Pakṣilasvāmin's introduction to his Nyāyabhāṣyam is perhaps one of the most interesting texts of the older Nyāya indispensable to the understanding of the system. This is not because the ideas expressed therein were not to be surpassed at a later period, but because in it the development of the school appears fixed, as it were, in a "transitory moment" (transitorisches Moment), and we see there for the first time that line of thought, which historically took form in the Nyāya (...) philosophy, becoming aware of itself in a clear, though archaic, manner. Furthermore, if we bear in mind to what extent such an interpretation of a school (given by itself) determines its development, the importance of Pakṣilasvāmin's text for the history of Nyāya cannot be over-estimated. (shrink)

The publication is a commented translation and study of the work “Pakṣilasvāmin’s Introduction to his Nyāyabhāṣyam” by a prominent Austrian indologist and intercultural philosopher G.R.F. Oberhammer. The author examines the background of Oberhammer’s research, gives a brief information about the school of Nyāya and focuses on how Oberhammer demonstrates the history of Nyāya and its becoming aware of itself as a philosophical system based on the short text of Pakṣilasvāmin (Vātsyāyana) introduction to his Nyāyabhāṣyam. In his article, Oberhammer (...) answers the question why such heterogeneous parts as elements of the theory of argumentation borrowed from the ancient tradition of Vāda (the theory of debate), logic and epistemology, cosmology and the doctrine of the soul and its liberation from the bonds of saṁsāra (soteriology) were combined into the harmonious philosophical system of Nyāya and how this happened during the development of the school due to its becoming aware of itself as a method of searching for truth (and what this truth is from the point of view of Nyāya), how this was helped by creative borrowing from another philosophical school – Yoga. The publication is prefaced by a brief history of the Viennese oriental and indological school, to which Oberhammer belongs. (shrink)

Pakṣilasvāmin Vātsyāyana (c. 450 CE) is the author of the Commentary on Nyāya (Nyāya-bhāṣya), the first full commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra of Gautama (c. 150 CE), which is itself the foundational text of the school of philosophy called “Nyāya.” The Nyāya tradition is home to a number of leading voices within the classical Indian philosophical scene and is celebrated in later doxographies as one of the six “orthodox” systems of Hindu thought. Given the way that sūtra texts and their (...) first commentaries are profoundly intertwined, Vātsyāyana’s work provides a formative vision of Nyāya’s self-conception as a philosophical system as well as interpretive strategies, central lines of argumentation, and determinations of importance that later Naiyāyikas (Nyāya philosophers) often take to be as much as a given as the original text itself. Along with its sustained defense of metaphysical realism across various fronts, Nyāya is best known for its achievements in epistemology and logic, and as indicated by the title of this chapter, the lens through which we will explore Vātsyāyana’s thought is his theory of knowledge. We will give special attention to his account of the nature and importance of cognition as a guide to action and will illustrate the way in which this theme informs a number of apparently distinct elements of his project including his realism, his account of epistemic entitlement, and his notion of philosophy’s contribution to living well. (shrink)