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Udayana's Arguments for a Creator and the Turn Toward Formal Reasoning

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Udayana's Arguments for a Creator and the Turn Toward Formal Reasoning

Vaisheshika's later history is less a story of new categories than of a new method applied to the old ones. In the eleventh century Udayana, writing in a milieu where the combined Nyaya-Vaisheshika project was already the dominant framework, composed the Nyayakusumanjali, a sustained argument that adrishta and the atomic order it worked through pointed beyond themselves to a single intelligent cause. Udayana laid out nine separate lines of argument for a creator, drawn from the world's order, from the need for an agent to set atoms into their first combinations, from language and scripture as testimony, and from analogy with ordinary made things, and organized them so that a critic had to answer each in turn rather than the position as a whole.

That style of argument, precise, enumerated, built for point by point rebuttal, became the discipline's defining habit. Writing in the early fourteenth century, Gangesha's Tattvacintamani took the same appetite for exact definition and applied it to the machinery of inference itself, inaugurating what later scholarship calls Navya Nyaya, the new logic, a tradition of technical terminology for reference, negation and property location so precise that modern logicians studying Indian philosophy still use it to test formal theories of definition. Vaisheshika supplied that tradition its categories; Udayana and Gangesha supplied the method that made arguing about them a matter of stated premises rather than assertion, and the atomism and the unseen force the first article describes were, by the time of Navya Nyaya, arguments to be proven rather than positions to be stated.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2024Analytic Philosophy in Early Modern IndiaView the Source
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