Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking.

• Author: Potter, Karl H.

Mohanty tells us that this is the first of a projected pair of books: this one deals with what he terms "theoretical reason," while the second, to come, will discuss "practical and aesthetic reason in Indian thought." Although portions of the present volume stem from earlier papers read and/or published, by and large this is a fresh attack on some of the most central, important topics broached in classical Indian philosophy. There can hardly be anyone more qualified to lead the attack than Mohanty.

The author's main concern in this volume, as with an important segment of his previous philosophical output, is with what in Sanskrit are called praminas, a term here translated as means of true cognition." Standard candidates for being pramanas include perception, inference, and language. Mohanty does not say much about perception, but he has here chapters on logic and language, and favors treating as well memory, history, and mathematics as independent pramanas, since they "lead to the establishment of beliefs (or theories) as true." The assumption here, which is standard, is that the Western concept of truth is also found in the Indian tradition, so that a pramana is what provides an accurate account of what is real. I have argued elsewhere(1) that the term prama may only indicate what is warrantedly assertible; if so, following Mohanty, memory, history and mathematics may be judged to be pramanas without their having to be admitted as conveying truth, since they do not always provide an accurate...