Oct 10, 2024

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta

Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta

Michael Thomas Williams

Hosted by Raj Balkaran

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Summary

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.

This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception.

This book is available open access here.

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Raj Balkaran

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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