Rudolf Otto’s concept of the ‘numinous’ was developed through study, observation, personal experience and religious and philosophical influences. The main philosophical influences for Otto's thought came from Fries, Schleiermacher, and Kant—from whom Otto derived the concept of thea priori nature of the numinous. However, the numinous does not appear to be a universally applicable category of experience, much lessa priori, and in some cases may distort religious experience. The example of Hinduism demonstrated how easily the concept of the numinous may (...) be applied to one. (shrink)

When People were falsely accused, and yet there existed no human means to testify to the truth, to whom did they resort for the final judgment? In ancient India, it was a sort of ordeal ( divya ), which was inseparable from oath ( śapatha ) and act of truth ( satya-kriyā ). Here we present some examples and investigate who appear in these contexts. As a result, we could classify them into (1) mahā−bhuūta (fire, wind, water, etc.), (2) heavenly (...) bodies (sun moon, etc.), (3) inner principles (heart, soul, etc.) and (4) gods (Agni, Vāyu, Indra, Yama, etc.). All these witnesses observe ( paś -) the act of a human being, right as well as wrong, either transcendently from above like the sun, or immanently from inside like wind which circulates human body in the form of vital breath. (shrink)

This thesis is the attempt to find a logical model for, and trace the history of, the catuṣkoṭi as it developed in the Indo-Tibetan milieu and spread, via China, to Japan. After an introduction to the history and key-concepts of Buddhist philosophy, I will finish the first chapter with some methodological considerations about the general viability of comparative philosophy. Chapter §2 is devoted to a logical analysis of the catuṣkoṭi. Several attempts to model this fascinating piece of Buddhist philosophy with (...) the tools of classical logic shall be debunked. A paraconsistent alternative will be discussed but eventually dismissed. As a rejoinder, I shall propose a model for the catuṣkoṭi with the help of speech-acts. The remainder of this chapter will look at Chinese and Japanese forms of the catuṣkoṭi which I shall model in a quasi-recursive system. The third and final chapter will look at the Kyoto School's soku-hi dialectics which ties together the different threads of this essay. I will criticise an established, classical model of the soku-hi dialectics and offer an alternative with a second-order paraconsistent semantics. (shrink)

In early Buddhist logic, it was standard to assume that for any state of a ff airs there were four possibilities: that it held, that it did not, both, or neither. This is the catuskoti (or tetralemma). Classical logicians have had a hard time mak­ing sense of this, but it makes perfectly good sense in the se­mantics of various paraconsistent logics, such as First Degree Entailment. Matters are more complicated for later Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, who appear to suggest (...) that none of these options , or more than one, may hold. The point of this paper is to examine the matter, including the formal logical machinery that may be appropriate. (shrink)