Epistemology of Perception: Gangesa's Tattvacintamani, Jewel Of Reflection On The Truth (About Epistemology): The Perception Chapter (Pratyaksa-khanda) Transliterated Text, Translation, and Philosophical Commentary.

• Author: Ganeri, Jonardon

Epistemology of Perception: Gangesa's Tattvacintamani, Jewel Of Reflection On The Truth (About Epistemology): The Perception Chapter (Pratyaksa-khanda) Transliterated Text, Translation, and Philosophical Commentary. By STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS AND N. S. RAMANUJA TATACHARYA. Treasury of the Indic Sciences. New York: AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF BUDDHIST STUDIES. 2004. Pp. xiv + 723. $62.

This book is the first full translation of the first chapter of one of the most important and influential Sanskrit works in Indian philosophy. The result of a collaboration between two of the world's leading experts on Gahgesa, it is a monumental and momentous achievement, one whose importance cannot be understated. Without doubt, it will add enormous impetus to the contemporary study of Navya Nyaya, the philosophical system Gangesa established, a system that dominated the Indian philosophical world for several centuries in the middle of the last millennium.

Ganges'a's Tattvacintamani is made up of four chapters, one for each of the four sources of knowledge (pramana) recognised in Nyaya philosophy. A great deal of both classical and modern scholarship in Nyaya Nyaya is dominated by the commentarial literature on the second chapter, which deals with inference. This is perhaps a pity, for the chapters on perception and on language are extremely rich and challenging works in their own right. The perception chapter, for instance, treats a host of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind as they bear upon the nature of perceptual awareness and perceptual knowledge. Prefaced with a treatment of "auspicious performance" (mangala), it is divided into the following sections: knowing veridicality, production of veridical cognition, characterizing veridical awareness, perceptual presentation of something as other than what it is, characterizing perception, sensory connection, inherence, non-cognition, absence, the connection of the sense object and light, the perceptibility of air, the fiery character of gold, the mind's atomicity, apperception, indeterminate perception, qualifiers versus indicators, and, finally, determinate perception.

The present work contains, in addition to the text itself in transliteration (largely following the Tirupati edition, but cross-referred to the Calcutta) and a translation of the text, an extensive paragraph-by-paragraph "philosophical commentary" and an introduction that sets out Gariges'a's system in broad outline. It was not the intention of the authors to prepare a critical edition of the text, although it is certainly to be hoped that a critical edition of a text of such importance will, one day, be produced. They do, however, construct the text in the light of their understanding of its content, and so assert that their "transliterated text is an edition distinct from the Tirupati edition, representing how Ramanuja Tatacharya and I [Stephen Phillips] read Ganges'a" (p. 6). They have made editorial decisions about how to parse the text into discourse segments--for example, in identifying purvapaksas ans siddhantans--and they have adopted interpretative principles of intelligibility, readability, and charity, so that, in particular, they "interpret a philosopher as trying, in any particular instance, to say something true and warranted as well as coherent with his or her overall view" (p. 5).

Some portions of the present text have been translated before. Jitendranath Mohanty's Gangesa's Theory of Truth (Santiniketan, 1966) was a pioneering and extremely influential translation and philosophical study of the "Knowing veridicality" section. In comparison with that work, the present book is distinctive in consciously making less use of the traditional commentaries, for "[i]t is commonly acknowledged ... that the classical commentators sometimes overinterpret Gangesa's questions. Much in their long discussions is innovative philosophically" (p. 73). The new translation differs from Mohanty's classic in two chief respects: it construes the term prama as "veridical" rather than as "true" (or, as Karl Potter has suggested, "workable"); and it takes issue with Mohanty's understanding of the term prathamam as indicating a discussion of the problem of knowing for the first time a la Meno, rather than as of knowing in unfamiliar circumstances (pp. 102-5, 699). Another section of the present text, "Absence," was translated by Bimal Krishna Matilal, forming the basis of his important work, The Navya-Nyaya Doctrine of Negation (Harvard, 1968), a book that remains, along with Daniel Ingalls' Materials for the Study of Navya-Nyaya Logic (Harvard, 1951), indispensable to the modern study of Navya Nyaya. Matilal too made much more use of the traditional commentaries than the present work wants to. He also made much more use of the vocabulary of contemporary analytical philosophy, which led him, say the authors of the work under review, to "fail to do justice to Gahgesa's objectivism and realism" (p. 704)...