Indian Tradition of Rationality

Abstract

The article touches upon the problem of concept “Indian tradition of rationality”. The author recalls a genetic link of the concept with Western philosophy. She notices the complexity of its application to Indian material, gives some examples in which the use of Western concepts of “reason”, “methods of cognition”, etc., leads to a distortion of the text’s meaning, and when an application of the criteria of Western logic to analysis of Indian philosophical discourse gives the readers an impression of its absurdity. However, according to the author’s mind, the difficulties with the applying of Western concepts are not the sufficient grounds to abandon them. This conclusion follows from the presence of comparative studies by researchers belonging to both traditions (for example, B.K. Matilal, J. Mohanty, A. Chakrabarti, etc.), who compare successfully Western and Indian kinds of logico-epistemological type of rationality. The difficulties just bring up the questions about new instrumental concepts and methods of comparative studies more adequate to Indian culture. There are two possible directions for the studies of Indian tradition of rationality in connection with the revision of contents of the concepts in Western post- modern philosophy. In the first of them the concept of rationality can not to be used at all, then the phenomenology of practices of Indian discourse becomes the subject of research, i.e. the discourse images in different contexts (religious, philosophical, scientific), its explicit and implicit foundations and aims, which aren’t coincide with Western ones. In the second case Indian rationality can be analyzed in accordance with the criteria of transversal reason and transversal rationality.