As I was finishing my master’s project work in logic, I was increasingly allured by the possibility of visiting Nabadwip, the erstwhile centre of Nyāya in India. Navya-Nyāya authors of the highest capacity functioned out of the area, with many of these philosophers owning large swaths of land as well as ṭols in the regions of Nabadwip and its neighbours of Santipur and Krishnanagar, all in the Nadia region. Indeed, it was a wellspring of the most interesting technical debates in Nyāya.

Travelling through Nabadwip, I was initially struck by the narrowness of the lanes. The exquisitely slender streets and the rather large pedestrian population make travel on foot or two-wheelers preferable to even totos. The arch at the entrance to the town announces the beginning of this urban landscape with its dense maze-like spatial organisation, which also paradoxically possesses a unique directionality pointing past the banks of Hooghly towards Mayapur, the more popular tourist destination made clear by the unequal saturation of ferry passengers to and fro across the Hooghly.

The second attempt is perhaps one of the most natural ways to read negation. It is based on the historical contributions of Dharmakīrti and Dharmottara1. Cognition A consists of a negation. The Dharmakīrtians draw a distinction between two kinds of negation: implicative and non-implicative. This distinction is not special to them, for the Mīmāṃsakas and the Madhyāmika also hold it, although for other reasons. Suppose I say, ‘The floor is not blue’.

The third attempt I present here is owing to the creative thought of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya. KC Bhattacharyya contends that absence cognitions involve the imagination. A striking passage from Gaṅgeśa is perhaps the best place to start this train of thought1: If you say that what is meant by absence [of x] is a cognition of a mere locus [say, y] arising upon remembrance of a counterpositive [viz., x], then a cognition of a mere locus such as a man has in darkness, etc.

Perhaps the most direct way to interpret absences, in particular cognition A, is to interpret it as an expression of a negative fact about the world. This attempt is bolstered by the historical contributions of Gaṅgeśa1 and Kumārila2. Cognition A merely is an expression of the negative fact (namely that there is an absence of Nyāya in Nabadwip) as grasped by perception or perhaps some other method. My experience of the city has, as a part, the counterpositive of the absence, i.

Three Phases of Comparative Philosophy 🔗Comparative philosophy as a self-conscious academic project has existed for the good part of a 150 years now. Ralph Weber and Arindam Chakrabarti place present comparative philosophy in its third phase1, ‘a critical conjuncture between universalism and localism’, after its first two phases, universalism and localism. How is this critical conjuncture different from the former stages? How can we understand historical encounters of world philosophy in light of these stages?