Hinduism: Details about 'Indian Logic'

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The development of logic in Indian philosophy dates back to the analysis of inference by Aksapada Gautama, founder of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy, probably in the first or second centuries BCE, and so stands as one of the three original traditions of logic, alongside the Greek and Chinese traditions.

Contents

The Nyaya Sutras

Main article: Nyaya Sutras

Vaisheshika

Founded by Kanada, the Vaisheshika school made use of the Nyaya system of inference.

Dignaga's formalisation of inference

Dignaga's characterisation of inference by



example and by the hetucakra (Peckhaus 2004)

The new Nyaya school

Main article: Navya-Nyaya

In the 13th century, Gangesha Upadhyaya founded the Navya-Nyaya, roughly rendered as the new school of logic, which was to become the focus for a renewed vigour in the investigation of logic and philosophical analysis .

Possible influence of Indian logic on modern logic

In the late 18th century, British scholars began to take an interest in Indian philosophy and discovered the sophistication of the Indian study of inference, culminating in Henry T. Colebrooke's The Philosophy of the Hindus: On the Nyaya and Vaisesika Systems in 1824 (in Ganeri, 2001), which provided an analysis of inference and comparison to the received Aristotelian logic, resulting in the observation that the Aristotelian syllogism could not account for the Indian syllogism. Jonardon Ganeri observed that this period was the period in which George Boole and Augustus



De Morgan were making their pioneering applications of algebraic ideas to the formulation of logic, and suggested that these figures were likely to be aware of these studies in xeno-logic, and further that their acquired awareness of the shortcomings of traditional logic are likely to have stimulated their willingness to look outside the system.

As a parallel, several mathematicians have suggested an influence of Indian mathematics on the European. For example, Hermann Weyl wrote:

Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the Greek view and followed a course which seems to have originated in India and which has been transmitted, with additions, to us by the Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as logically prior to the concepts of geometry. (Weyl, 1929)

References

  • B. K. Matilal. Logic, Language, and Reality: An Introduction to Indian Philosophical Studies. Delhi, 1985.
  • B. S. Gillon. , in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998.
  • J. Ganeri, editor. Indian Logic: A Reader. Routledge Curzon, 2001
  • V. Peckhaus. . In Ivor Grattan-Guinness, editor, History of the Mathematical Sciences, 2004.
  • V. V. S. Sarma. . Proc. Bombay Logic Conference, 2005.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Indian_logic". A list of the wikipedia authors can be found here.