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tor of his works, and Kalidas, whose sympathy with his father's philosophical thought makes him his intellectual heir.117 Philosophical reflection, he said, begins with the existence of what is given in experience. By logic we discover interpretations of the given recognized as possibilities, and from these other possibilities are derived. In the realm of possibility, which is the domain of logic, there is no affirmation. The basic logical category is negation, including double, triple, and quadruple negation, by which novel possibilities are developed, equally possible but incompatible. Any possibility may become actual, but conflict among actuals is resolved by recognizing them as alternatively actual. Possibility and actuality are themselves alternative attitudes. Underlying such dialectic is the linguistic analysis of the common structure of all possibilities, a study which analyzes the "mere forms” of semantic thought and the "pure forms of syntactic thought. Both the logical and the linguistic analyses were elaborated in an involved dialectic, but neither was systematized.
Neo-Vedanta search for the Absolute is continued in Kalidas Bhattacharyya's book Alternative Standpoints in Philosophy, 118 the lucid style of which is a refreshing contrast to that of his father's works. His philosophical thought is a continuation of his father's philosophy, but it is developed in an original way, and his epistemological subjectivism is opposed to his father's realism. The logic of alternation provides the structure of his thought. When one alternative is asserted as actual, the other alternatives are rejected or ignored or subordinated or included, and by the dialectic resulting from these processes the chosen alternative is developed to its logical conclusion. The central problem of philosophy, he says, is how knowledge of object is possible, since knowledge, the subjective feeling of an object, and object, known as not itself knowledge, are so opposed in nature that their conjunction seems contradictory. Alternative attitudes offer alternative solutions. A philosopher does not become
117 For Kalidas Bhattacharyya's recollection of these conversations five years after his father's death see my article “Contemporary Vedanta Philosophy" (Rev. of Met., 9 (1955-56), 494-96).
118 Calcutta, Das Gupta, 1953, 366 pp. The logic of alternation is applied to various problems of psychology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an earlier book Object Content and Relation (Calcutta, Das Gupta, n.d., 160 pp.) and several articles in Calcutta Review, Entretiens, K. C. Bhattacharyya Memorial Volume, Our Heritage, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy East and West, Proceedings of the Indian Philosophical Congress, The Mother, and Visvabharati Quarterly. Analysis of these works is beyond the scope of the present article.
