This study offers a panoramic view of the creative, expository, interpretive, dialectic, polemical, didactic and devotional phases of Dvaita philosophy, and its ...

A brief account of karma and transmigration is followed by an introduction to Indian ways of assessing arguments. The body of the work canvasses the systems of Nyaya Vaisesika, Buddhism, Jainism, Samkhya and Advaita Vedanta.

Recognizing newness is a difficult task in any intellectual history, and different cultures have gauged and evaluated novelty in different ways. In this paper we ponder the status of innovation in the context of the somewhat unusual history of one Sanskrit knowledge system, that of poetics, and try to define what in the methodology, views, style, and self-awareness of Sanskrit literary theorists in the early modern period was new. The paper focuses primarily on one thinker, Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, the most famous (...) and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīkṣita. We discuss Jagannātha’s complex system of labeling of ideas as “new” and “old,” the new essay style that he used to chart the evolution of ideas in his tradition, his notion of himself as an independent thinker capable of improving the system created by his predecessors in order to protect its essential assets, and the reasons his critique of Appayya was so harsh. For both scholars what emerges as new is not so much their opinions on particular topics as the new ways in which they position themselves in relation to their system. (shrink)

Apart from his voluminous, immensely learned, and spectacularly successful contributions to the fields of Hermeneutics, non-dualist Metaphysics, and poetics, the sixteenth century South Indian polymath Appayyadīkṣita is famed for reviving from obscurity the moribund Śaivite Vedānta tradition represented by the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya of Śrīkaṇṭha. Appayya’s voluminous commentary on this work, his Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, not only reconstitutes Śrīkaṇṭha’s system, but radically transforms it, making it into a springboard for Appayya’s own highly original critiques of standard views of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta. Appayya addresses long (...) sections of his commentary to matters dealt with glancingly or not at all in the root text, drawing conclusions which Śrīkaṇṭha nowhere endorses. Furthermore, the distinctive positions Appayya develops in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā feed into Appayya’s other works in ways that have so far been largely ignored by modern scholars. For example, most or all the discussions Appayya’s Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā, twenty-seven essays on scattered topics in Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, build on arguments first advanced in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā—most notably Appayya’s totally original theory of the signification of adjectives, first developed in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, the full elaboration and defense of which takes up fully sixteen of the twenty-seven essays that make up the Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā. (shrink)