Abstract
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.
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Notes
For a discussion of the application of Ockham’s Razor in the history and philosophy of science, see Klee (1997).
Here, I follow W. Rasmussen in discussing the views of the Nyāya and the Vaiśeṣika schools on the nature of universals under the label of ‘Nyāya’ (Rasmussen 2009a).
Jātir-eva na ca vyakteḥ svarūpam: Dvivedin (1984)
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Barua, A. Do Brute Facts Need to Be Civilised? Universals in Classical Indian Philosophy and Contemporary Analytic Ontology. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 32, 1–17 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-015-0001-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-015-0001-2