"pakSatA" in (Navya-)NyAya

[Jogesh Panda]

Indology <INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>   I am looking for passages in NyAya literature which specify the
>   notion of "pakSatA" (i.e. being the logical subject of an
>   inference).

Examples of pre-GaGgeza discussions of pakSatA presented in a formal-ontological scheme are Udayana's KusumAJjalI [third stavaka]and MaNikaNTha's nyAyaratna.

Depending on the emphasis of your enquiry, pakSatA in its latent form can be traced to the works of Jayanta BhaTTa [nyAyamaJjarI, anumAna section]JJAnazrImitra, RantakIrti, RatnAkarazAnti and others.

In later navyanyAya, pakSatA has been discussed and commented upon by RaghunAtha, JagadIza and GadAdhara. The commenterial tradition continues to kAlizaGkara siddhAntavAgIza [kroDapatrasamgraha] and beyond.


>   Jitendranath Mohanty relates its being investigated in
>   terms of (a) presence or absence of a desire to establish the
>   probandum and (b) presence or absence of certainty regarding the
>   presence of the probandum and adduces the SiddhAntamuktAvalI as
>   textual support ("Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought", Oxford
>   1992: Clarendon Press, pp.102ff.).
>   What interests me in particular is the idea (according to Mohanty)
>   that inference in some cases takes place WITHOUT uncertainty and
>   WITHOUT the desire to establish the probandum, as for instance when
>   the presence of a raincloud is spontaneously inferred from hearing
>   thunder.
>





The point of your interest in pakSatA  and the example you quote from Mohanty [as discussed in siddhAntamuktAvalI] seem to me to be different from the Navya variety of pakSatA. This concept or notion of pakSatA is an approximation of the old nyAya category of sAmAnyatodRSTa anumAna. I do not have the Mohanty book with me, so cannot comment further on this point. Prof. Mohanty is knowledgeable, so I need to know the context in which he uses the siddhAntamuktAvalI to be able to talk about it. But I would like to offer a general caution regarding siddhAntamuktAvalI used as an example of NavyanyAya. This work is a revisionist approach to the Navya variety of nyAya [claasical nyAya updated with navya terminologies,and navyanyAya understood according to the concepts of classical nyAya].

Best wishes,

Jogesh Panda


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