiences are completely “constructed” by doctrinal context. (shrink)

Universals in the Platonic tradition were intended to play both metaphysical and epistemological roles. The contemporary debate around universals has focused overwhelmingly on the former, with even ‘platonists’ typically holding that our knowledge of universals is derived from our knowledge of particulars. In contrast, I wish to argue for the epistemological primacy of the universal: specifically, I defend the thesis that we perceive particulars as a result of knowing universals, and not the other way around. My argument draws from the (...) work of Malebranche, who notoriously contended that we see ordinary objects through the immutable ‘ideas’. I conclude with the suggestion that the resulting account of the relationship between our knowledge of universals and our perception of particulars may be thought of as a kind of Platonic indirect realism. (shrink)