A workshop on Indian logic and epistemology

Modern formalisms for Pre-modern Indian logic and epistemology – interdisciplinary workshop, Hamburg, 04.-06.06.2010

On the past weekend a worshop on classical Indian logic and epistemology took place at the University of Hamburg which was convened by the Asien-Afrika-Institut (AAI) and the Department of Mathematics and was sponsored by the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences (MIN). The event brought together a bunch of experts from different fields of Classical Indian philology as well as of Logic. In the experimental nature of this gathering the organizers of the workshop saw a chance to generate a new momentum for the research of both involved disciplines could benefit from – the, let’s call it “western tradition” of research in logics has great interest to get also into the Old Indian philosophical systems which requires the cooperation of philologists while Indology naturally has limits to interpret the old texts also in regards to the latest research in fundamental exact sciences (I hope this is the right term) and could also benefit from an exchange. I think the conference indeed brought a lot interesting insights from each the other discipline and I would say everyone would agree that such a cooperation couldn’t be other than fruitful for both sciences, Indology could gain an advance in legitimation (things like Buddhist logic in the latest generation of Blue Ray players could be ultimate fundraisers) while the modern systems of logic and epistemology have the chance to get new challenging objects from the extremely rich and deep Indian culture for developing themselves. That concepts like the differentiation of research and subject matter as well as the notion of “the modern age” and its advance dissolves under this approach is another issue which for me this workshop brought up again.

If at all possible to group the contributions that took place completely, to begin with that a large part of the conference was dedicated to the field of research in Jainism, namely the presentations of Piotr Balcerowicz (Warsaw), Melanie Barbato (Munich) and Marie-Hélène Gorisse (Lille). Needles to say, Jainism definitely plays an important role in the history of Indian philosophy and so philosophical resp. logical or epistemological concepts also from that tradition like the saptabhaṅgī, the “sevenfold predication” and the anekantavāda doctrine of the immanent multiplicity of viewpoints are challenging objects in order to penetrate them throughout. Also the lectures on Buddhism have managed to problematize significantly the things that are to be found in this philosophy. So Birgit Kellner (Heidelberg) spoke about the cognitive predicated in the inferences from non-perception in the works of the Pramāṇa scholar Dharmakīrti (approx. 600-660 AD), while other lectures were dedicated to the Madhyamaka teacher Nāgārjuna (approx. 150-200 AD) – namely the ones of Laurent Keiff (Lille) and Graham Priest (Melbourne). Priest spoke about the problems of penetrating the catuṣkoṭi as it is implied in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās formally adequately in terms of paraconsistent logics which demonstrated how challenging Old Indian philosophy could be even for the most advanced in “modern” non-classical logic.* The necessity of such an approach was confirmed also by the presentation of Sara Uckelman (Amsterdam), who is researching into Medieval logics and the challenge of their modelling. The pre-modern Indian logic shows certain similarities to that tradition which also is very challenging to understand them in terms of modern formal logic: some medieval systems need to be described with – again – even the latest contemporary science like Dynamic epistemic logic, Dialogical logic, etc. Finally, the talks of Claus Oetke (Stockholm) and Klaus Glashoff (Lugano) even deepened some the problems of modelling resp. formalization Classical Indian logic, while Wilfrid Hodges‘ (London) talk about the Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical comments on and additions to Aristoteles broadened the historical logic as it was already presented in the workshop – all that here only to highlight a very few of what was presented.

A few slides and presentations already appeared on the page of the workshop and hopefully more are going to be found here soon. At the end of the conference it was attempted to establish further forms of cooperation and from events such as this may even some mixed projects may result. The organizers would like to see the workshop to be in a number of other events like this and hopefully some of the issue which were raised here are going to be further discussed.

* See L.R. Horn’s article on Contradiction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The term “classical modern logic” denotes the systems up to Modal logic and PWS. On Non-classical logic see Priest’s An introduction to non-classical logic. 2nd edition. Cambridge (usw.): University Press 2008 (on FDE see chapter 22).