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Working together? A short checklist

I am a passionate fan of co-working, since

  1. I believe that working with other people (especially if one works with always new people and not always with the same group) helps one becoming aware of one’s implicit presuppositions
  2. working with other people allows me to achieve more ambitious goals (in my case, an example are the volumes on the Reuse of texts in Classical Indian philosophy I edited for the Journal of Indian Philosophy—I would not have been able to achieve that target alone, since I lack the relevant expertise in many fields of Indian philoosophy)
  3. working with other people is more fun, and fun motivates one whenever one is stuck in a difficult situation
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The Indian ever-doubting quest for Truth

At times, it almost seemed blasphemous to say the things we said when the eternal flute of the Divine itself called to us every moment to give up the vain, empty, dry world of the intellect and the greeting of the ‘Rādhe Rādhe’ which remained us of the ecstasy of divine love. But amidst these enticements and allurements what sustained us was the unbelievably long, hard-core tradition of the ever-seeking, ever-doubting sāttvika quest for the ultimate Truth by the buddhi in the Indian tradition, which has never been afraid of raising the most formidable pūrvapakṣas against one’s own position and attempting to answer them.

(Daya Krishna, Bhakti, while discussing the saṃvāda on bhakti he organised at Vrindavan)

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Dealing with the logic of prescriptions can be hard…

…because it is so difficult to determine whether they have a truth-value. This point is acknowledged in the contemporary debate on deontic logic:

A fundamental issue of deontic logic is Jorgensen’s dilemma, as noted by Jorgensen. On the one hand, there are inferences involving norm sentences such as ‘you should stay‘ or ‘you may leave‘ in our lives; therefore there should be a logic dealing with them. On the other hand, these sentences express orders or permissions and do not have tuth values: therefore, there cannot be such a logic. A dilemma arises. (Ju and Liang 2015, section 1)

Out of probably similar reasons, also within Indian philosophy almost no school focused on the logic of prescriptions. Even within the only one which did, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, some authors then moved back towards the safer ground of understanding prescriptions as descriptions. Again, in the words of Ju and Liang:

To solve this dilemma, many philosophers have proposed a distinction between two different uses of norm sentences: descriptive and prescriptive uses. In the descriptive way, norm sentences are used to state what agents ought to do; they can be true or false. […] Deontic logic is ‘legalized’ in this way. (Ibid.)

In this sense, trying to “legalize” deontic logic is a way to deal with it and to attribute truth values to it. Kumārila went a little bit in this direction when he stated that prescriptions refer to the future (which is still beyond the precinct of application of truth values, but not as much as the deontic domain, which will never be). Maņḍana went much further and claimed that, e.g.,

O x / you desire y (“You ought to do x if you desire y”)

is tantamount to:

x is a means to realise y

Why so? Because of the dilemma mentioned above, but probably also because Maṇḍana was in part closer to Vedānta than to Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and was in this sense keen to avoid the commitment to sādhyavākyārthavāda, i.e., to the theory according to which all sentences can only convey a prescriptive meaning.

I am grateful to Bama Srinivasan, who sent me a copy of Ju and Liang’s article.

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16th World Sanskrit Conference: A panel on the development of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta

Last week took place one of the main (or the main?) conferences for Sanskrit scholars, namely the 16th edition of the World Sanskrit Conference, of which you can read a short summary by McComas Taylor on Indology (look for it here). Marcus Schmücker and I organised a panel called One God—One Śāstra, Philosophical developments towards and within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta between Nāthamuni and Veṅkaṭanātha. You can read the initial call for papers here.