Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

What is rationality?

Akṣapāda Gautama's Nyāyasūtra opens with this sūtra:
pramāṇa-prameya-saṃśaya-prayojana-dṛṣṭānta-siddhānta-avayava-tarka-nirṇaya-vāda-jalpa-vitaṇḍā-hetvâbhāsa-cchala-jāti-nigrahasthānānāṃ tattva-jñānān niḥśreyasâdhigamaḥ || NyāSū 1.1.1 ||

Very, very loosely:
"Supreme happiness is obtained by the knowledge of the reality [lit., the 'that-ness'] of (1) the sources of knowledge, (2) the objects of knowledge, (3) doubt, (4) purpose, (5) example, (6) previously established principles, (7) the components of the syllogism, (8) hypothetical reasoning, (9) resolution, (10) truth-seeking debate, (11) argument for the sake of winning, (12) pointless arguing, (13) false reasons, (14) deceit, (15) sophistry, and (16) points of refutation."

Pakṣilasvāmin Vātsyāyana begins his commentary, the
Nyāyasūtrabhāṣya, by briefly defining these sixteen categories and by looking at the purpose of ānvīkṣiki, translatable as "critical inquiry", "the science of logic", or perhaps simply "rationality". He says a lot of interesting things that I will go into at a later date, but for now, I'm most intrigued by the verse with which he concludes his discussion of NyāSū 1.1.1:

pradīpaḥ sarva-vidyānām upāyaḥ sarva-karmaṇām |
āśrayaḥ sarva-dharmāṇāṃ vidyôddeśe prakīrtitā ||

Loosely:
"The lamp of all sciences, the means of all actions, the basis of all religions—[critical inquiry] in the investigation of science is laudable."

But this verse is not his own. Its origin: Chapter 2,
ānvīkṣikī-sthāpanā "The Establishment of Critical Inquiry", Book 1, vidyā-samuddeśa, "The Ascertainment of the Sciences" of the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya.


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Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”