Do traditional Indian philosophers ever take the stance that there are unsolved problems that they are working on? Or do they always talk as if they know the truth and here it is? @cmalcolmkeating @HistPhilosophy
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Replying to @ericlinuskaplan @HistPhilosophy
This is a really interesting question. I have a few thoughts, not well worked out. There is the way thinkers explicitly frame problems and what they are doing. So often genuine innovation occurs but in the guise of commentary which shows what X thinker "really" meant. (1/n)
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There are also often times when someone will give several options as solutions to a problem, without explicitly favoring out. This not a "I know the truth and here it is" stance, but a stance of inquiry & openness (2/n)
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Jainas are an interesting set of thinkers, too, since anekāntavāda (the view that truth/reality does not have a single nature) entails that statements should have a "syāt" (could be) attached to them, along with a relativization. (3/n)
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This stuff gets technical; there are lots of interpretations of what they mean, but one way to think of it is that for any property P for an object o, we could say o is P, o is not P, o is P & not-P, o is beyond words (bw), o is bw & P, o is bw & not-P, o is bw & notP & P (4/n)
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Finally, your question raises the issue of what counts as a "problem" for different Indian philosophers and why. These are not modern academic philosophers working on puzzles for tenure, but thinkers embedded in often religious controversy that gives rise to problems (5/n)
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This aspect can be overstated or understated, but there's something to the way in which these presuppositions impact the boundaries of problems. Which needn't mean dogmatism (there was conversion and innovation) but starting points for inquiry. (6/n)
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So, tl;dr - they don't always speak in terms of "here's the truth, voila!" in form or substance, some of them explicitly relativize truth, but I think it is interesting to consider disanalogies in how various Indian philosophers frame their projects vs. modern philosophers. (7/7)
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PS I'd be interested to hear with
@Ethan_Mills_42@elisa_freschi@NeuroYogacara@constancekassor@evantthompson@bsod_nams@SomeStingray@ProfRichardKing have to say about this question! (Obvs. feel free to ignore the tag.)4 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
If "problems" means ones admitting of "solution" via demonstration or construction, I think that may be a historically recent and idiosyncratic conception of philosophy tied to the rise of modern science.
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Replying to @evantthompson @cmalcolmkeating and
that makes sense! connected to the idea of the "Research Program"!
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