Logic and language in Indian religions (original) (raw)
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This paper engages with Johaness Bronkhorst's recognition of a "correspondence principle" as an underlying assumption of Nāgārjuna's thought. Bronkhorst believes that this assumption was shared by most Indian thinkers of Nāgārjuna's day, and that it stimulated a broad and fascinating attempt to cope with Nāgārjuna's arguments so that the principle of correspondence may be maintained in light of his forceful critique of reality. For Bronkhorst, the principle refers to the relation between the words of a sentence and the realities they are meant to convey. While I accept this basic intuition of correspondence, this paper argues that a finer understanding of the principle can be offered. In light of a set of verses from Nāgārjuna's Śūnyatāsaptati (45-57), it is maintained that for Nāgārjuna, the deeper level of correspondence involves a structural identity he envisions between understanding and reality. Here Nāgārjuna claims that in order for things to exist, a conceptual definition of their nature must be available; in order for there to be a real world and reliable knowledge, a svabhāva of things must be perceived and accounted for. Svabhāva is thus reflected as a knowable essence. Thus, Nāgārjuna's arguments attacks the accountability of both concepts and things, a position which leaves us with nothing more than mistaken forms of understanding as the reality of the empty. This markedly metaphysical approach is next analyzed in light of the debate Nāgārjuna conducts with a Nyāya interlocutor in his Vigrahavyāvartanī. The correspondence principle is here used to highlight the metaphysical aspect of the debate and to point out the ontological vision of Nāgārjuna's theory of emptiness. In the analysis of the Vigrahavyāvartanī it becomes clear that the discussion revolves around a foundational metaphysical deliberation regarding the reality or unreality of svabhāva. In this dispute, Nāgārjuna fails to answer the most crucial point raised by his opponent-what is that he defines as empty?
Framing the Foundations of the Buddhist Theory of Language
This paper argues that Buddhism can legitimately be taken as science. It came to be thought of as a religion in the European discourse in the framework of the conflicted opposition between science and religion Europeans who viewed Buddhism from the outside. The essential criteria distinguishing between science and religion is that the latter holds as true some premises that it holds cannot be empirically verified, premises that were reveal in holy books by God, for example. Buddhism is radically empirical in that it urges doubt, questioning, analysis and testing of every principle as a goldsmith might test gold.
Houben 2000 - Language and Thought in the Sanskrit tradition
“Language and thought in the Sanskrit tradition.” In: History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present ... , 2000
Among fundamental, problematic aspects of the relation between thought and language, there are questions such as: How is language (spoken or written) perceived and understood? How is a message or idea ‘encoded’ in language? What truth-claims can be upheld for knowledge based on language? What is the relation between language and the process of thinking in general, or of logical thought in particular? A basic issue relevant to all these questions is: are thought, thinking, understanding always connected with language, not just at the level of discursive thinking which seems clearly language-related, but also at the level of vaguer thoughts and ideas? Or are there ‘cognitive episodes’ which are entirely ‘free from language’? It is this basic issue that was of crucial importance in philosophical and linguistic discussions in the Sanskrit tradition. It is on this basic issue, already evoked in Upanisadic statements, that the present article is focused. At the background of the problems of the relation between language and thought there is a larger problematic set of notions, namely language, thought and reality. Problems concerning language and thought and their relation are therefore, also in this article, inextricably bound up with ontological questions (‘what is real?’), apart from linguistic and epistemological ones.
In Schafer, Dagmar, and Glenn Most (eds.) Thinking in Many Tongues. Forms of Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. A Reader. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill. Forthcoming.BRILL eBooks, 2023
The text excerpts at hand are taken from the Descent into Laṅkā Scripture (Laṅkāvatārasūtra), a Buddhist Mahāyāna scripture from around the third to fifth century ce, written mostly in prose form as a dialogue between the Buddha and his disciple, Mahāmati. The excerpts are a selection of verses from the tenth chapter of the text, which, grouped together, provide a narrative of sorts of how language develops from the pre-embryonic stage, through gestation, and finally to its manifestation as linguistic behavior. Pivotal in this account is the notion of speech as stemming from vikalpa—conceptual discrimination—which is seen as responsible not just for manifest discursive thought and behavior, but also for deeper epistemic distinctions and fundamental concept formation. Under this account, our experience, which is initially an undifferentiated causal mental flux, necessarily passes through certain conceptual filters. At the most fundamental level of our (subliminal) mental activity, this manifests in a basic discrimination that separates all experience into the categories of a subjective aspect (a grasper) and an objective aspect (what is grasped). This first and most basic distinction is the original sin, so to speak, after which many other conceptual categories are imposed on our otherwise undifferentiated experience so as to organize it into meaningful units. Eventually these manifest—shaped by habit and convention—in overt linguistic activity and communication.