Bimal Krishna Matilal Quotes
Bimal Krishna Matilal was an Indian philosopher and Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford, widely credited with putting classical Indian philosophy onto the agenda of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Navya-Nyaya Doctrine of Negation, Logic, Language and Reality, and Perception developed sustained comparisons between the technical Indian schools of Nyaya and Mimamsa and the work of Frege, Russell, and Quine, showing that Indian philosophers had grappled with cognate problems in their own technical idiom. The quotes below are attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal, organized by topic.
Bimal Krishna Matilal on Knowledge
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Attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal:
“Indian philosophy is not a body of doctrine; it is a tradition of argument.”
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Attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal:
“The Nyaya theory of perception is not folk psychology; it is rigorous epistemology.”
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Attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal:
“There is no comparative philosophy without close translation.”
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Attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal:
“Logic is universal, but its expressions are local.”
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“Central Philosophy of Jainism (1981), p. 2”
A metaphysical thesis of a particular school is usually rejected by a rival school which puts forward a (directly or indirectly) contradictory thesis. Jainism says that the lesson to be drawn from such age-old philosophic disputes is the following: Each school asserts its thesis and claims it to be the absolute truth, and thus it does not really wish to understand the point that is being made by t
Bimal Krishna Matilal on Virtue
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Attributed to Bimal Krishna Matilal:
“Dharma in the Mahabharata is not a code; it is the ongoing question of what the right thing to do is, in a world that does not arrange itself for us.”