Which one of the following classical Indian thinkers has made this argument?
Gotama's Reasoning on Soul Qualities
The argument that qualities such as desire and cognition necessarily require an underlying substance, and thus serve as marks to identify that substance (the soul), is attributed to the classical Indian thinker Gotama.
Nyaya School's Perspective
Gotama is the founder of the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy. The Nyaya school analyzes reality through categories like substance (dravya), quality (guna), and action (karma).
- Nyaya philosophy posits that qualities like cognition (jñāna), desire (icchā), aversion (dveṣa), effort (prayatna), and feelings like pleasure (sukha) and pain (duḥkha) do not exist independently.
- These qualities inhere in a substance.
- Gotama argued that the self or soul (ātman) is the substance in which these qualities reside. Therefore, the presence of these mental states and experiences serves as an inferential mark or sign of the existence of the soul.
This reasoning connects observable qualities to the unobservable substance, the soul.
Important Questions from Religion & Indian Society
- Which school of classical Indian philosophy asserts the following?
1. It is fallacious to take any knowledge claim (jñāna) as absolute.
2. To recognize that all knowledge claims are contextually and partially true does not lead to skepticism. - Which one of the following classical Indian schools of thought do the philosophical texts Spandakārikā and Pratyabhijñāsūtra belong to?
- According to the Advaitic text Vedāntaparibhāṣā, “Those means of knowledge are six in number (tāni ca pramāṇāni ṣaṭ)”. These are:
- Which of the following options is/are included among the four states of Ātman as delineated in the Mānḍukya Upaniṣad?
- Which of the following options is/are NOT correct according to Śaiva-siddhānta?
