In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 215 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!