In this paper I will discuss the significance of upam na in the Ny yas tra as a source of knowledge and its role in understanding and learning about the world. Some philosophers, particularly Buddhists, have argued that upam na is reducible to inference. I am going to defend the Ny ya view that upam na is in fact a fundamental source of knowledge which plays a significant role in teaching and learning. In fact, I am going to argue that (...) by introducing upam na as a pram a the Naiy yikas accounted for the way humans acquire certain types of knowledge. Finally, I will highlight the similarities between the role of upam na in the Ny yas tra and some of Wittgenstein's remarks on family resemblance and proof. (shrink)

This paper is a critical review of Jonardan Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India.

The article deals with some facets of the phenomenon of the underdetermination of meaning by (linguistic) data which are particularly relevant for textual exegesis in the historico-philological disciplines. The paper attempts to demonstrate that lack of relevant information is by no means the only important reason why certain issues of interpretation cannot be definitely settled by means of traditional philological methods but that the objective nonexistence of pertinent data is equally significant. It is claimed that the phenomenon of objective under-determination (...) possesses among others two major consequences: (1) A strict separation between the exploration of the history of (Indian) philosophy and philosophical criticism is theoretically incorrect. (2) Transference of indeterminacy and vagueness to the target langue in translations of textual sources is not only legitimate but sometimes most appropriate. Presumably the relevance of the discussed issues is not strictly confined to the area of Indian philosophy. (shrink)

Over the course of more than two millennia the philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā has thoroughly analyzed normative statements. In this paper we approach a formalization of the deontic system which is applied but never explicitly discussed in Mīmāṃsā to resolve conflicts between deontic statements by giving preference to the more specific ones. We first extend with prohibitions and recommendations the non-normal deontic logic extracted in Ciabattoni et al. from Mīmāṃsā texts, obtaining a multimodal dyadic version of the deontic logic \. (...) Sequent calculus is then used to close a set of prima-facie injunctions under a restricted form of monotonicity, using specificity to avoid conflicts. We establish decidability and complexity results, and investigate the potential use of the resulting system for Mīmāṃsā philosophy and, more generally, for the formal interpretation of normative statements. (shrink)