โ Scribed by J. F. Staal
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In studying a civilization different from our own we are prone to impose the conceptual framework and prejudices of our own tradition. The study of Indian logic by Western scholars, including Indian scholars who accepted certain tenets of Western logic, forms no exception. S. C. Vidyabhusana, the first historian of Indian logic, looked at his subject through eyes so colored by what he regarded as Aristotelian logic, that he talked of the 'Indian syllogism' and saw in it traces of the influence of Aristotle -a historical claim no serious student of Indian logic would nowadays wish to make his own. Moreover, like many other scholars of his generation, Vidyabhusana was not really familiar with Aristotle, but rather with what is generally called 'traditional logic', a mixture extracted from Aristotle, but enriched with the left-overs of numerous other dishes. A decade later, the great Russian pioneer of the study of Buddhist logic, Th. Stcherbatsky, adopted a Kantian framework and introduced thereby even greater confusion. For unlike Aristotle, who doubtless continues to be the greatest logician in the Western tradition, Kant was no logician, and the greatest weaknesses of his philosophy are due precisely to his ignorance of logic.
I present these remarks by way of introduction, but they should not be regarded merely as historical anecdotes. For the prejudices of Vidyabhusana and Stcherbatsky continue to affect our understanding of Indian logic. This is clear from the literature in Western languages even on such elementary notions as the concept of pak+va. This particular notion is furthermore obscured by the fact, that the term paksa is within Indian logic itself not used unambiguously. And so we witness the growth of a dense jungle of scholarship -first in Sanskrit, and next in Western languages -due to confusions around a notion that is basic and quite elementary. This paper attempts to clear some parts of that jungle.
There is no point in criticizing theories unless it is from the perspective of what one regards as the correct theory. Similarly, in order to appreciate precisely where and how some interpretations have gone wrong, we have
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