Bogdan Diaconescu

This article is first in a series dedicated to issues in the intellectual history of Mīmāṃsā in early modern India and part of a larger effort to broaden the basis for understanding the new formulations of central topics of the Mīmāṃsā textual-ritual complex in this period. It examines how the Varanasi scholar Khaṇḍadevamiśra makes use of Navyanyāya tools of analysis by putting under the microscope the example of his investigation and new formulation of the signification of agent and agency by the verbal affix in his ample analysis of the cognition of the meaning elements of a sentence. Authors of Mīmāṃsā works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually and selectively adopt the tools and techniques of cognitive analysis and the characteristic new idiom elaborated by Navyanaiyāyikas a few centuries earlier. This process of adoption arises on the sidelines of the Advaita–Dvaita Vedānta controversy in South India, then subsequently flourishes in Varanasi, as I have followed elsewhere. In his analysis of the topic studied here, Khaṇḍadeva uses the new tools to revisit the Mīmāṃsā tradition in order to advance his new formulation while refuting certain Navyanyāya rival positions.

The intellectual culture of India presents us with highly elaborated theories of verbal cognition, known in Sanskrit philosophical literature under the generic name of sabdabodha. The theory explored in this book represents the content of the cognition derived from linguistic utterances as a paraphrase centered on a meaning element-the principal qualificand, which is qualified by other meaning elements. Thinkers of the Mimamsa, Nyaya and Vyakarana schools concern themselves with this topic, situated at the interface between epistemology, linguistics, scriptural exegesis and logic, and deeply embedded in wider conceptual networks. The three competing versions of the theory and the intriguing questions they raise have never received extensive and historical treatment. Debating Verbal Cognition expounds the debate between the philosophers of the three schools, setting the arguments in their philosophical, doctrinal and historical context. It provides a timeline through the history of this debate, revealing the complexity of argumentation and drawing in particular attention to the bigger picture beyond the purely linguistic stand. The central argument focuses on the capacity of the initial contexts, with the network of issues to which the theory is connected, to render intelligible the presuppositions and aims behind the complex justification of the late stages. This book is an attempt to understand the rationality and internal coherence of each position, and to make sense of the reasons why the thinkers of the three schools have continued over the centuries to hold on to three mutually exclusive positions, despite the fact that none of the schools can give an all-comprehensive and unitary form of the theory.

This article aims to follow the process of adoption of Navya-Nyāya techniques of cognitive analysis in the school of Vedic hermeneutics, Mīmāṃsā, in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, in the larger context of the spread of these techniques in India. I shall argue that this process arises in Mīmāṃsā on the sidelines of the Advaita-Dvaita Vedānta controversy in South India, then subsequently flourishes in Varanasi. These techniques are adopted gradually and selectively, for not all the Mīmāṃsā thinkers choose to use them.

Johannes Bronkhorst, professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1987 to 2011, undoubtedly belongs to the most talented and significant indologists of the last three decades. His abundant work testifies to an unparalleled range of interests from early Buddhism to grammar, mathematics to asceticism, philosophy to archaeology, and is characterized by the determination to challenge preconceived ideas, cliches and traditional constructs.&ltBR> The present felicitation volume includes thirty-two essays by some of the finest scholars in the field of indology, which reflect Johannes Bronkhorst's main scholarly contributions: Grammar, Philosophy, Vedic Studies, Buddhism and Jainism, Dharmaśāstra and Arthaśāstra, Epics and Purāṇas. It presents an almost complete spectrum of the intellectual and spiritual pursuits and speculations in Ancient India, and will be of inestimable value to the specialists of all fields of Indology. The volume also includes a presentation of Johannes Bronkhorst's academic career and contribution to Indian Studies by Jan E.M. Houben, and an ongoing bibliography of his work."