In this article, I explore the encounter of the Mādhva philosopher Vyāsatīrtha with the works of the Navya-Naiyāyika Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya. The article is based on original translations of passages from Vyāsatīrtha’s Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava. Philosophically, the article focuses on the issue of empty-terms/nonexistent entities, particularly in the context of the theory of inference. I begin by outlining the origin of the Mādhva and Nyāya positions about these issues in their respective analyses of perceptual illusion. I then contrast the role of (...) Gaṅgeśa’s thought in the Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava and show how Vyāsatīrtha responds to Gaṅgeśa’s ideas in different ways in those texts. I conclude with a discussion of how Vyāsatīrtha defends the Mādhva theory of “substrate-free” qualities against Gaṅgeśa in order to show that we can think and make valid inferences about nonexistent things. (shrink)

The classical traditions of Vedānta in India explored the problem of why an omnipotent being like God would permit sentient beings to suffer in His creation. This article explores the solution provided to the problem of suffering by the sixteenth-century philosopher Vyāsatīrtha. Vyāsatīrtha argued that there is a satisfying explanation of why God would permit suffering to both exist and to be unevenly distributed among the individual souls trapped in transmigratory existence. He claims that we can only reconcile the idea (...) of an independent, omnipotent God with the existence of suffering by assuming that God’s treatment of the individual souls is based primarily in their eternal, immutable ethical natures and not purely on their conduct/karma as some earlier philosophers suggested. The article is based on original translations of the passages in the Tātparyacandrikā where Vyāsatīrtha makes these arguments against his Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita opponents. (shrink)

In his celebrated treatise of Navya-nyāya, the Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa offers a detailed formulation of the inference of God’s existence. Gaṅgeśa’s inference generated significant commentarial literature among Naiyāyikas in Mithilā, Navadvīpa and Vārāṇasī, but also attracted the attention of South Indian scholars, notably Vyāsatīrtha, who comments on it extensively in the Tarkatāṇḍava. In the wake of Vyāsatīrtha’s pioneering critique, the 16th-century Sanskrit polymath Appaya Dīkṣita developed a revised version of Gaṅgeśa’s inference in his magnum opus of Śivādvaita Vedānta, the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā. This (...) article highlights that Appaya was thoroughly acquainted with the technical idiom of Navya-nyāya and sufficiently conversant with its literature to address authoritatively one of its key problems. Appaya’s contribution sheds new light on how the Navya-nyāya tradition continued to flourish in South India during the late medieval period. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the incisive counter-arguments against Gaṅgeśa’s defense of non-conceptual perception offered by the Dvaita Vedānta scholar Vyāsatīrtha in his Destructive Dance of Dialectic. The details of Vyāsatīrtha’s arguments have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent Navya Nyāya thinkers, as well as by contemporary scholars engaged in a debate over the role of non-conceptual perception in Nyāya epistemology. Vyāsatīrtha thoroughly undercuts the inductive evidence supporting Gaṅgeśa’s main inferential proof of non-conceptual perception, and shows that Gaṅgeśa has no basis for thinking (...) that non-conceptual perception has any necessary causal role in generating concept-laden perceptual awareness. He further raises a number of internal inconsistencies and undesirable consequences for Gaṅgeśa’s claim that non-conceptual states are introspectively invisible. His own causal theory of perception is more parsimonious than the Nyāya account, and is equally compatible with direct realism. I conclude by noting several striking parallels between Vyāsatīrtha’s views and the conceptualism of John McDowell, while also suggesting that Vyāsatīrtha's own conceptualism is not unduly constrained by some of McDowell’s limiting assumptions about concepts and perceptual contents. (shrink)