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empiricism gives to the Jaina conception of knowledge a remarkable power and a peculiar suitability for serving as a philosophical basis for scientific thought It need hardly be stressed at this stage that the development of science has been possible only through a simultaneous emphasis on experience as well as pure reason While the rationalistic tradition in the west going back to Plato discovered the paradigm of knowledge in mathematical reasoning, modern empiricism from Bacon onwards helped the growth of physical sciences by stressing the role of controlled observation The two streams were congruent in the matter of verification which combines reasoning as well as experience Thus it was Kant who argued that the nature of the scientific judgement lies in its being synthetic and a priori It has, on the one hand, the necessity and universality appropriate to a purely rational law Pure mathematics and logic illustrate this aspect of scientific knowledge On the other hand, scientific knowledge, and the laws it discovers, are laws of nature exhibited by reality and hence verifiable in experience, they are not merely analytical, explicating the given concepts themselves The reconciliation of these two aspects in philosophical theory has been an extremely difficult task in the history of philosophy
According to Jaina epistemology knowledge belongs to the soul but reveals itself as well as an independent reality, which may be material or immaterial By holding knowledge to be the eternal and spontaneous essence of the soul and by holding it to be self-conscious (sva-prakāśa), the Jaina view distinguishes itself from such other realistic theories as of Nyaya-Vaiśesika and Purva-Mimänsä On the other hand, it discards the representationist and idealistic theories of the Buddhist schools It also rejects the Buddhist doctrine of the radical separation of experience from thought (pramāna-vyavastha) and against this holds knowledge to be always of the nature of judgement, Vyavasaya or vikalpa There is no such thing as non-judgemental pure experience which could be condemned as 'confused', 'inadequate', or 'incommunicable' cognition Thus on the Jaina view, knowledge is self-conscious (sva-prakāśaka) and objective (para-pra
