Nyaya And Jaina Epistemology

Author(s): Kokila H Shah
Publisher: Sharadaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

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NYAYA AND JAINA EPISTEMOLOGY
superstitiously into his philosophy. Everything is idea, of course, but the idea imprinted on the senses are not mere ideas of our own, like imagination but are presentations. However, Buddhists were atheists and, therefore, there was no question of these philosophers following such a line of argument. Rather they thought that since ideas alone were real, the world of experience was unreal like ‘city of the Gāndharvas'.
Thus, idealism as an epistemological theory maintains that what appears in our cognition has no objective status. That is, phenomena have no objective reality and they are merely subjective ideas. This is, because according to idealism the world-show is nothing but a manifestation of consciousness and has no reality apart from consciousness. Berkeley had to appeal to God to save idealism from slipping into subjectivism. But the Indian idealists, in fact, amounted to this position. They showed a marked tendency to establish the primacy of the spirit by proving the unreality of material world. This tendency was carried to its extreme by some schools of Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta. Both argued that phenomenal world has no intrinsic reality. Moreover, they also argued that since the world was unreal and since the socalled sources of our valid cognition pretended to present it as something real, these were to be considered as invalid and false. Thus, it means the doctrine of intrinsic falsity of knowledge is logically the position of all the Indian idealists. Since the extreme form of Idealism does not recognize any extramental reality the corollary is that all means of knowledge because of their pretentious claim to reveal extramental are to be treated as false.
Idealism has been one of the most dominant phases of Indian philosophy. Epistemologically, the conclusion that