Mark Siderits on Anumāna

Abstract

AbstractIn his "Deductive, Inductive, Both, or Neither" Siderits claimed that in the earliest stratum of Indian thought there existed an implicit idea of pervasion and that Dignāga did not make any contribution to the new development of Indian logic by his theory of pervasion of a proving property (or reason) by a target property to be proven. In this paper I demonstrated that Dignāga indeed developed a new phase of Indian logic by his theory of pervasion that had not been known by his predecessors, by showing that the proof formulae Siderits presented did not actually come from what he thinks the earliest stratum of Indian thought but from the later Indian logicians' works that had been under the great influence of Dignāga's systme of logic. I also analyzed some basic terminology of Dignāga's logic such as pakṣa, sapakṣa and asapakṣa and presented the basic structure of his proof formulae.”