ABSTRACT
Other paradigms abound in India of the nature of philosophical inquiry and the proper work of reason. Some are familiar, for instance the instrumentalist conception of reason as promoted by Kautilya, a royal minister, strategist and educator. Others, less so. In Chapter 3, I show how the Vaisesika metaphysicians find in reason a tool for the construction of a formal ontology. A hierarchical theory of categories and natural taxonomies, alleged to be the metaphysics encoded in the Sanskrit language itself, is interpreted graphically, giving metaphysics a formal basis. The Yogacara Buddhist, Dinnaga is, by contrast, an ontological reductionist and a nominalist. He is uncompromising in his search for unity and simplicity in philosophical explanation, and he uses the method of rational reconstruction to rebuild our old conceptual superstructures on new, leaner, foundations. His system is my concern in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 concerns the Jaina philosophers, who look to reason as an instrument of harmonisation. The ancient philosophical controversies – so resistant to solution, so intractable to the up-front reasoning of debate, argument and evidence – call, it seems, for a new rationality, one whose function is to subvert the way ordinary language works, making explicit the hidden parameters in assertion, and so enabling the reasoner to harmonise apparently conflicting beliefs. The task of reason is again different in the new epistemology of the later classical writers. The problem now is whether the norms of reason can themselves be rationally justified, and the idea to be defended is that reason sustains a wide reflective equilibrium of beliefs, actions, principles and theories. It is in this way, I argue in Chapter 6, that an attempt is made to diffuse a critique of reason advanced by the formidable Advaita sceptic, Sriharsa – that reason seeks to justify itself only at the peril of a viciously infinite regress.
