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IMPLICATIONS OF THE BUDDHIST-JAINA DISPUTE OVER THE FALLACIOUS EXAMPLE
IN NYAYA-BINDU AND NYAYAVATĀRĀ-VIVRTI*
Piotr Balcerowicz
From the times of Aristotle, to whom the idea seemed so obvious and natural that he eventually failed to spare anywhere in his voluminous oeuvre even a single word of explanation on it, and of Alexander, his commentator, who was the first to point out its significance explicitly, the benefits of symbolic expressions in logic, or formal logic to be more precise, have not been questioned seriously by any sane student ever since. It has been unanimously determined that the predominant idea underlying the usage of symbols in logic lies in the desire, first, to make the student 'aware, that the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely upon the laws of their combination',' and, secondly, to render "every logical proposition, whether categorical or hypothetical, capable of exact and rigorous expression', not to mention a certain amount of intellectual gratification derived from the symmetry of their analytical expression, harmony and consistency notwithstanding the simple fact that 'in the beginning the use of letters is a mystery, which seems to have no purpose except mystification. The distinct advantage of the first two requirements, that is the recognition of class and general notion as a universal point of reference and univocality in the use of names, that jointly enable us to arrive autonomously at specific universally applicable, contents and context-independent elementary laws of thought and draw valid conclusions autonomously with reference to the contents of premises, was recognised relatively early by Alexander
In the discipline (of logic), letters are used in order to make us aware, that conclusion does not depend on contents, but on (syllogistic] figures, on relation of premisses and on (syllogistic) modes, because it is not the
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