Materials for the Study of Navya-Nyaya Logic

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The usage of the learned varies as to just which Indian philosophers may be said to belong to the school of Navya-nyaya (the New Nyaya). For convenience, in this book I regard all Naiyayikas from the time of Gangesa (thirteenth century) to the present as Navya-naiyayikas. These philosophers have written on logic, epistemology, physics, and grammar, but logic has been the most distinctive of their disciplines. It is in logic that they created a new style and method in Indian philosophy.

The mass of Navya-nyaya writings on logic is enormous, yet almost none of this is available in a Western language. Western Sanskritists have been repelled by the complexities of Navya-nyaya style, while the Indian pandits trained in this style are almost never trained in Western logic.

The purpose of this book is to present a small number of Navya-nyaya texts in such fashion that they may be understood by a Westerner. This is not primarily a comparative study, but I have drawn comparisons to Aristotelian and mathematical logic when it seemed to me that a particular Navya-nyaya theory or technique might be elucidated thereby.

The study of Navya-nyaya needs no apology to an Indianist. A great part of Indian philosophy since the thirteenth century is unintelligible without it. But more than this, I believe there is much in Navya-nyaya that will also prove of interest to the general student of philosophy and logic. I shall enumerate some points which I consider to be of such general interest, adding in parentheses references to Section II where these points are discussed in detail. First, I must admit that the list and the judgments it contains are preliminary. A general evaluation of this system of logic cannot be made until many more of its texts are translated and explained.

The metaphysical basis of Navya-nyaya is thoroughly realistic, yet its logic is a formal logic showing an unusual power of abstraction. Its realism may be seen in its dissatisfaction with the mere analysis of words. The Naiyayika always tries to push further back, to explain the relations of the things themselves. Thus his logic deals very little with propositions; it deals rather with 'knowledges', which when valid are said to represent facts as they actually are (87). Again, Navya- nyaya does not distinguish names from descriptions, it distinguishes the entities that describe from the entities described (§ 20). Occasionally this realism results in confusion (§ 42), but not often. Both realism and the power of abstraction may be seen at their extreme in the Navya-nyaya method of universalizing. Quantifiers ('all', 'some', 'any', etc.) are almost never used. The facts which we express by quantification, Navya-nyaya expresses by means of abstract proper- ties and the combination of negatives (§§ 22, 28, 32).