ABSTRACT
Nyāya philosophers forged a theory of consciousness that remains instructive for modern debates in the philosophy of mind. Resisting Sāṃkhya dualism as well as Cārvāka materialism, Naiyāyikas argued awareness could only be produced through contact between physical objects or inner feeling and mental states, the sense organs and the self, making embodiment a necessary condition of consciousness. Their framework insisted that we become aware of our own conscious states because of directly accessed first-person experiences. This theory cannot be characterized according to modern Western categories in the philosophy of mind, such as dualism, reductionism, or emergentism. Instead Nyāya makes it possible to understand consciousness through experiential, analytical and causal approaches.
