Philosopher
Gaṅgeśa
fl. 1300–1350
Also known as Gangesha, Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya
Logician of the Nyāya school whose Jewel founded “New Nyāya” (Navya-Nyāya), the standard technical language of Indian philosophical argument for centuries.
Gaṅgeśa lived in the first half of the fourteenth century in Mithilā, in north-eastern India, where he was a prominent teacher of Nyāya, the classical Indian school of logic, and of Mīmāṃsā. His masterpiece, the Tattvacintāmaṇi or “Jewel”, consolidated centuries of advances in the theory of knowledge and logic within Nyāya, and drew in much of the ontology of its sister school, Vaiśeṣika.
It is traditionally taken to mark the start of “New Nyāya” (Navya-Nyāya), whose precise technical language went on to shape philosophical argument across many Indian schools.
Key ideas
- Reliable sources of knowledge
- Perception, inference, analogy and testimony, working properly, produce only true awareness. When we’re fooled, it’s by flawed “pseudo-sources” that closely resemble the real ones.
- Doubt refuted by action
- Scepticism can be answered by “pragmatic contradiction”. No one can regularly turn to fire in order to make smoke and at the same time doubt that fire causes smoke.
- Pervasion (vyāpti)
- Inference rests on natural relations of “pervasion”, in which the presence of one property, such as smoke, proves the presence of another, such as fire. Gaṅgeśa rejected twenty-four attempts to define pervasion before giving his own.
- Testimony as its own source
- Knowledge from what others tell us is a distinct source of knowledge, not a kind of inference. Against Buddhist sceptics, Gaṅgeśa argued that true testimony can be told apart from error by the way it is produced.
- Tradition
- Indian
- Region
- Mithilā, north-eastern India
- Themes
- Knowledge and scepticism
Key works
- The Jewel (Tattvacintāmaṇi)
Sources
- Stephen Phillips, Gaṅgeśa, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy