What do readers think? Do we need more dialogues (with whatever tradition), more space for the great traditions of Indian philosophy, etc., or a little of both?

The deliberate ignoring of [the] […] twentieth century discussion […] is only a symptom of that widespread attitude which does not want to see Indian philosophy as a rationcinative enterprise seriously engaged in argument and counter-argument in its long history and developing […]. This, and not mokṣa, is its life-breath as it is sustained and developed by it. Those, and this includes almost everybody, who think otherwise believe also that Indian philosophy stopped growing long ago. (The Nyāya Sūtras: A new commentary on an old text, p. 8)

What do you think? Is there a common core to all Indian philosophical schools?

If God did not need man, if man were simply dependant and nothing else, there would be no meaning to man’s life or to the world. ‘The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny’.

Martin Buber’s own words (I and Thou, p. 82) are even more direct:

You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know too that God needs you—in the fullness of His eternity needs you? […] You need God, in order to be—and God needs you, for the very meaning of life.

Somehow, I am not surprised that Maurice Friedman participated in one of Daya Krishna’s saṃvādas (one can read the transcripts in Intercultural Dialogue and the Human image, Maurice Friedman at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

• Esther Solomon, Indian Dialectics. Methods of Philosophical Discussion (Ahmedabad: B.J. Institute of Learning and Research) 1976;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Modes of debate and refutation of adversaries in classical and medieval India: a preliminary investigation”, Antiquorum Philosophia 1 (2007), 269-280;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Does India think differently?”, in Denkt Asien anders? Reflexionen zu Buddhismus und Konfizianismus in Indien, Tibet, China und Japan, edited by Birgit Kellner and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2009), 45–54;
• Sung Yong Kang, Die Debatte im alten Indien. Untersuchungen in der Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna 8.15-28 (Reinbeck: Wezler 2003);
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate in the Context of Indian Medical History: Towards a Critical Edition of the Carakasaṃhitā”, in Encyclopedia of Indian Wisdom. Prof. Satya Vrat Shastri felicitation volume, edited by Rāma Karaṇa Śarmā (Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan 2005), 394-403;
• Bimal Krishna Matilal, “Debate and Dialectic in Ancient India”, in Philosophical Essays. Professor Anantalal Thakur Felicitation Volume, edited by Ramaranjan Mukherji (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1987), 53-66;
• Gerhard Oberhammer, “Ein Beitrag zu den Vāda-Traditionen Indiens”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Süd- und Ost-Asiens 7 (1963), 63-103;
• Karin Preisendanz, “Debate and Independent Reasoning vs. Tradition: On the Precarious Position of Early Nyāya”, in Harānandalaharī. Volume in Honour of Professor Minoru Hara on his Seventieth Birthday edited by Ryutaro Tsuchida and Albrecht Wezler (Reibeck: Wezler 2000), 221-251;
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate, Proof and Counter-Proof in the Early Indian Dialectical Tradition”, Studia Indologiczne 7 (2000), 369-382;
• Ernst Prets “Futile and False Rejoinders, Sophistical Arguments and Early Indian Logic”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 29.5 (2001), 545-558;
• Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Solomon’s book is a classic, although somewhat outdated reference book on the topic of dialectics in Nyāya and in other schools.
Among the other authors, Bronkhorst suggests that the roots of Indian dialectics should be placed in the Buddhist communities in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent (which might have been influenced by the Greek tradition of public debate in the Indo-Bactrian kingdoms). Kang and Prets (“Theories of Debate”) focus on the (indigenous) roots of dialectics in the medical tradition, where a discussion (called sambhāṣā ‘conversation’) among practitioners was meant to establish the truth about the patient’s condition through the evidence at hand (their symptoms), whereas the term vāda meant a hostile debate and included the subgroups of jalpa and vitaṇḍā). Oberhammer, Preisendanz, Prets and Nicholson focus on the early history of vāda and its more technical elements.
All of these scholars agree on the presence of hostile (‘agonistic’ in Nicholson’s book) and collaborative (‘non-agonistic’) forms of dialogue in pre-Classical and Classical Indian Philosophy, with the latter possibly having developed out of the former (see the Conclusions in Nicholson’s book).
B.K. Matilal (1935–1991), himself an analytic philosopher and a scholar of Indian logic and philosophy in general, performed a move similar to that of Daya Krishna, insofar as he focused on the epistemological potential of vāda (although, differently from Daya Krishna, he did not exploit the creativity of this concept in different contexts).

The process of locating scholars interested to respond to the issues are still going on.

For almost all details related to this Project as well as many events prior to the October Dialog, check this link. This site is being regularly updated to help keep track of the prior events that will lead to the Bangalore Dialog. The organisers will really appreciate suggestions  from readers about Areas of Indian Philosophy which can be better extended to meet the epistemological criteria of modern science (particularly Physical science, since the organisers come themselves from Physics).

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)

from http://www.popsci.com/should-animals-same-rights-people

1. If, in fact, humans have more rights than animals because they are the dominant group, then this resembles very much racism or any other dominion of one group over the other.
2. If, by contrast, humans have more rights than animals because they are different than animals, then what does this difference consist of? If it amounts to rationality, should psychically empaired human beings have no rights?

Since after the end of the Nazi experiments a (more or less) general consensus has been achieved about the fact that psychically empaired human beings deserve the same rights, one is led back either to No. 1 or to a different basis of the human claim for rights. This could be Peter Singer’s claim that one’s moral stand should be calculated not on the basis of one’s ability to reach a soteriological goal or one’s rational value but on the basis of one’s ability of experiencing pain (Singer 1975). This includes psychically empaired human beings. But it also includes at least many animals (one might argue about the fact that many invertebrates with no nerve ganglia cannot literally speaking experience pain).

The discussion about the inclusion of animals within the realm of beings to whom human rights can be ascribed, thus, seems to hit a nerve in Western thought. It seems that no straight line can be legitimately drawn to separate animals and humans and that there is more a net of family resemblances than a straight opposition between the two groups (a dolphin or a gorilla, just to take an obvious example, seem to me to resemble a human being much more than they resemble an amoeba, although all three can be used for the sake of medical research or kept in zoo-like institutions).

The situation is slighly different in other traditions of thought. In Classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, for instance, the idea that we have stronger obligations towards the members of our extended family and towards further “proximate” people is a viable option and one could easily extend this model to animals, so that it would be legitimate to attribute rights first to the members of our families, then to members of our communities, then to further human beings, then to pet-animals, then to further animals with whom we are somehow connected and only at last to further animals. However, this option clashes with the Western ambition of building a universal ethical system, does not it?*

I wrote about Indian reflections on this topic in a forthcoming article (a preliminary draft of which is available here), where I basically argue that most Indian thinkers seem to see non-human and human animals along a hierarchical sequence with no brisk interruption.
Daya Krishna connects this with the utilitaristic approach to knowledge which characterises most Indian explicit reflections about it:

The usual Indian analysis is centered around the hedonistic view of human nature which sees it as naturally seeking pleasure and avoding pain and has a pragmatic view of knowledge which sees the `truth’ of knowledge in terms of its ability to avoid pain and afford pleasure to the humanking. But on this view no distinction is possible between the human and the animal world as the latter also is supposed to seek pleasure or avoid pain and `sees’ the `truth’ of its knowledge in terms of the `success’ achieved by it in this enterprise. In fact, the whole learning theory in modern psychology and the training of animals is based on this premiss (2004, p. 237)

Let me just add that Daya Krishna is thinking of the first aphorism in the foundational text of the Nyāya school (NS 1.1.1), where knowledge is linked to the achievement of one’s summum bonum. In another philosophical school, the Mīmāṃsā, animals are also considered on the same level as humans when it comes to the fact of desiring happiness (PMS chapter 6).

* I am grateful to L.E. for having discussed this topic with me. For a critical discussion of the concept of “rights”, see Amod Lele’s discussion here (and in the previous posts). On why I am citing Daya Krishna, see this post. Within Chinese philosophy, on Confucius vs. Mozi regarding the universality of rights see this post by Eric Schwitzgebel.

I am generally interested in thinking people, who often happen to be philosophers, but might as well be anthropologists, linguists, scientists and so on, and in this sense I will not start by explaining why on earth I read philosophical texts. However, I have to admit that I started reading contemporary Indian philosophers (back in 2002) because I hoped to better understand classical Indian philosophy through their eyes. Even before that time, I had read B.K. Matilal’s works or J.N. Mohanty’s ones (not to speak of J. Ganeri’s ones) not for Matilal’s or Mohanty’s sake, but as a way of approaching Nyāya, Navya Nyāya or phenomenology. Reading K.C. Bhattacharya seemed to me like a continuation of that line of thought (following the steps of great forerunners). However, K.C. Bhattacharya proved to be too difficult to work as a doorway to something else and too interesting not to be read for his own sake.

Long story short: I read Daya Krishna (and further contemporary Indian philosophers) for their own sake, as I would read Kripke or Austin. No matter what he engages in, he offers an ever-fresh vision of things, relentlessly looking for what a text or an idea mean and not just for what one is used to think that they should mean. Daya Krishna’s work blossoms with openness to the “other” point of view hiding in texts, ideas or concepts: He is not content with the usual or the conventional and is clearly annoyed by whoever is. He constantly seeks for a counter-perspective, and should his ideas have become mainstream in one or the other field, he would have probably challenged his audience to question them again, always looking for prairies of thinking which could have allowed room for creative and yet rigorous enquires.

On top of that, Daya Krishna has for me the additional appeal of being interested in things I myself find interesting, such as Nyāya’s epistemology or Mīmāṃsā’s difficult relation with ritualists —something very rare in other philosophers who, especially in the West, are often rather pray to the fascination of the “new” and would not spend too much energy in the exegesis of an obscure school of Indian philosophy. By contrast, Daya Krishna does not seem to be ready to close a topic unless he has fully understood what is at stake, no matter if this has become outdated by new researches in the meantime (think of his invitations to Kashmir Sufis who were and are for opposite reasons —being too much or too little “Islamic”— often neglected both in Pakistani and Indian philosophical and theological discourses).

Let me, therefore, repeat it here (the padārthas have been emphasised):

pramāṇaprameyasaṃśayaprayojanadṛṣṭāntasiddhāntāvayavatarka-nirṇayavādajalpavitaṇḍāhetvābhāsacchalajātinigrahasthānānāṃ tattvajñānān niḥśreyasādhigamaḥ

(the translation is purely indicative:)

The summum bonum is achieved through the knowledge of the reality of means of knowledge, objects of knowledge, doubt, purpose [of one’s investigation], example, conclusive view, parts [of the syllogism], reasoning, ascertainment, discussion [aiming at the establishment of truth], agonistic debate, sophistry, pseudo logical reasons, deceit, futile answer and points of defeat.

A first problem regards the fact that the first two items seem to already include the rest of the list, so that one does not really understand why others are separately listed. My usual attitude is to give credit to a text and try to make sense of it, but in this case, let us look at it through the eyes of a thought-provoking Indian philosopher, Daya Krishna, who wrote:

We have two different types of topics which have been discussed and enumerated as pramāṇa, prameya, saṃśaya, prayojana, dṛṣṭānta, siddhānta, avayava, tarka, nirṇaya on the one hand and vāda, jalpa, vitaṇḍā, hetvābhāsa, chala, jāti and nigrahasthāna on the other. The latter obviously relate to discussion and argument between persons while the former seem to be more internatl to the nature of the argument itself. The latter therefore have psychological elements intermixed with other things while the former seem to be more logical in character. (2004, p. 61)

The ‘extensional’ enumeration of the subject-matter of the Nyāya-sūtras, thus, is an amalgamation of two different discourses, the one relating to the forms of argumentation between different persons debating a point and winning or losing in the argument, and the other relating to the theory of proof of justification. The mixing of these different discourses in the first sūtra is a sign of a basic confusion in the mind of Gautama, the supposed author of the Nyāya-sūtra. (pp. 48–49).

Now, Daya Krishna is a philosopher and his words about the Nyāyasūtra should tell us more about his own philosophical position than about Nyāya itself. Nonetheless, the point seems to me, in this case, worth further reflection.