The tradition of Nyāya philosophy centers on a dispassionate quest for truth which is simultaneously connected to soteriological and epistemic aims. This article shows how Vācaspati Miśra brings together the soteriological concept of dispassion with the discourse practices of debate, as a response to Buddhist criticisms in Dharmakīrti’s Vādanyāya. He defends the Nyāyasūtra’s stated position that fallacious reasoning is a legitimate means for a debate, under certain circumstances. Dharmakīrti argues that such reasoning is rationally ineffective and indicates unvirtuous qualities. For (...) Vācaspati, fallacies are a way to prevent the spread of morally weighty falsehoods when no other method is available to a debater. After showing textual relationships between Vācaspati’s defense and Dharmakīrti’s earlier criticism, it evaluates their arguments, concluding that Vācaspati’s position involves irresolvable tensions with other Nyāya commitments. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers have, since the pioneering work of B.K. Matilal, emphasized the contributions of Nyāya philosophers to what contemporary philosophy considers epistemology. More recently, scholarly work demonstrates the relevance of their ideas to argumentation theory, an interdisciplinary area of study drawing on epistemology as well as logic, rhetoric, and linguistics. This paper shows how early Nyāya theorizing about argumentation, from Vātsyāyana to Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, can fruitfully be juxtaposed with the pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation pioneered by Frans van Eemeren. I illustrate (...) the implications of this analysis with a case study from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s satirical play, Much Ado about Religion (Āgamaḍambara). (shrink)