CONTENTS
Chronology ix
Principal Philosophers Discussed xi
Map xiii
Introduction 1
Part I. India Expanding 11
1 The World and India: 1656 13
Francois Bernier and his pandit 13
The public profile of the 'new reason' 16
2 Dara Shukoh: A Spacious Islam 22
Migrating texts 22
Translating Sanskrit into Persian 23
A religious cosmopolitanism 24
Meeting of two oceans 26
Another affinity 28
3 The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yasovijaya Gani 31
Studying the 'new reason' in VaranasI 32
Secular intellectual values 33
Reflections on the self 35
Yasovijaya and Dara Shukoh: a cosmopolitan ideal 36
4 Navadvipa: A Place of Hindu-Muslim Confluence in Bengal 39
A Bengali sultanate independent ot Delhi 40
The curious biography of a teacher 41
Raghunatha Siromani (c. 1460-1540) 44
The final years of Navadvipa 51
Part II. Text and Method 61
5 Contextualism in The Study of Indian Philosophical Literature 63
Quentin Skinner and perfonnative speech-acts 63
Intertextual intervention 65
Prolepsis and anticipation 68
Cultural indexicals 70
Immersion and Indian intellectual practice 72
6 Philosophers outside Academies: Networks 74
The new reason and the court of Akbar 75
A less embedded network 79
A Navadvipa-based network 81
Rivalry over Raghunatha 84
New developments in NavadvTpa 85
7 An Analysis of the New Reason's Literary Artefacts 89
Commentaries 91
Internal critiques of Vaisesika metaphysics 95
Research monographs 96
Manuals for new students 98
8 Commentary and Creativity 102
Commentary as mediating a conversation with the past 102
Towards a typology of commentary 104
Commentary as weaving a text 107
The singly authored principles-and-gloss text 112
Part III. The Possibility of Inquiry 117
9 Inquiry: The History of a Crisis 119
Inquiry in the knowledge disciplines 119
Inquiry in early Nyaya 122
Ways of gaining knowledge 125
Sriharsa's 'refutations' 127
10 Challenge From the Ritualists 131
Scepticism and truth in the Gemstone 131
Two models of inquiry 135
An intrinsicist theory of error in action 139
Knowing naturalized 142
11 Interventions in a New Research Programme 145
Difficulties in Garigesa's theory 145
The Precious Jewel of Reason: a genealogical state-of-research review 147
Self-conscious modernities 149
The weight of evidence 153
A method for rightly conducting reason in the Garland of Principles 157
Part IV. The Real World 163
12 Realism in Question 165
The reach of Vaisesika realism 165
Realism and reference 168
Grades of existence 170
Epistemic constraints on the concept of truth 172
'Whatever is, is knowable and nameable' 175
Realism and reduction 179
13 New Foundations in the Metaphysics of Mathematics 181
Mathematics and the philosophical theory of number 181
Counting and construction 182
Numbers as properties of objects 187
Indefinite pluralities 191
Raghunatha's non-reductive realism 194
14 Metaphysics in a Different Key 200
Raghunatha's challenge 200
Naturalism and reductionism in the Essence of Reason 201
Escaping the oscillation between eliminativism and non-reductivism 206
The Garland of Categories: naturalism and reduction 211
Mechanical philosophy in the Garland of Categories'? 214
Part V. A New Language for Philosophy 221
15 The Technical Language Assessed 223
The importance of disambiguation 224
The syntax of the formal system 226
A semantics for the language 228
Reparsing ordinary language 230
The new language and the predicate calculus 232
16 Rival Logics of Domain Restriction 237
Analysis from Buddhist sources 238
The early modern theory: a unified account 240
Conclusion 244
Recommended Further Readings 252
Bibliography 254
Index 279