Ajay Verma

The first noble truth in Buddhism points toward a purely phenomenal experience. Though purely qualitative in nature, the experience of suffering has an existential aspect. As stated in the second noble truth, suffering has a cause that relates to our situatedness in the world. Notwithstanding, the cause of suffering has to be something external to the mental state of suffering itself. Some of the more recent studies on mental states suggest two different positions on the nature of mental states. One may view mental states as self-referential, reflexive and purely qualitative in nature; alternatively, one could view them as transitive as pointing towards something external, beyond and other than themselves in terms of their cause or the like. The former of these positions is known as internalism, while the latter is named externalism. Nyāya school of Classical Indian Philosophy presents a unique position in this regard. They view pain and pleasure as objects of cognition rather than their content. As such, an act of perception becomes a mere transitive act, a mere operator or the lowest common denominator of all mental acts without having content in themselves. Buddhist logician, however, views mental states as pure qualitative states. As such, they seem to embrace internalist position regarding mental states. This paper attempts to demonstrate that this position if prescribed to Buddhism, renders their second noble truth problematic.

One of the most important characteristic of human mind is that it can go back and forth beyond the given and lend those space and time framework to highly intelligent philosophical speculations. Human mind has an uncanny ability to schematize, thematize, and problematize otherwise plain looking facts of the world to construct intelligible narratives about its creation, sustenance, destruction, and so on. One such grand narrative is the age old notion of ‘designer god’. One such brilliant piece of speculative metaphysics is found in one of the Nyāya masterpieces, namely Nyāyakusumānjali. Authored by Udayana this text presents interesting and compelling arguments to prove the existence of God within the metaphysical framework of realism. Some of these arguments are later put to severe criticisms by the Jainas among other schools. This paper attempts to investigate some of the criticisms offered by the Jaina philosopher Guṇaratna against the Nyāya conception of God in the Īśvarotthāpaka section of his Tarka-Rahasya-Dīpikā which is a commentary on the Ṣad-Darśana-Samuccaya of Haribhadra Suri. As a part of the concluding note it is suggested that the notion of God is a unique and distinct idea where the conception of ‘all’ in the absolute sense is considered in ways that requires more systematic examination.

The first noble truth in Buddhism points toward a purely phenomenal experience. Though purely qualitative in nature, the experience of suffering has an existential aspect. As stated in the second noble truth, suffering has a cause that relates to our situatedness in the world. Notwithstanding, the cause of suffering has to be something external to the mental state of suffering itself. Some of the more recent studies on mental states suggest two different positions on the nature of mental states. One may view mental states as self-referential, reflexive and purely qualitative in nature; alternatively, one could view them as transitive as pointing towards something external, beyond and other than themselves in terms of their cause or the like. The former of these positions is known as internalism, while the latter is named externalism. Nyāya school of Classical Indian Philosophy presents a unique position in this regard. They view pain and pleasure as objects of cognition rather than their content. As such, an act of perception becomes a mere transitive act, a mere operator or the lowest common denominator of all mental acts without having content in themselves. Buddhist logician, however, views mental states as pure qualitative states. As such, they seem to embrace internalist position regarding mental states. This paper attempts to demonstrate that this position if prescribed to Buddhism, renders their second noble truth problematic.

One of the main problems regarding language which has bothered philosophers since antiquity is that it often misleads us. Linguistic understanding inevitably involves a subject who understands and the subject-matter or content of what she understands. Since the subject-matter of linguistic understanding is externally given to the subject as text or spoken word, linguistic understanding, therefore, is both subjective and objective at the same time and ineluctably involves interpretation on the part of the subject. But the moment we grant the subjective participation in understanding, the problem of universality of meaning would inevitably raise its head. This problem has been addressed in different ways by different thinkers across history and cultures. Even though some of the ancient Indian thinkers like Bhartṛhari mainly focus on understanding of the Vedic texts, they could probably have important clues for the problem of universality in understanding through language as it is posed by hermeneutic thinkers starting from St. Augustine in medieval period up to Gadamer and Habermas in more recent times. This paper attempts to explore and examine Bhartṛhari’s philosophy of verbal holism from the point of view of the problem of universality in hermeneutics.