Śrīvaiṣṇavism, Indian and Comparative Philosophy at my new blog

Śrīvaiṣṇavism and Viśiṣṭādvaita VedāntaThis post discusses the differences between Bhedābheda and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta.
This post discusses the position of Yāmuna within Vedānta.
You can read a short summary of the panel on Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta at the last WSC here.
What happened at the beginnings of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta? You can read some answers here and here.
The manuscript basis of Vedānta Deśika's Seśvaramīmāṃsā are discussed here.
A summary on the debate about phonemes in Mīmāṃsā and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta can be read here.

Further Indian Philosophy
A basic bibliography on Jayanta can be read here.
This post offers an overview of Indian linguistics.
Again on Indian linguistics, this post discusses the Mahābhāṣya antecedents of Kumārila's discussion on the sentence.
Cogent evidence (arthāpatti) is discussed here.
Slightly away from my usual concerns, this post discusses substances for the Vātsīputrīyas.

Comparative Philosophy
Deontic logic is discussed here.
This post discusses the category of "West".
Should one study Indian, Chinese, etc. philosophy within the regular curriculum? Read some thoughts here.
Can a debate about ethics be universal if it focuses only on Western ethics? Discuss here. Accordingly, this post discusses the universality of ethics in connection with Hindu bioethics.

Methodology
This post discusses the role of imagination in our reconstructions.
Do you plan to work together? Read this post (and let me know what you think).
Do you also dislike TOC in alphabetic order? Read and comment on this post.

Long sellers: Quotations and Daya Krishna
This post is dedicated to Daya Krishna.
What to read on reuse? You can find some resources here.

Book reviews
This post introduces a series of posts discussing reviews of my book.
Andrew Ollett's review is discussed here.
Taisei Shida's one is discussed here.
For my comments on Hugo David's review, read here.

Interview
You can read here an interview with Shilpa Sumant.

You can find further short posts, Call for papers, quotes, etc., at my new blog.

IABS, IDhC conferences and other posts (including various CfP)

You can find a summary of my posts on the IABS (International Association of Buddhist Studies) Conference on my new blog, here.
You can find a summary of my posts on the IDhC (International Dharmakīrti Conference) on my new blog, here.
Further, you can find a post on bhakti and Daya Krishna here.
A post on common misunderstandings of Mīmāṃsā can be read here.
Are you interested in philosophy and epistemology of language and in testimony? Read this CfP.
The Call for Papers for the next CBC can be read here.

Be sure to check my new blog's archives for August and September for further short posts.

A new post on Hayagrīva and further interesting ones

You can read my June posts (on Mīmāṃsā's theory of language, Hayagrīva, Bogdan Diaconescu, Editing proofs, Veṅkaṭanātha's Buddhist quotes and Philosophy) at my new blog, here.

Kumārila on sentence meaning

Who are the opponents in Kumārila's Ślokavārttika (henceforth ŚV), chapter on sentence-meaning? And did the ŚV set the standard for all further discussions on the topic?
Please read the rest at my new blog, here.

Is Vyāḍi meant when Jayanta refers to “exclusion”?

Is Jayanta referring to Vyāḍi when he lists various positions at the beginning of his discussion about the sentence-meaning, in his Nyāyamañjarī, book 5? Read the answer at my new blog.

Who invented the apoha theory? On Kunjunni Raja 1986

Who invented the apoha theory? If you, like me, are prone to answer "Dignāga" and to add that Dignāga (as shown by Hattori) was inspired by Bhartṛhari's theory and that Dharmakīrti and Dharmottara later fine-tuned Dignāga's one, you are ready to have your view challenged by K. Kunjunni Raja's article in Buddhist Logic and Epistemology (ed. by B.K. Matilal and R.D. Evans, 1986). Please read the rest at my new blog, here.

शब्दविषये रसेल(Russell)मत: संस्कृतायां वाचि निरूपितः

इह पठनीयः ।

One Year PG Diploma in Sanskrit Computational Linguistics

at the university of Hyderabad, with Amba Kularni (among others). Read the rest at my new blog, here.

पदनित्यत्वं वेदनित्यत्वं च

किमर्थम् पदानित्यत्वं निषेद्धव्यम् ?
मीमांसकास् "शब्दो नित्य एव" इति मन्यन्ते । यथा वयं वृद्धव्यवहारे शब्दार्थसम्बन्धानधिगच्छामः, तथा भूते काले वृद्धाः अपि −इत्यनादिरेव शब्दप्रयोग इति ।
शेष इह पठितव्यम् ।

शब्दनित्यत्वविषये शबरवेदान्तदेशिकयोर् मतौ

इह पठनीयम् ।

Is the Veda the body of God? (Yoshimizu 2007–II part)

How can one interpret a Vedic passage by saying that a certain meaning was not "intended" (vivakṣita), while still thinking that the Veda has no personal author?

The Mīmāṃsā cannot renounce the idea that the Veda has no personal author (apauruṣeyatva): its whole theory about the Veda's validity depends on this principle. However, Kumārila needs also to explain in which sense one can decide whether an interpretation of the Veda is right or not on the basis of whether it is intended (vivakṣita). How can one speak of intention if there is no author?

The context principle and some Indian controversies over Meaning —B.K. Matilal and P.K. Sen

The context principle and some Indian controversies over Meaning is a milestone in Indian studies, and in the history of their interaction with mainstream (i.e. Western) philosophy. Since it was published in 1988 on Mind (one of the top-5 journals in Philosophy, inaccessible for most authors), virtually everyone (in Indian philosophy) has read it.

Have you also re-read it?
I re-read it after some years this Summer and I have to admit that it was again a surprise. The article starts with a discussion of the Context principle in Frege and Quine (does the principle mean that words HAVE no meaning outside a sentence, or that their meaning can only be UNDERSTOOD within a sentence?). In this connection, M & S discuss a strong and a weak interpretation of the Context principle (according to whether it should answer the first or the second question). They end up saying that the strong interpretation clashes with Frege's later work (see below), whereas the weak interpretation (the context is only needed to understand the meaning of words) is trivial. Thus, an intermediate interpretation needs to be adopted, namely that "the meaning of a subsentential expression is nothing but its contribution to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs" (p. 80).

Next, Matilal and Sen discuss also Russell's On Denoting (another milestone of contemporary Philosophy of Language). I have to admit that I could not understand Matilal and Sen's treatment of it until I actually read Russell (but the fact of making a reader undertake further studies might be conceived as a further result of Matilal and Sen). Until M & S, in fact, I had always thought of Russell's philosophy of language as correspondentist, whereas M & S interpret Russell's strategy of reduction (through his "contextual definitions") as also (implicitly) presupposing some sort of Context principle.

A further step is the analysis of Frege. In fact, the Context principle seems to clash with the sense-reference distinction, outlined by Frege in his later work. M & S use Michael Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language to claim that both theses can co-exist: words' meanings are outer referents, but "we cannot say anything, in the strict sense of the word 'say', without the use of whole sentences" (p. 80). After a short excursus on Kant's unity of thought, Michael Dummett's book is also quoted to discuss the distinction between the Context principle and the Composition principle. According to the latter, the meaning of a sentence is the result of the composition of the words forming it.

Does this sound familiar? If not, it means that you have not been working on the Kumārila-Prabhākara-Bhartṛhari-Nyāya controversy on word- and sentence-meaning. In fact, as shown by M & S in the second part of their work (pp. 84--97), the Indian scenario also revolves on similar issues. Bhartṛhari is clearly an holist: for him the meaning of a sentence is a whole and word-meanings are only secondary abstractions. Kumārila and Prabhākara represent two different positions, possibly identifiable, respectively, with the weak and the intermediate interpretation of the Context principle.

This leads to a further problem, i.e., the link between linguistics and ontology. The topic is only hinted at at the end of M & S's article, but it is, in my opinion, the most thought-provoking contribution of the article (together with the very idea of joining Frege and Kumārila side by side in a philosophical debate).

In fact, if words express their meanings only once already related in the context of a sentence, as upheld by the Prābhākaras, what consequences does this have for the Prābhākara ontology? If, for instance, "cow" in "Bring the cow!" does not mean  a separate cow, but a cow insofar as it is related to the injunction of being brought, does this entail that a "cow-connected-with-the-injunction-of bringing" exists out there? What sort of cow would this be? Surely an incomplete cow, one which is completed by the injunction of bringing. Should one admit —for the sake of maintaining the correspondentism between meanings and outer world— that there are "unsaturated entities" out there?

My personal answer is that ontology is less relevant than linguistics for the Prābhākaras (unlike for most Western philosophers and common folks) and that, as a matter of fact, this sort of correspondentism is already ruled out by the Prābhākara stress on exhortations as the paradigm of all sentences.

What do you think? Can there be linguistics without ontology?
Moreover, methodologically speaking, I wonder why M & S has not been enough for further studies of this sort to be the rule on Mind (and other philosophical journals). Does this failure depend on their style? (Or should we just start working as a task-force and submit many articles of this kind?)

On ontology and Mīmāṃsā, see this post. On ontology in Indian philosophy in general, see this one.
As hinted at in the Introduction, this was not the first time I read M & S's article. You can read a further post about it (focusing on the Prābhākara linguistic theory) here. On Frege's and the Prābhākara philosophy of language, check this post.

varṇa: 'letter' or 'phoneme'? (Or: How to translate Sanskrit technical terms?)

How to translate Sanskrit technical terms? Do we have to keep their technical aspects or make them more readable through non technical translations?
In my opinion, the answer varies according to the target readership and the text one is translating. I remember having translated thali in a Hindi novel with 'plate' because its specificites were irrelevant. By contrast, I would have not acted this way in case I were translating a cooking manual meant for cooks.

Take, for instance the case of akṣara in Indian linguistics. I cannot understand why, after Wezler's illuminating essay Credo quia Occidentale one can still translate it with letter/lettre or any other European synonym. If one translates it with 'letter', one

a) subscribes to the Western prejudice in favour of the written form of a language (although the truth is that each language is pronounced before being written),
b) projects into a Grammatical text something it did not mean to say (several Śabdapramāṇa theorists explicitly maintain that only spoken language communicates knowledge and the few who address the problem of written language say that it can inferentially communicate something because one infers phonemes out of their written form): if one makes an author speak of "letters" a reader aware of the debate might think that he was a sustainer of the possibility of written language to communicate knowledge. Is this really the case?
c) A naïver reader might think that 'kh' is made of two akṣaras/letters.

Long story short: the meaning (artha) is —in Indian linguistics— not conveyed by 'letters'. It is conveyed by phonemes. It is a distinct achievement of Indian linguists to have understood it instead of falling in the trap their Western colleagues felt in (i.e., the one of the superiority of the written system, aptly denounced by Saussure in his Cours). I really do not want to level their achievements down to the average Western level.
Westerners should start to think more about the topic if they find sentences such as "The meaning of a linguistic expression is conveyed by the phonemes composing it'' wired. And is not this (=leading to further thinking) our purpose?

How do you translate technical terms?

The whole discussion has been triggered by Aleix Ruiz Falqués, who dedicated a thought-provoking post to it. Be sure to read also the interesting comments by Jayarava and Aleix' answers. 
UPDATE: Further interesting comments can be found here.

Space and time in India

In the Western civilization, many of us (me included) are used to temporal explanations and temporal questions (one might say that this is a result of the Christian concept of a linear time, from creation to redemption). It is for this reason that we tend to think of time as the unavoidable framework and we are not at ease with Stephen Hawkins' or St. Augustine's claim that there used to be a "moment before time", which, by definition, does not have any temporal extension.
The situation is completely different in Classical, non-Buddhist India, where the concept of anāditva 'beginninglessness' frontally opposes the predominance of a linear time. In Mīmāṃsā, the idea that the world should have had a beginning and that it will have an end is completely weird. The world extends through time without stretching from a beginning to an end. In Grammar and Nirukta (see Kahrs 1998) one consistently encounters spatial explanations of phenomena that we would explain in temporal terms. For instance, the author of the Nirukta does not say that a certain term "comes from"/"derives from" (note the temporal metaphor at work) a certain root, nor does Patañjali speak of lopa as the "elision of a certain phoneme". Rather, spatial metaphors are used: a certain term is used at the place of another one, a lopa is the substitution of a certain phoneme with a zero-substitute.

Do you know of other examples from different contexts, in India and in the West?

On spatial vs. temporal explanations in Ritual and Mīmāṃsā speculation, see this post.

Final Balance on my 2012 projects: tantra and prasaṅga

tantra and prasaṅga in Śrautasūtra, Mīmāṃsā and Grammar

Participants: E. Freschi and Tiziana Pontillo

The project aims at throwing light on a shared prehistory of Śrautasūtra, Mīmāṃsā and Grammar, by means of a special focus on their structural approach to their topics (ritual or language). It shows how, notwithstanding their different objects, all schools share the idea of describing them through the opposition between general and specific rules, with the latter overruling the former. Furthermore, the project shows how, among the more technical devices used for this purpose, tantra and prasaṅga share some similarities ---insofar as they can make an element apply to a context where it is actually absent--- but at the same time represent two opposite models. tantra applies within the precinct of a certain context (i.e., a certain grammatical rule or a certain sacrifice), whereas through prasaṅga an element is applied outside its original context. Last, the project shows that the frame of reference of the authors of Śrautasūtra, Mīmāṃsā and Grammar is spatial. Accordingly, the usual way of referring to devices such as lopa as 'disappearance [of a phoneme]', is plainly wrong, because they imply a temporal perspective which is altogether absent. Instead, the project suggests to describe such devices as instances of substitution, with no diachronic implication.

Retrospect of 2012 (September-December): On the basis of a first article on this topic published before Summer 2012, E. Freschi and T. Pontillo wrote a book entitled ''Rule-extension strategies in Ancient India: Ritual, exegetical and linguistic considerations on the tantra- and prasaṅga-principles''. E. Freschi has presented part of the project during a conference in Cambridge, October 2012.

Preview of 2013: Drafts will be corrected, indexes created and the book finalised for publication before Summer 2013 at Fritz Lang, Frankfurt a.M.

Any suggestion concerning further directions of research in this field are welcome.
  
On tantra and prasaṅga, see this post. For an application of tantra and prasaṅga outside their usual precincts, see this post. For my final balance on other projects, see this post.

New Year's Indological Projects

What do you plan to achieve in 2013?

I have already described my goals in this post, but here are my plans concerning the next twelve months.
My 2013 project: finish the translation of the first book of the Seśvaramīmāṃsā by Veṅkaṭanātha, study of it and of its manuscripts. To this are added, month by month, the following smaller projects:

January: Finishing my volume on tantra and prasaṅga. Paper on paribhāṣās in Mīmāṃsā (for a volume on paribhāṣās edited by Gianni Pellegrini). Working on my volume on Quotations (proceedings of this conference).
February: Paper on paribhāṣās in Mīmāṃsā. Volume on Quotations. Finishing the paper on meaning and reference in Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī, book 5 (with Artemij Keidan).
March: Paper on nature in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā (for a conference in Rome organized by Raffaele Torella). Volume on Quotations. Paper on meaning and reference in Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī, book 5.
April: Finishing my book on Testimony in Indian philosophy. Launching the new version of this blog.
May: Finishing my book on Testimony in Indian philosophy.
June: Paper on Veṅkaṭanātha and Rāmānujācārya on the study of Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā.
July: (holiday +) Paper on Veṅkaṭanātha and Rāmānujācārya on the study of Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā.
August: CBC conference on Testimony in Philosophy (see here).
September: CBC conference on Testimony in Philosophy. Correcting the first drafts of the volume on Quotations.
October: Paper on Veṅkaṭanātha and Śrī Rāmānuja on the study of Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā.
November: (no further projects yet)
December: (no further projects yet)

In case you want to feel accountable for your scholar commitments, please add a comment below.

For my more general goals, see this post.

Next Sanskrit-Philosophical projects

Do you have just goals you can achieve by yourself? If not, here are my current projects, to which you are welcome to contribute. I will regularly update this post and add your names, if you desire to join and to be mentioned. Please consider that only the first six have been already undertaken:

• 1. Quotations and re-use of texts in Sanskrit śāstra. I have been working on this topic for several years and am about to chair a Coffee Break Conference about it (see here). The contributions will appear, if approved by the reviewers, in a special issue of the Journal of Indian Philosophy. I am now considering broadening the field to quotations and re-use of texts in Indian literature, including Veda, Belles Lettres and manuscript usages.
• 2. Coffee Break Conferences, i.e., conferences which are only meant for discussing and without read papers. We organize CBC once or twice a year, on several topics. You can read about the next projects on this website.
• 3. A panel on Testimony: I and the other two organisers welcome contributions on śabdapramāṇa in several fields, i.e., seen from the legal and philosophical point of view, in India and outside India. Further details can be read here.
• 4. Editions and translations: Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī, book 5; Veṅkaṭanātha's Seśvaramīmāṃsā, Prabhākara's Bṛhatī, Rāmānujācārya's Tantrarahasya.
• 5. Finishing my study on vidhi, apūrva, niyama, in Grammar, Dharmaśāstra and Mīmāṃsā.

• 6. A reader on śabdapramāṇa in Indian and Western philosophy. NB: I have already written a book about it in Italian and it would be great if one could add translations of key texts in favour or against Linguistic Communication as an Instrument of Knowledge.
• 7. A textbook about how to translate śāstric Sanskrit (along the lines of Tubb and Boose's Scholastic Sanskrit), which should ideally include chapters on Reading śāstric Sanskrit (with textual examples and tutorials) and on the specific issues related to translation. For a blurb, see this post.
• 8. A collective volume on Mīmāṃsā as a sāmānyaśāstra (i.e., on Mīmāṃsā rules and ideas as found outside Mīmāṃsā).
• 9. A collective volume on Scholastic texts, i.e., on post-classical śāstric texts, e.g., on the struggle of doing philosophy after Kumārila, Dharmakīrti, Śaṅkara, etc., trying to balance innovation and strategies for preserving what is already there.

What are your projects? Do you have collective projects in mind?

abhihitānvayavāda, anvitābhidhānavādaś ca

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शब्दस्यार्थो वाच्य इत्युच्यते । यः शब्दो ऽर्थमभिदधाित, सो वाचक इत्युच्यते ।
एकस्मिन् वाक्ये ऽनेकानि पदानि सन्ति । तानि पदान्यर्थवचकानि इति सर्वे मन्यन्ते, स्फोटवादिनो व्यतिरिच्य ।
अपि तु वाक्यमपि महात्वपूर्णमिति मीमांसकमतम्, यतो भिन्नेषु वाक्येष्वेकमेव पदम्भिन्नार्थेषु प्रयुज्यते । उदाहरणम् यथा -- स संस्कृतं पठति,  स पुस्तकं पठति, यजको वेदं पठतीत्यादि ।
प्रथमवाक्यस्य "स संस्कृतभाषायां पुनः पुनरभ्यासं कृत्वा संस्कृतं ज्ञास्यति" इत्यर्थः । द्वितीयवाक्यस्यार्थः "स स्वार्थे पुस्तकं (ममसि) पठति" इति । त्रितीयवाक्यस्यार्थः "याजक उच्चैर्वेदम्पठति" इति ।
अतः "पठति" इतिपदमेकमेव, अर्थास्तु भिन्नाः । कस्मात्करणात् ?
एतस्य प्रश्नस्योत्तरदानार्थं मीमांसादर्शने वादद्वयम् अस्ति, अभिहितान्वयवादः, अन्विताभिदानवादश्चेति ।
मुख्यो ऽभिहितान्वयवादी कुमारिलभट्टः । मुख्यो ऽन्विताभिधानवादी प्राभकरः शालिकनाथमिश्रः ।
अभिहितान्वय इति समासस्य विग्रहः "अभिहितानामर्थानामन्वयः" इति । ये ऽर्थाः शब्दैरभिहिताः, तेषामन्वयः । वस्तुत एकमेकं पदमेकमेकमर्थमभिदधाति । अर्थमभिधाय पदानां को ऽपि प्रयोगो नास्ति यत अर्थानभिधायार्थानामन्वयो भवति । अन्वयः सम्बन्धः ।
अन्विताभिधान इति समासस्य विग्रहः "अन्वितैः पदैरभिधानम्" इति । पदानि परस्परसंबद्धान्येकमेवार्थमभिधाते । यथा "शुक्लां गां दण्डेनानय"  इति वाक्ये शुकलामितिपदस्य विशिष्टार्थो नास्ति । केवलं संपूर्णवाक्यस्यार्थो ऽस्ति । यतः शुक्लामितिपदं गामितिपदास्यार्थं किंचित्परिणामयति । गामितिपदस्य सर्वदा सर्वेषु वाक्येष्वेक एवार्थो नास्ति । अन्यैः पदैर् गामितिपदस्यार्थपरिणामो भवति ।

Rule-extensions in Indian Linguistics and Ritualistics

At the core of the basic framework of Sanskrit systematic thought (and possibly of many other scientific treatises written in every kind of languages) is the practical and effective opposition between general and specific rules. This opposition entails the need of a device for properly extending rules, especially in the case of an overlapping of rules. In the Indian culture this need has lead to an analysis of the abstract structure of the extension of rules, which has been probably inaugurated by the ritualistic tradition. This developed a methodology often considered as a good antecedent of the grammatical substitution-system and of other sophisticated patterns of scientific descriptions, such as the Mīmāṃsā's ones.
 Nevertheless, this underlying arrangement of technical works is not often made explicit, so that all its features are to be patiently detected by a modern reader, often merely by starting from some terminological hints hidden in the texts, such as tantra and prasaṅga.

What other terms made you consider in a different way the whole structure of the way one reasons within śāstras?


I have written way too much on this blog on tantra and especially on the more obscure prasaṅga (a couple of examples are this post and this one, but just enter any of the related terms in the search engine on the left).

Didactic of Sanskrit

I have been learning Sanskrit for many years and hope to improve my knowledge of it all my life long. Furthermore, I had for many years the priviledge of teaching Sanskrit and I look forward for the next chance of doing it again. This probably applies to you, too. Nonetheless, the didactic of Sanskrit is a sort of terra incognita. This might have to do with the fact that many Sanskritists feel that teaching is only something they have to do, whereas their true vocation would be to just research. Or with the fact that pedagogy is generally considered as a sub-field, one for people who failed in the main topic ("if you are not able to be an historian/a philosopher/a philologist, etc., you are ready to become a pedagogist").
Still, this is a pity. Because learning and teaching Sanskrit without being aware of the best tools to do it means wasting one's and other people's time.

At the last IIGRS (click here for the whole programme) there were two incredibly well-prepared and well-documented papers on the didactics of Sanskrit (a theorical one by Sven Wortmann and a practical one, showing how an actual class can be structured, by Ann-Kathrin Wolf). Everyone seemed to have enjoyed them and the follow-up discussion has been a great success. Here is my personal highlight:

•  There are several kinds of students (analytical, visual, auditory… ones). Thus, one needs to use the tools which are more effective to each of them.

This is tantamount to say that one has to know oneself. There is no point in trying to focus on learning by heart the declension of devaḥ if you are a visual type and would rather be able to remember its graphic form. Nor does it make sense to focus on it if you are an auditory type, who would remember all the forms of devaḥ once you have encountered them in an actual conversation. Sven and Ann-Kathrin stressed the importance of leaving one's "comfort zone" and trying out other learning styles, but I am not completely sure I agree with that. If you are an analytical type, knowing about the Indoeuropean background will help you, but if you are a visual one, you will just have to learn by heart two sets of paradigms (the i.e. and the Skt ones). And so on.

What was your experience in learning Sanskrit? And in teaching it? What would (or could) you improve?

On the last IIGRS, see also this post. On Spoken Sanskrit (a powerful tool if you are an auditory type), see this post and this one. On my own efforts of explaining Sanskrit syntax (in an analytical way, I am afraid), see this post.