In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 4 days ago.
Keywords: Buddhist epistemology , apoha , philosophy of language

Ole Holten Pind’s PhD dissertation at the University of Vienna has just been released on the university’s e-theses server and is available for download as a PDF:

“Dignāga’s Philosophy of Language: Dignāga on anyāpoha. Pramāṇasamuccaya V. Texts, Translation and Annotation”: http://othes.univie.ac.at/8283/ (374 pages, 2.4MB)

The theory of apoha, “exclusion”, is the specific contribution that Buddhist epistemologists have made to the philosophical inquiry into language (especially semantics) in ancient India, centering around the idea that words signify their referents not directly, but by excluding that which is not within their scope. (“Cow” refers to things that are not non-cows.) It is not only a theory of meaning and signification, but has served as a site for much important theorizing of the nature of concepts and how they are cognized.

Recent studies have focused on elaborations of the apoha theory after Dharmakīrti; Pind’s dissertation goes back to the sources and deals with the initial exposition of that theory by Dignāga in the fifth chapter of the latter’s Pramāṇasamuccaya and -vṛtti. Long awaited, direly needed!

Comment

This is a: snip, written by Birgit Kellner 31 days ago.
Keywords: digital tricks

Some digital archives don’t offer entire books for download, but only allow you to see one page at a time – you have to use their website to go through the book.

This is inconvenient. And especially when the books in question are in the public domain anyway, I see no reason why publicly funded digital archives should operate this way. Perhaps some users only want to look at an individual page, but why not offer a PDF (or DjVU) download in addition, for those who prefer to read offline? (Or even print?)

The workaround: find out the directory that contains the files (for instance by right-clicking on a page image on the site in your Firefox, choosing “copy image address”, and pasting into a text editor), and then run:

wget -r http://thesite.com/thedirectory/

(Oh, and install wget for your operating system in case you are so unfortunate as not to have it.)

Some sites prohibit users from downloading entire directories. But it shouldn’t be too difficult to generate a list of all the files you want, and store them in a file (say, list.txt), with one download URL per line. And then:

wget -i list.txt.

This should do the trick. But if the site is so malicious as to prohibit access through wget altogether, just pretend you are a browser:

wget -U firefox -i list.txt.

Watch the files fly to your harddrive, and enjoy.

Comment [2]

This is a: snip, written by Birgit Kellner 118 days ago.
Keywords: Indian logic

Well, it had to happen eventually. Claus Oetke, known for his rigorous analytical approach to ancient Indian philosophy (with Indian logic being his speciality), finally took one of my publications as a target of his usually very strongly voiced criticism.

Oetke has a habit of writing extensive papers or even monographs that use specific topics in Indian philosophy as a gateway to deal with wide-ranging methodological issues in the interpretation and understanding of Indian philosophy which he feels are neglected in the field of South Asian or Buddhist Studies. Typically, these publications are occasioned by him taking issue with something that other scholars wrote, and these others become the target of quite heavy criticism.

This time it happened to me. Oetke’s 83-page paper “Some Issues of Scholarly Exegesis (In Indian Philosophy)” (Journal of Indian Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/s10781-009-9072-1, available here if your library has a subscription for the journal’s online content) takes issue with a review of his monograph “Vier Studien zum Altindischen Syllogismus” (Reinbek 1994) that I wrote more than twelve years ago. The review was published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60/2 (1997), pp. 382-383. (Lest you should think that Oetke takes 83 pages to attack my meagre two – John Taber is also a target of Oetke’s criticism in these pages, though he doesn’t come off nearly as ignorant as myself.)

I haven’t had the time to read Oetke’s paper thoroughly, so I won’t comment on the quality of his arguments. Since I changed my views on many things over the past twelve years, I would probably now agree with him at least on some of the points he raises.

I feel honoured to be regarded as worthy of such fervent criticism by someone as intelligent as Oetke, one of the few real philosophers in Indological studies (where philosophers are unfortunately a rare breed), if I may add. I just wish he had taken up one of my more substantial recent articles, and not a twelve-year old two-page book review that I wrote while working on my PhD in Hiroshima, and that exhibits an over-confidence not entirely unknown among PhD candidates.

Comment [1]