Philosophy East and West

In Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box, Jessica Frazier has brought together an impressive array of scholars who have contributed nine essays, plus an introductory and concluding chapter, both written by her, which collectively provide a most fruitful perspective for examining classical South Asian traditions of thought. Creating categorial frameworks was certainly a prolific activity among the ancient and medieval authors of the darśanas, and indeed these authors drew heavily from pre-scholastic texts and language to build their systems. Frazier in her concluding chapter gives a helpful synopsis of the various roles played by categories in Indian philosophies, classifying them as “semantic, modal, qualitative, mereological and teleological,” as these roles contributed to explanations of everything from the cosmological order to justifying certain practical or spiritual goals to solidifying the identity of the communities devoted to them (p. 160). However, as she reminds us, [End Page 655] there were also internal critiques of the entire categorization process forwarded by various movements for various reasons. And while Frazier occasionally invokes more recent Western reflective paradigms for understanding the human, and not world-dictated, functions of categories, offered by such figures as George Lakoff, Mary Douglas, and Peter Berger, she also reminds us that cross-cultural philosophical exploration can also helpfully prompt us to reexamine the ways in which we have become accustomed to cutting up the world (p. 160). The contributions to the volume illustrate all of this well.

A third of the collection’s essays address issues of how categorial systems of different schools were applied to analyses of the natural order and epistemology. Stephen Phillips’s “Pramāṇas (Knowledge Generators) as Natural Kinds,” teases out the significance of how classical Brāhmiṇical logicians went about identifying certain kinds of cognitions as reliable producers of knowledge. Since, after all, different philosophical systems employ variant sets of padàrtha or “categories,” resolving doubts about which set is the most reliable depends upon our ability to garner knowledge in the first place (p. 29). After recalling the basic Naiyāyika principle that one becomes aware of cognitions through the apperception of subsequent cognitions, Phillips argues that the apperceiving cognitions are able to identify knowledge-bearing cognitions because the latter are “quasi-universals” or “natural kinds” (p. 33). They are so because they are characterized by certain continuous properties (anugama pratyaya), perception always exhibiting sense-organ contact with an object, inference always exhibiting an invariant relation between a present and postulated property, and so on (p. 34). These recurrent properties are not to be found in other kinds of cognitions that fail to confer knowledge, such as perceptual illusion or invalid inferences. And so, for Nyāya, pramânas are a particularly important fundamental categorial scheme, as they help us sort out the viability of other philosophical categories.

Two other contributions to the volume take up how seven basic categories are treated in Vaiśeṣika, an especially apt number given the centrality of enumerating and defining the padàrtha of nature in this system. Shashiprabha Kumar shows both how these categories—namely substance, quality, action, universality, particularity, inherence, and absence—were arrived at through a prolonged intellectual effort of subsumption and subclassification of other candidate categories (pp. 90, 94-97). This process not only demonstrates the “rationalistic” inclinations and “pluralistic realism” of the Vaiśeṣikas, but also is thematized by them as the means to attaining the ultimate good for human life, which is distinguishing dharma from adharma (pp. 98, 93).

For his part, Jonardon Ganeri questions the degree to which the Vaiśeṣika categories can serve to underwrite its preferred kind of realism, a realism that strives toward a systematic classification of being whose accuracy is not parasitic on the human interpretive efforts involved in the classification (p. 101). Reminding us of the etymology of the term padàrtha as being “the object for which a word stands,” Ganeri attempts to...