ABSTRACT
What grants the phenomenal world its factuality? What propels a person to consider what appears before his or her own eyes to be a fact? According to K.C. Bhattacharyya, feeling plays a pivotal role in our prevailing perception of the world as factual. This chapter focuses on Bhattacharyya’s reflections on Śaṅkara’s doctrine of māyā (illusion). Bhattacharyya takes the classical Indian concept of māyā as an invitation to analyze the experience of illusion. He directs his careful attention at the Advaita Vedānta notion that the phenomenal world is neither an objective nor a subjective fact. Contemplating the famous snake-rope illustration, Bhattacharyya claims that the most curious element in the experience of mistaking a rope for a snake is the apparent givenness of the illusory snake. Even after dispelling the epistemic error that led one to believe a rope is a snake, the feeling that a real snake was perceived continues to linger. For Bhattacharyya, this lingering feeling reveals that even if a certain object, or the world as a whole, turns out to be an illusion, we still consider it a fact because of how it moves us, how it affects us. In this sense, the phenomenal world is not an epistemic fact but first and foremost an affective or felt fact.
