ABSTRACT
In this Chapter, Elisa Freschi focusses on the work of Veṅkaṭanātha (c.1269–1370), who is the main systematiser of the so-called Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta school. He engaged with a huge range of different philosophical and religious schools and attempted a new synthesis of them. This Chapter investigates whether he used different dialogical structures to deal with different types of discussants and analyses his motivations for using the one or the other approach. The first step consists in noticing that there are no visible distinctions among living discussants and ones which are no longer an actual threat: there is nothing in his style which would make an external observer be able to understand whether he is discussing a living discussant or not. Next, Veṅkaṭanātha defined vāda as a dialogue aimed at the establishment of the truth and he remained faithful to this definition, since he deeply engaged in discussions, without ending them abruptly with ad hominem attacks, paralogisms and not even appeals to authority. This is particularly evident in the case of his engaging with Mīmāṃsā authors, where he entered the Mīmāṃsā arena and argued using Mīmāṃsā principles in exactly the same style found in Mīmāṃsā texts, until a shared conclusion was reached. One might imagine that he was convinced of the ability to produce arguments palatable not only to Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedāntins, but also to Mīmāṃsakas. Last, Freschi analyses Veṅkaṭanātha’s use of quotations from authoritative texts: are they only supporting an independent argument, or are they rather meant to work as independent evidence in their own right?
