Jaina Theories of Reality and Knowledge

SR No.: 001608
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Y J Padmarajiah
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal
Publication Year: 1963
Total Pages: 444
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, Epistemology, & Anekantvad
File Size: 23 MB

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CHAPTER IX
an important one too. Where is the harm of my believing that if, in this severe weather, I were to neglect to throw (what you call) the idea of a coat over the ideas of my shoulders, the idea of cold would produce the idea of such pain and disorder that might possibly terminate in my real death?" A Study in Realism (John Laird, C. U. P., 1920, Cambridge), p. 63.
Repudiating the claim that the Modern Einsteinian Theory of Relativity supports idealism, Russell writes under the heading 'Realism in Relativity'; "It is a mistake to suppose that relativity adopts an idealistic picture of the world-using 'idealism' in the technical sense, in which it implies that there can be nothing which is not experience. The observer who is often mentioned in expositions of relativity need not be a mind, but may be a photographic plate or any kind of recording instrument. The fundamental assumption of relativity is realistic, namely, that these respects in which all observers agree when they record a given phenomenon may be regarded as objective, and not as contributed by the observers." Bertrand Russell on 'Relativity', Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., The Univ. of Chicago, 1950. See also his The A. B. C. of Relativity (London, 1925), pp. 219-20.
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Max Born, the great theoretical physicist, also offers a similar vindication of the 'reality' of the pre-existing external material world. This is done in answer to Herbert Dingle's thesis. Dingle puts to himself the fundamental question, viz. "What exactly is it that physicists are doing?" The answer: "That can be answered satisfactorily only in terms of experience, not of the external world." In his reply to Dingle, Max Born describes the former's viewpoint as standpoint of extreme subjectivism" or "physical solipsism" and endeavours to restore, by means of several technical and lay arguments, common sense to the relativistic, quantum, (for an unequivocal support of Max Plank to an external world "which is 'independent of ourselves', something absolute that we are facing..." see Albert Einstein: Philosopher-scientist, 2nd ed., ed. P. A. Schilpp, New York, 1951, p. 136 f.) and other theories of science and, thereby, to philosophy. (Vide H. Dingle's lecture to the British Association, 1951, on "Philosophy and Physics", 1850-1950, in Nature (London), Vol. 168, pp. 63036, especially p. 634, para 2, and Max Born's article on "Physical Reality" in the Philosophical Quarterly (ed. T. M. Knox), Vol. III No. 11 for April 1953, pp. 139-149.) A. P. Ushenko is
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