Deontic logic, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and comparative philosophy

Until the end of February, I will be mainly busy working on dentic logic in Mīmāṃsā. You can read about my musings on this topic here (on hermeneutic principles in Mīmāṃsā), here (on prohibitions), here (on the principle of parsimony) and here (on conditional obligations in Mīmāṃsā).
Here you can read some thoughs on comparative philosophy.
You can read here my thoughts on free will in Rāmānuja.

Doing research on free-will in Indian philosophy

As a scholar trained in Western Academia, one has at least three choices while dealing with Sanskrit Philosophy:

1. One can treat it as if it were Western philosophy and discuss, e.g., of monotonic or non-monotonic logic in Nyāya,
2. One can deal with it in its own terms, e.g., by describing the inner-Mīmāṃsā controversy about whether one has to study the Veda because of the prescription to study it or because of the prescription to teach it (since, in order for someone to teach, someone else must be learning from him),
3. One can attempt a compromise, looking for how a certain topic is configured in Sanskrit philosophy.
4.  

Please read the rest at my new blog.

A theist caught in the paradoxes of free will

Can a theist believe in God's omniscience&omnipotence and in free will? I have argued in other posts that one can think in a compatibilist way (because God wants to be freely loved) and that this entails that no punishment/ban from God's presence can be eternal. Here I would like to test it in the case of Vedānta Deśika/Veṅkaṭanātha, a Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedāntin who also wrote Mīmāṃsā works.

You can read the rest at my new blog, here.

Predestination in Madhva's thought

Predestination is admitted by the Theistic school of Dvaita Vedānta, founded by Madhva (see Zydenbos 1991). In his review of Zydenbos' article, V.N. Pandurangi (Pandurangi 2012) translates the three kinds of souls according to Dvaita Vedānta as 'eligible for liberation' (muktiyogya), 'ever returnee' (nityāvarta) and 'eligible for eternal hell' (tamoyogya). It is not clear —due to the ambiguous semantics of Sanskrit kṛtya suffixes such as yogya— whether the first and the last group of souls will necessarily attain liberation and hell or may attain them. This difference has a major impact on the issue of free will and it is possibly presupposed by Bhagavadgītā 16.19-20 referring to eternal hell and in several other short hints by various authors (including Vedānta Deśika, see, again, Pandurangi 2012). However, the latter examples only refer to the limit case of a few souls at the edge of the classification and authors are careful to explain that these marginal cases should not make people despair, thinking that they might be eternally bound souls.
Is, thus, predestination to eternal hell a real possibility for ordinary people? Or only the limit case of a classification? I am inclined to think that the former option applies to Madhva, and the latter to the rest of Indian philosophy. Do readers agree?

On predestination and free will see also this post and this one. On Madhva, see this post.

The paradox of questions

One does not expect from an artist to be able to supply a compelling definition of what is ''art", but on the other hand no philosophical investigation can be accomplished unless we are aware of what we are trying to achieve and of what is our initial understanding of it.
Thus, no questioning is possible if one has absolutely no idea of what is the topic one is asking about and in one sense the question already embeds its answer. This is the paradox of question (see a beautiful article by Amber Carpenter and Jonardon Ganeri, 2010).
This means that even one's initial question needs to be cautiously examined. This is even more so whenever one tries to question a text or a philosophical school remote in time and/or space, so that one's initial understanding of what one is looking for runs the risk to be so wrong as to be misleading even as an initial guidepost. This is what happens, in my opinion, when we start by asking questions such as "What do Indian authors think about free will?" or "Did Indian authors believe in God?". On the other hand, one cannot just avoid asking questions, unless one wants to write nothing but descriptive articles. Nor can one hope to ask only questions which make sense within the Indian context, unless one has decided to give up any hope to communicate with the non-Indian world (including at least a part of oneself).


How do you solve this problem?
On God and free will in Indian thought, see this post. On free will in particular, check also the label "free will". On descriptive articles, see this post.

God and free will in Indian philosophy and in Mīmāṃsā in particular

Possibly because God is rarely seen as directly interfering in worldly matters (He rather uses karman to do it), I am not aware of philosophical discussions about whether human beings alone are responsible of good and evil or God is corresponsible as well, insofar as He favours the first and lets the latter happen. One also does not find the kind of reflections one finds in Islamic thought, asking why God does not let future evil-doers die while they are still harmless children, in order to prevent them from doing evil and, hence, to eternally suffer in hell... Nor does one find the problem of the coexistence of God's goodness and free will. I tend to think that the Christian answer to this problem would be that free will is so precious, that God prefers people to be free rather than forcing them to be good. This might be due to the fact that God himself wants to be chosen freely and freely loved. But one might object that this desire of Him implies that there are also evil-doers, who might harm other people. How can one justify a desire, if this indirectly implies harming others?

Mīmāṃsā authors deny any role to god as a philosophical entity. They may personally adore a personal God, but tend to be quite strict in denying to Him/Her any ontological foundation. In other words, god has no place as a justification for the system and there is, consequently, no need to discuss one's freedom in respect to his omnipotence. The absence of any comparison with god also entails that Mīmāṃsā authors do not need to specify in which sense one can be said to be free, given that one is not as free as god is, since, for instance, god can assume every possible form and we cannot. (Pratyabhijñā authors, in this connection, suggest that the limited subjects only enjoy a fraction of the God's infinite power of freedom.)

Are you aware of discussions about God and free will in Sanskrit texts?
On free will in Mīmāṃsā, see this post.

Free will in Mīmāṃsā

I already discussed how free will does not appear as much a crucial conundrum, if seen from the point of view of Indian philosophy, which in general silently embraces compatibilism (between determinism and free will).

In addition to the general points already brought forward, it is worth remembering that Mīmāṃsā authors in general tend to favour accounts which mirror one's experience. If, for instance, one experiences one's cognition of a chair one gradually distinguishes in a dark room as a ''sense-perception'', there should be very strong reasons to refute it this status (see Taber 2005, discussing this point in Kumārila). Similarly, since we obviously feel that our will has a role in the process of undertaking an action, Mīmāṃsakas do not dispute this. Unlike their Western colleagues, Mīmāṃsā philosophers do not question the degree of freedom of the decisions one experiences as free. They do not, e.g., argue for the fact that our experience of freedom might just be an epiphenomenon accompanying the process of undertaking an action, or that our experience of freedom might be in fact a fake, since our decisions are completely determined by who we are, which is a priori determined by facts we cannot interfere with, such as genes and early education. The fact that decisions are experienced as free is enough for Mīmāṃsā authors to treat them accordingly.

Thus, for Mīmāṃsakas the issue of free will strictly depends on how one understands action. Within this framework, one could also just speak of ''will'', since from the point of view of the way a single action is caused, nothing changes if the general laws of the universe allow freedom or not.

On the topic of free will, a very recent article by Johannes Bronkhorst ("Free Will and Indian Philosophy", Philosophia Antiquorum, forthcoming) also argues in favour of an experiential approach. In our experience, we all know what it is to be free and this experience is perfectly compatible with determinism, since (see this post), we would keep on feeling free even if determinism were the case.


On free will in Indian philosophy, see this post (and the others tagged "free will").

Why we cannot but be free

I am inclined to think that the free will vs. determinism problem is only a seeming problem. No matter what natural scientists will decide about determinacy and indeterminacy, the status of electrones will not change the way we think about ourselves:

Standing there [between a cake you want to buy and someone with an Oxfam tin on the steps of the shop, with a single note in your pocket], you might believe that determinism is true. You may believe that in five minutes' time you will be able to look back on the situation and say, of what you will by then have done, 'It was determined that I should do that'. But even if you do believe this, it does not seem to undermine your current sense of the absoluteness of your freedom, and of your moral responsibility for your choice. (G. Strawson, Free Will in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Of course, one could reply that this is just a psychological attitude, and that just like we are deterministically inclined to believe in continuity after death, so are we also inclined to believe that we are free. But even if this could explain, it does not change our basic intuitions about freedom. Why? Because they belong to a different precinct than laws about the "external" world. If I do feel pain, I will not be convinced by my very learned physician that tells me I should not feel any pain in my knee, since it is intact. Pain and freedom, in other words, belong to subjectivity, in the sense that they are not subject-independent, although they "subjective" in the sense of "personal, different for each human being". One cannot explain them away from an "objective" point of view.

Indian authors seem to have chosen the middle path of compatibilism, see this post.
Are you aware of Indian works favouring determinism or predestination?

On free will on this blog, check the corresponding tag. For other blogs, you might be interested in this discussion on Amod Lele's one.

Free will in Indian philosophy

Free will is one of the most central topics of Western philosophy. In contrast, it is hard even to find an adequate synonym in Indian philosophy. Why? Possibly because:

1. 1. Indian philosophy is not dominated by Theism as a philosophical position (there have been several theistic philosophies, but the core of Indian philosophy —Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Buddhism, Jainism…— does not need a personal God),
2. 2. the theory of karman introduced determinism as a pre-condition, so that the only option left was some sort of compatibilism and everyone automatically adjusted.

Most Indian authors are in fact by default compatibilists. They assume automatically that we are determined by karman, but also that karman is not an inestricable chain. If it were one, no liberation would be possible without a Divine intervention. Predestination is, thus, admitted by some Theistic schools such as Madhva's one (and possibly presupposed by some verses of the Bhagavadgītā referring to eternal hell). However, predestination cannot be accepted by all the schools who stress the importance of one's path, such as Buddhism, nor be a philosophically viable option for the schools who do not recognise a personal (and, hence, arbitrary) God as fundamental to their system. If there is no God arbitrarily deciding to rescue the one and send to hell the other, what would be the rationale of predestination? A Materialist might answer that one just happens to be among the lucky ones or not, but materialism is, again, an extreme position within Indian philosophy.

On the topic of free will in Indian philosophy, see this post (and all other posts under the tag "free will").

Free will and desire

Are we free only when we act independently of desire? Or can one speak of free will also in the case of acts determined by desire? In other words, is eating while hungry an instance of free will? Or is only the whimsical movement of one's arm with no exact reason a free act?

The second example is the one discussed by Lev Tolstoj in War and Peace and it is the standard example of free will. Maybe so standard, that it is almost purely speculative. At least according to several schools of Indian philosophy, desire is a fundamental part of the decision process. We do not go on moving our arms randomly, without any purpose. Our usual behaviour is much more finalized (, and hence belongs to the first category). In fact, the arm-case might be re-interpreted as just an instance of the "desire to prove that one has free will", with this desire having itself previous causes (one's education, etc.). Then, the question amounts to the problem of the link between desire and resolution. Are one's resolutions free, if they have desire at their basis? Or does free will only exist independently of/against desire? Indian schools such as Mīmāṃsā have naturally acknowledged the role of desire (and also Aristotle explains the human tendency to speculate as caused by a natural desire). The second option, by contrast, seems to be too much determined by the Western manichean approach to flesh vs. spirit.

What do you think? What is the view of the schools you are more familiar with?

On the necessity of desire for an action to be undertaken in Mīmāṃsā, see here. For the Nyāya stance, see here. On free will, se here. On free will in Indian philosophy, see here. For a Western point of view on the topic discussed above, you might want to read this question raised on academia.edu (and its "answer" by Richard Price).

Free will

Although free will is not my main field, I started thinking about it more and more in the last months, since I have been asked to write a contribution on free will in Mīmāṃsā within a volume dealing with free will in Indian philosophy. Of course, one of the most important questions is whether it makes sense to speak of "free will" in Indian philosophy. From the literal point of view, one's will can only be defined as "free" if there is the chance for it to be bound. Is this the case in India? There is something like that in some Śaiva schools, where it is said that God alone is completely free (īśvara and svatantra), whereas we are all like cattle (paśu), bound by three fetters. Further, one might suggest that karman might be thought to obstruct one's will, although in philosophical schools I never found a deterministic view of karman being explicitly endorsed (this happens, rather, in dramas, cf. the attitude of minor characters in the Śākuntalā). I am very much inclined to think that also Buddhism is not deterministic, cf. the fact that Dharmakīrti refutes the possibility of inferring a result from its causes, so that even a karmic cause cannot be said to invariably lead to a certain result.
Furthermore, the issue of free will strictly depends on how one understands action and in this sense Indian schools of thought have very interesting investigations to offer on the abode of action and most of all on the resolution to undertake an action.

What is instead missing, if I am not wrong, are several of the issues connected with free will in the Western traditions. Starting from the obvious lack of the original sin (apart from the theology of the ISKCON movement), the balance between God's omniscience and free will seems to be less of a problem. Possibly because God is rarely seen as directly interfering in worldly matters (He rather uses karman to do it), I am not aware of philosophical discussions about whether human beings alone are responsible of good and evil or God is corresponsible as well, insofar as He favours the first and lets the latter happen. One also does not find the kind of reflections one finds in Islamic thought, asking why God does not let future evil-doers die while they are still harmless children… Nor does one find the problem of the coexistence of God's goodness and free will. I tend to think that the Christian answer to this problem would be that free will is so precious, that God prefers people to be free rather than forcing them to be good. This might be due to the fact that God himself wants to be chosen freely and freely loved. But one might object that this desire of Him implies that there are also evil-doers, who might harm other people. How can one justify a desire, if this indirectly implies harming others?

On the issue of free will in Eastern theology and, hence, on many of the issues above mentioned, just read an interesting article by David Heith-Stade (you might also want to have a look at his interesting blog).

Is there room for Free Will in Indian Philosophy?

Where shall we look for Indian discussions on free will? Free will seems to have to do with action. Although one might not need to act, in order to have free will, the capacity to act if one wishes to is the core of free will. Hence, one might be inclined to look for discussions on Free Will in the context of a system's theory of action. Another interesting semantic field would be that of God, since He is one who is surely assumed to be omnipotent and is often declared to be free. And free will seems to me to be a presupposal for free omnipotency.

I just happened to read a passage defining agent-hood (kartṛtva):

Agency is the fact of having a direct knowledge of the material causes, of having desire to do and of being endowed with an [actual] action
(upādānagocarāparokṣajñānacikīrṣākṛtimattvaṃ kartṛtvam)

The text is Annambhaṭṭa's dīpikā on his Tarkasaṅgraha (on proposition 17). The context is that of the inference about the existence of a Lord, namely "A sprout is made by a doer, because it is a product, like a pot", so that the agency here described might be only the God's one. If this were not the case, one would have the following three requisites of agency in general:

1. 1. direct knowledge of the material causes (i.e., applied and unmediated knowledge)
2. 2. desire to do
3. 3. actual doing

As for 3., I would define free-will as just the capacity to do what one wishes, independent of whether one actually does it or not. But the stress on the actual action might be just a nicety of Annambhaṭṭa.
The cognitive element seems a more significant difference. The material causes are later defined as samavāyikārana (like clay in case of a pot). Direct knowledge is a typical requisite of God, since He does not need to depend on the complex epistemological system we are bound to, and can just know everything directly. If the definition does not only apply to Him, then it means that agency requires this sort of direct knowledge to the things you'll need in order to act. Does it refer only to practical actions, such as doing a pot, where you must have a direct knowledge of the clay? Or can it apply also to general concepts? And what would a "material cause" be, in such cases?