Jaina Logic

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: Raja Krisen Jain Charitable Trust New Delhi

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Jaina Logic
Jainism is a realistic and pluralistic philosophy. It is empiricist in outlook, although at the highest level it does emphasise the supremacy of the omniscient experience, kevala jana for the ultimate-experience of truth. But for the empirical knowledge we have to rely on logic and understanding.
Philosophy is not merely an academic persuit. It is intimately connected with life. Philosophy, it is said, begins in wonder. But philosophical speculations cannot fructify at the lower level of curiosity. Hegel said philosophy makes its first expression when experience and thought have fully matured. The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight till the evening twilight has begun to fall. Philosophy is a reflection on experience in order to comprehend the ultimate reality. As Mathew Arnold said, it is to see life steadily and to see it whole. Philosophy has had the dual function of revealing truth and increasing virtue, and philosophers have sought to provide a principle to live by and a purpose to life for
In the West, Philosophical enquiry, as academic pursuit, has proceeded in two directions:
1) The apriori rationalistic deductive methods of enquiry which were first used by Parmenides and his disciple Zeno making a distinction between sense and reason. In the middle ages philosophy was sustaining itself under the shadow of theology and Aristotle's deductive methods. Descartes and Spinoza built systems of rationalism. In Hegel and Bradley we go much further away from common sense; and we see the super structure of philosophic speculation only to gaze at the ivory tower far from the madding crowd. ii) The second course of empiricism based on inductive methods as expressed in protagorean doctrine of Homo-Mensura, led us to the Humean tendency which has been recently revived by the Cambridge Philosophers who brought philosophy to the brink of extinction. Philosophy became "Important nonsense". Philosophy, to them, is only logical analysis. It is identified with