'Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide' by Jonardon Ganeri (2021)

Well yes but hasn’t this been done ?  Indeed, for the scholar or the student but not very much for the individual seeker for whom the topic has become a live option and who wants a conspectus not a close analysis.  The assessment ‘accessible’ is the faint praise that allows rejection which is unfair to a book which lays out a program of styles of inwardness that acutely observes their differences.   That can bring illumination to doctrines which are accepted as central to the various traditions.  On that point his mentioning of Nagarjuna’s rejection of the concept of self-luminous cognition which I took to be a tenet of Buddhist epistemological theory was interesting.  He does not develop a revised view which might skew towards Vedanta; controversion and alternative theorising is not a goal.

The manifestations of  Self as multiply realised that are part of the Western tradition brings him into the domain of Kierkegaard and Passoa.  Is this simple role playing or neurotic withdrawal from commitment with faulty epistemology as a foundation?  Is it enriching elaboration?  Ganeri allows the individual palate to decide and rightly so.  No special doctrine is urged and the short chapters allow the timid to edge along the springboard.  You have for example:

Libraries Lined with memories (Augustine’s theory)

Rashomon’s Effect (perspectives and illusion)

Self-illuminating Being (Buddhist theory and Nagarjuna)

Hidden Layers Within (Passoa and his personas)

Troubles with Doubles (Kierkegaard and the aspectual self)

This is a short book running to 122 pages.  Less is more.

Professor Ganeri, Nyayasutras, Credence and Adherence

Professor Jonardon Ganeri makes it clear in his 2001 book Philosophy in India: The Proper Work of Reason that a particular focus of his work will be on the Nyayasutras with the commentary of Gotama. His paper on Epistemic Principles still has that approach. The difference is that, he there, in a broad brush way, speaks of the Nyayasutra as Indian Philosophy as though it characterised the whole of that vast subject.

Indian versions of Revelation and Oracle, for instance, were largely dismissed.

Is this the case even in the Nayasutras themselves? Here is a citation from that work that seems to bear him out.

130.The Veda is reliable like the spell and medical science, because of the reliability of their authors.

—69.The spell counteracts poison, etc., and the medical science prescribes correct remedies. The authority which belongs to them is derived from their authors, the sages, who were reliable persons. The sages themselves were reliable because
(1)they had an intuitive perception of truths,
(2) they had great kindness for living beings and
(3) they had the desire of communicating their knowledge of the truths. The authors (lit., the seers and speakers) of the Veda were also the authors of the spell and medical science. Hence like the spell and medical science the Veda must be accepted as authoritative. The view that the Veda is authoritative because eternal, is untenable.

This would appear to reduce the Veda to the same status as spell (mantra, I presume) and medicine and therefore not an eternal or apoureshya (not of human origin) truth. However in the preceding commentary the Veda is regarded as being essentially unfalsifiable and non-empirical.

120: The so called untruth in the Veda comes from some defect in the act, operator or materials of sacrifice-
-59 Defect in the act consists in sacrificing not according to rules, defect in the operator (officiating priest) consisting in his not being a learned man, and defect in the material consisting in the fuel being wet, butter being not fresh, remuneration (to the officiating priest) being small, etc., A son is sure to be produced as a result of performing the sacrifice if these defects are avoided. Therefore there is no untruth in the Veda.

The credence required by the Veda is resistant to contrary indications unlike the deliverances of a doctor which can be discovered to be unfounded and have no empirical basis. Sabda (Testimony) in this area is of a different, essentially religious, order. It requires adherence, not cool rational judgment.
**********************
At the commencement of the Agnihotra (Fire Ceremony) during Dasara the priests were having great trouble getting a fire stated using a bow drill and tinder. The materials were perfect and normally starting a fire this way is a brisk procedure. They were at it for quite a while before they gave up and asked the Guru to intervene. His answer was:
- You are thinking bad thoughts. Please clear your mind of them.
Which they did and there was a fine blaze in no time.

Ganeri on Epistemic Pluralism

Epistemic Pluralism : From Systems to Stances is the title of a paper by Jonardon Ganeri which was wafted my way courtesy of Academia.edu. Its aim is to promote the notion of pramanas i.e. means of valid knowlege, as epistemic systems. The number of pramanas accepted by the classic darshanas (views/philosophical schools) can vary from six down to one. Their names as usually translated are Perception, Inference, Comparison, Verbal Testimony, Presumption, and Non-Apprehension. As is well known these means of valid knowledge are supposed to underived and foundational. Whether the conflicting views can be viewed as stances or different ways of attaining knowledge, epistemic pluralism in other words, is the matter under discussion. That is a question well worth exploring but the problem is that Ganeri’s discussion is self sabotaged from the onset by the co-opting of Paul Boghossians categories of the activities involved in doing basic science. They are as follows:

In particular: (Observation) For any observational proposition p, if it visually seems to S that p and circumstantial conditions D obtain, then S is prima facie justified in believing p.
Deduction) If S is justified in believing p, and p fairly obviously entails q, then S is justified in believing q. (Induction) If S has often enough observed that an event of type A has been followed by an event of type B, then S is justified in believing that all events of type A will be followed by events of type B.
4
(And perhaps also Ganeri)
(Inference to the best explanation) If S justifiably believes that p, and justifiably believes that the best explanation for p is q, then S is justified in believing q.

However the superimposition of these epistemic principles or strategies on the classic pramanas as argued over by the classic darshanas ends up falsifying their nature.

Ganeri:

Indian epistemology in general is an analysis of pramanas, methods for interrogating reality, sources of warranted belief. A pramana is, more or less, what Boghossian means by an epistemic principle

Here at this point Ganeri makes what I consider to be the fundamental mistake of mapping the Boghossian system onto the Pramanas in a way which distorts them.

Their names for Observation, Deduction, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Testimony are, respectively, pratyaksa, anumana, arthapatti, and sabda. Yet they might have forgiven him, for they also discussed and disagreed among themselves whether Testimony is a fundamental or a derived epistemic principle, and they were, in general, fully cognizant of the importance of establishing a basic set of underived epistemic principles.

I would hold that he is wrong in principle and wrong in detail. ‘Observation’ is not the same as ‘Perception’/pratyaksa. An observation is a focussed form of perception. What Indian philosophers debated was the validity and nature of perception as such.
Anumana (Inference) is not deduction but more like induction or a judgment based on invariable concomitance.
Arthapatti (Presumption) is not inference to the best explanation/abduction. There is no sheaf of explanations out of which we select one. It is a simple switch. Given that he is alive, Ram is in his house or not.
Finally Sabda or Testimony is the reliance on information from a trustworthy source. Ganeri’s dismissal of Revelation (Vedas) as an accepted valid means of knowledge is not correct.

Indian versions of Revelation and Oracle, for instance, were largely dismissed.

In the closing pages of his paper Ganeri offers an egregious piece of self-stultification:

Dogmatism about the actual practices and modes of production that constituted nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European science combined with a belief in the appropriateness of the use of violence to suppress other stances to constitute the epistemic stance of European colonialism: {European Colonialism} Use the epistemic principles in accordance with the conventions of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European scientific communities, and do so dogmatically, using violence against anyone who disagrees. While it is not the case that dogmatism per se entails the endorsement of violence.

While no violence was used in the writing of this paper clearly the superimposition of Boghossian’s epistemic principles on the Pramanas leads to distortion and erosion of a significant way of grappling with the problem of knowledge.

The True Rasa of Indian Thought

The idea planted by Matilal that the theological and mystical elements of Indian thought ought to be avoided by philosophers has taken root. He himself swerves around Sankara who falls foul of the closed minded definition of what counts as philosophy in analytic circles. The bewildering fatuity of the continental/analytic divide is accepted by a large part of the Anglo-American tradition so how can they make the leap to an understanding of the interwoven elements of Indian philosophy that dares to ask: what is conceptual analysis for?

The problem is that when one attends only to the acceptable face of Indian thought what is left may be depreciated by Western logicians.

Compared with the logic of the ancient Greeks, Indian logic is not very impressive. It must be emphasized, however, that – unlike the logic of the Arabs – it developed independently of Greek though. While it may be granted that the logic of propositions may have been anticipated by some Buddhist logicians, it does not seen that much progress was made. The logic of noun expressions asserted itself more firmly, as in the five-member syllogism and its variants, but it never reached the level of Aristotle's syllogistic. The development of Indian logic was severely handicapped by the failure of its logicians to make use of variables. As a result, no logical principles could be stated directly; they had to be illustrated by standard examples or described metalinguistically (i.e. in talk about the language in which they might have been stated ). Finally, in Indian thought, logical topics were not always separated from metaphysical and epistemological topics (on the nature of being and knowledge, respectively). It must be remembered, however, that present knowledge of the development of logic in India is incomplete and that it may have to be revised in the light of future research.

( from Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th.Ed.1991 Logic, the History and Kinds Of Nicholas Rescher ed.)

Dr. Ganeri whose plea for a cosmopolitan attitude to philosophy has been circulating recently
circular
is of the Matilal lineage as it were. Following that line is evident from his introduction to the 2001 Indian Logic: A Reader in which he claims that the accentuation of the spiritual element in Vedanta is an internalisation of an orientalist attitude which neglects the logical and rationalist strain of thought. True after its fashion, I suppose, but the diabolism of it is that the focus on the analytic is also an internalised image of 'real' philosophy.

Where is the true rasa? 'Leave the pickles' I always say in my local Indian restaurant.

Hinduism by Jonardon Ganeri (from Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Religion pub. 2010)

If we were to bake a Hinduism cake what ingredients would we put into it? Clamour of bells at arati, the waving of burning camphor, pre-dawn chanting of 'asato ma, sat gamaya , yoga, the fully naked sage padding along a road with his water pot and staff, first feeding ceremony, Brahmins with thread over their ears drying off after a dip in the Ganges, the smell of the garlands in Bangalore City Market, Gita, Upanishads. I could go on but finally and ever and always – darshan, darshan of the murti, the teacher, your innermost self in meditation.

Now compare that to the alternative cake of Nyaya logic and disputations concerning the empirical foundation of the fruits of sacrifice offered by Jonardon Ganeri in his note on Hinduism in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion. Falls flat doesn't it? Not that its not an ingredient but it would take a scholar to spot it. It's the sort of hard tack that sustains but barely his lucubrations. The cause of this fallen cake is not hard to discover and its aetiology requires no acute investigation. There is an embarrassment about the relationship between Hinduism and religion, it seems more the province of mad mystics and not the detached logical explorations of the philosopher. How else will the study of Hinduism, if you accept that label, be moved from the Religious Studies Department to the more prestigious Department of Philosophy?