Marie-Hélène Gorisse

In classical India, Jain philosophers developed a theory of viewpoints ( naya-vāda ) according to which any statement is always performed within and dependent upon a given epistemic perspective or viewpoint. The Jainas furnished this epistemology with an (epistemic) theory of disputation that takes into account the viewpoint in which the main thesis has been stated. The main aim of our paper is to delve into the Jain notion of viewpoint-contextualisation and to develop the elements of a suitable logical system that should offer a reconstruction of the Jainas’ epistemic theory of disputation. A crucial step of our project is to approach the Jain theory of disputation with the help of a theory of meaning for logical constants based on argumentative practices called dialogical logic . Since in the dialogical framework the meaning of the logical constants is given by the norms or rules for their use in a debate, it provides a meaning theory closer to the Jain context-sensitive disputation theory than the main-stream formal model-theoretic semantics.

In his excellent paper, Nagarjuna as anti-realist, Siderits showed that it makes sense to perform a connection between the position of the Buddhist Nagarjuna and contemporary anti realist theses such as Dummett’s one. The point of this talk is to argue that this connection is an important one to perform for one’s correct understanding of what Nagarjuna is doing when he criticizes the contemporary Indian theories of knowledge and assertion, first section, but as soon as the theories of argumentation are involved, this connection can be implemented in a better way from another anti realist perspective, namely the one of Dialogical logic, in which the signification is given in terms of rules in a language game. The philosophical issues are to hold an interpretation of the type of assertion performed by Nagarjuna. We here aim at making a rational reconstruction of his chief claim 'I do not assert any proposition' in which a proposition is considered as the set of its strategies of justification. As for the last section, the point will be to apply these analyses to Buddhist practice. We will in this section consider the conventional character of human activities as the fact that any speech act is performed within a dialogue under ad-hoc restrictions; and the question of one’s progress in the soteriological path to liberation will be asked.

The practice of rational debate between philosophers from different traditions, especially between Hindu—Naiyāyika and Mīmāṃsaka—, Buddhist and Jain philosophers, is unique in classical India. Around the 7th c., a pan-Indian consensus was achieved on what counts as a satisfactory justification. The core of such discussions is an inferential reasoning whose structure is such that it ensures that its conclusions are recognised as knowledge statements, irrespective of the obedience of the interlocutor. In this line, stories of conversion following those philosophical debates are commonplace in the narratives of the different traditions and regularly involve the conversion of a royal patron. Beside the influence of argumentative practices on social and political changes, theories of argumentation have deeply influenced the whole edifice of philosophy in pre modern India, since no philosopher can claim a thesis without being committed to defend it in this highly regulated dialogical framework. Moreover, the characterisation, as well as the methods to test the validity of this justification, raised the question of the existence of shared principles and was a battlefield for the different traditions to establish their own conceptions on the constitution of the world and on our ability to know it. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the contribution of the minority tradition that is Jainism to the framework of philosophical disputation in India.

This paper is a review of the nine chapters more directly concerned with philosophy of the volume Jaina Scriptures and Philosophy. Edited in 2015 by Peter Flügel and Olle Qvarnström, this interdisciplinary volume in philosophy, philology, linguistics, literary studies and history is presented as an essential contribution to the study of Jaina philosophy inasmuch as it offers a collection of cutting-edge analyses on the emergence and development of philosophical concepts such as the Self and its epistemic faculties, with a focus on early Jaina canonical literature and commentaries thereof.

This paper explores the coexistence of more apologetic and of more systematic considerations in the _Āpta-mīmāṁsā_ (ĀMī), _Investigation on authority_, of the Jain author Samantabhadra (530–590). First, this treatise offers a relevant case study to investigate the transition from a conception in which the reliability criterion of an authoritative discourse is the authoritative character of its utterer, to a conception in which the criteria of validity and soundness of the discourse itself are foremost. Second, Samantabhadra is one of the first authors to undertake to logically prove the omniscience of the Jain teachers. And third, he links these questions to the celebrated Jain epistemological theory of non-one-sidedness.