Ep. 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 270 is something like is intelligence needed for the creation of the world? We're discussing the new book God and the World's Arrangement, which presents passages from the Nyaya Sutra and the Brahma Sutra, with commentary by the 8th century philosopher Shankara and the 10 century philosopher Vachaspati Mishra, as well as some of their opponents, all collected, translated and explained by Nirmalya Guha, Matthew Dasti, and our very special guest on this episode, Stephen Phillips. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, not to be dismissed like a lion replica.

0:48 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, unconscious but not sure he possesses action, although he's connected to an insentient body. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan,

0:58 Wes: neither all pervasive nor infinitesimal, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:03 Mark: And welcome, Stephen.

1:05 Stephen: Yes, sir, glad to be here.

1:07 Mark: Where are you calling from? You're still teaching at ut, right?

1:09 Stephen: No, I retired, so this is my first year of full retirement. Fortunately, I avoided the Zoom transition. I know my colleagues had to work very hard to broadcast their classes, give exams, et cetera, by Zoom. And I retired just before the pandemic hit.

1:31 Seth: So I have to ask, you were a professor when we were there. So if you just retired this year, does that mean you did about 75 years at UT, something like that?

1:44 Stephen: No, I think I spent 38 years.

1:46 Seth: Wow.

1:46 Stephen: At UT. Now I'm living in New Mexico, where we're shifting, my wife and I. We still have a house outside of Austin.

1:54 Mark: This does have a personal connection for me and no doubt for Wes, that is the very first thing that when we started in graduate school at UT is we were graders. Not even TAs. They didn't let us actually talk to the students, but we were graders for you for your Intro to World Philosophy class. And so.

2:11 Stephen: Oh, I see.

2:12 Mark: And the very first.

2:13 Stephen: I'm sorry, it all runs together for me. I don't remember you in particular.

2:19 Mark: Well, this was 1994, and the very first assignment, I believe, that you gave to folks was Udayana, a slightly later figure than the ones we're talking about, but within one of the same traditions.

2:31 Stephen: Who gave an argument for the existence of Ishvara, God.

2:35 Mark: Yes. So it's something like. I remember like a pot being in there and all these undergrads having to. That God must have been the Creator. Because the things of the world are produced like a pot. And that was just about it. It was just about those two sentences. And they were asked to write a couple pages. And so, Wes. Right, that was our introduction to you remember this the same way I do, Wes, that this was like the first thing.

2:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I remember being a grader.

3:02 Stephen: So you were also a grader, I see.

3:04 Wes: Yeah.

3:05 Mark: Yes. For the same class. Yep.

3:06 Stephen: Gosh, I gave that course up. I got tired of teaching it because it was just too broad. I mean, I love teaching Confucius, but having to range so broadly over so many times and places, I thought it was just too superficial. And so I stopped teaching that course. But it was successful for 10 years or so, maybe 15.

3:29 Mark: Well, what we are clearly not getting there is all the context that we got out of your little book this time. The fact that we're talking about two, really three of these Sutra schools from starting around like 300 BC through the figures that we're covering, so 800, 900, and just getting those two sentences like, okay, well, why are we doing this as world philosophy? Like, there's Western versions of that same argument from design, but with all these assumptions from the milieu at the time, it really means something quite different. Of what? Saying that the world is a product?

4:05 Stephen: Well, yes. And also you were probably in that course. We only talked about Udayana and his arguments. The best of which, by the way, I call a criteriological argument. It's really neat. It has to do with teaching God is the original teacher. Where did you learn the things that you know? Well, you learned it from your teacher. Where did your teachers learn it? And then the objection is people can innovate. They don't have to learn from their teachers. And then I guess it's a Hindu view of God. The response Udayana gives is, well, when people innovate, they're channeling the Lord and God is responsible for all creativity and it's ongoing.

That was kind of the best one. But we're not doing that one today. We're doing from the very beginning the old ones. And also another thing we're doing today, or at least in the book that we're focused upon, is the Vedanta philosophy of religion. Vedanta is not famous for its rational theology, but personally, I think Shankara and his follower Vachaspati should be better appreciated for their contributions within the Vedanta camp. I mean, they make of them within the Vedanta camp. But they're very interesting. The points they make. As you mentioned, there are really three schools, not just Nyaya and Vedanta, but also Sankhya, which is a much more minor school, just to judge by the volume of texts produced over the years.

But Sankhya is particularly interesting in the modern context in that Sankhya can stand in for modern materialism, that the world just comes about naturally without any attendant Ishvara or first cause. So yes, we have those three. I don't know how much background you want on Vedanta.

6:02 Mark: I'm wondering if we could get at what the issue is and what kind of argument this is first and then we'll. As we introduce the positions. Yes, let's give some background. But I think it's very easy for us to get lost in a sea of names in history here.

6:14 Stephen: Partly it's that Sankhya is atheistic and so is all Buddhist philosophy. Even one of the so called Hindu schools or Vedic schools, Mimamsa, attacks the notion of omniscient divine being. So you would think that in the culture Nyaya is not particularly theistic. In its earliest stage, the Nyaya Sutra there out of, I don't know what is it? 400 sutras of the Nyaya Sutra, these terse aphorisms, philosophic aphorisms that strung together express an entire worldview. Only three have anything to do with Ishvara the Lord. But it seems as we move through time, the Nyaya Sutra is very early and we had, you know, Vatsyayana around 450 AD, Uddyotakara about a century and a half later, a commentator and then Vachaspati around 950.

You have a sense that there really needs to be within the Nyaya tradition a fortified, solidified formal argument defending or establishing the position that then becomes intrinsic to all later Nyaya stretching all the way up until modern times and hundreds of texts, that there is a Ishvara, an omnipresent all knowing, not necessarily all powerful. That's something you really have to talk about. Sarva Shakti mean having the necessary ability to bring about the world as we see it. That's the issue. The Buddhist hot to deny it sort of the Mimamsakas and not in the Nyaya context, but more in the Vedanta context.

So has Sankhya. Now in the Vedanta context the main emphasis is yoga and some sort of mystical and direct awareness of God or Brahman, as the Vedanta say. And I think that this is brought to us by our guru, the tradition and especially the Vedicanthi Upanishads. They teach us how to get there, but at least according to Shankara. And the text that he most relies on called the Brahma Sutra, which is a systematization of the philosophy of the Upanishads, reasoning helps us. It firms up our commitment to follow a yogic path as well as establishes the very best.

It sort of starts the process of causal reasoning. That Brahman is defined in the very second sutra of the Brahma Sutra is that from which the world proceeds. Helps us to understand there are really two dimensions going on. There's our personal experience of the absolute, but there's also we reason about what the absolute is far beyond our individual experience. And that, of course, is challenged by all the atheists, whereas Nyaya is really just concerned with rational argument. The Vedantans have this mystical side to them, Yoga. I mean, it's also in Nyaya to some extent, but surely not nearly as prominent.

9:24 Mark: So I do want to direct folks. I was helped to prepare for this, to listen to. We had Peter Adamson on the podcast recently. He has a philosophy without any gaps, Indian philosophy one. You know, there's a few episodes on Nyaya and an episode on Vedanta to really get these schools clear. I'll direct folks over there. But for our purposes, the last thing we covered on this podcast in this tradition was the Bhagavad Gita. Do you remember the year on that around?

9:51 Stephen: Yeah. The Bhagavad Gita is early. Right. It's before the systematic philosophies. It's usually looked upon as a little Upanishad and part of the Vedanta tradition.

9:59 Mark: Right. So the Vedas go all the way back to, you know, 1500 B.C. like, very far. And then the Upanishads are the sort of the later part of the vedas and the 800, 800. Okay. And then Bhagavad Gita is the end of that 500, 400, 400 B.C. yeah. So we got these oral traditions then in which these schools are developed, but then at some point, somebody writes it down. And so like the Brahma Sutra, which is the Vedantan text, I have a date of 2nd century CE.

10:29 Stephen: It's really hard to date those, you know, very early texts. The Brahma Sutra is not just winding it down. The Upanishads were written down. The Bhagavad Gita was written down. It's that. It's a systematization. There are, you know, I don't know, 13 important Upanishads, and some of them are very long and they're not all concerned with metaphysical or epistemological or ethical topics as the Brahma Sutra is. They're not particularly philosophic. So the Brahma Sutra is, along with a lot of other schools, the Buddhist. You can sort of imagine a culture, I don't know, around 300 B.C.

200. There was a great Buddhist empire about that time where there's a lot of, I don't want to say friction, but at least antagonistic discourse with the Vedic tradition and these breakaways like Buddhism and Jainism and rationalists and materialists and so on. And so there was a real flourishing of philosophic discourse and sort of, as I see it, as the origination of the sutra text maybe from 200 BC to 280. It's really hard to specify exactly because these manuscripts are not dated. We can only get a really relative chronology when we look at these very old texts.

Now, the later texts, like, I don't know, Vachaspati, he mentions a king or two. And so we know we can date Vachaspati and later figures.

11:58 Seth: I'm glad you mentioned this idea that they spring out of a culture where there was a lot of discourse. Call it antagonistic, but maybe not, or agonistic, but not hostile, because that really comes to life in your book. So I'll tell you, I had no idea what to expect. And when, you know, in the introduction, you say, we're going to go through these 10 sentences, I thought, okay, I don't know what I'm in for here. As soon as I started reading, it was immediately familiar in two ways. First of all, credit to the translation and the commentary that couches things.

It's very easy to follow the arguments, I think, even with some of the technical language. But you do a great job in the commentary of clarifying and sort of relating it to common Western argumentation types and so forth. But anybody who's used to reading, you know, Socratic dialogue, or in my case, I think more on point, this is very much like what you see if you study the Talmud, where you have sentences or sections of the Hebrew Bible, which then have commentary after commentary to explicate and to try and fill out. And it's more hermeneutics about teasing out meaning.

13:07 Stephen: I was a teacher at the University of Texas, teaching among undergraduates. So what is often implicit in a text that sort of change your voice? There'll be something very subtle, what I call a discourse marker. I got this from Nicholas Asher. You probably remember as a term in linguistics, which sort of Signals a change of voice. And a lot of previous translators don't reconstruct the exchanges by identifying the shift of voice, but somehow putting it all in the voice of the one author and not putting out saying objection or so and so. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to bring out, for an English reading audience not familiar with Sanskrit, the implicit discourse structure and make it explicit in translation.

And I think that's one of the keys to making what's really true. It's just, as you say, it's much like a Socratic dialogue. There's this objections and responses. That's how the philosophic genre, with its thousands and thousands of texts, that's how you go about doing philosophy.

14:22 Seth: Yeah, completely agree. And that you did a fantastic job. The book is just super consumable and enjoyable. So I just wanted to.

14:30 Stephen: Well, thank you.

14:30 Seth: Get that out there.

14:32 Mark: Do we want to just start on page 10 and kind of go through some of the sutras here? So that is the Brahma Sutra 2.2.1.

14:40 Stephen: This is the ten sutras that we translate along with the commentaries of Shankara. But this is at the level of Brahma Sutra by person named Badarayana. So just to get the overview, and because the world's arrangement would be impossible, the argument that would establish an insentient cause of the universe is not legitimate. It's wrong. I would add the word material in front of cause. An insentient material cause of the universe. The Vedantans in this stretch are dealing with Sankhya, which is very much like Vedanta in that in the beginning there's a homogeneous blob, that primordial matter, and everything comes out of that.

Now, for the Vedanta, that's not just dumb matter, it's Brahman. It's the one who's self conscious, et cetera. And Brahman brings creation out of itself as the material cause. And I don't know if you think of Aristotle's four causes, they're all there. The Indians say instrumental instead of efficient. Agential is one of the instrumental causes, but there's also the teleological, the final cause, and the formal. That's not brought out so well in the Indian context, but it's there as well in the idea that that Ishvara or Brahman, the Lord has to have the cognition necessary to make this wonderful arrangement.

Now the world's arrangement, a lot's packed into that. And Vachaspati maybe makes the best gloss of that. I think Shankara himself says, you know, beyond the capacity of even the greatest poets, imaginative people to imagine. And Vachaspati talks about how coordination of all these things through all time and plants and animals and so on, just it's not possible without sentience. And then we go on with some other arguments. Action. You can't think of the Sankhya primordial matter acting on its own or eliminating the Sankhya view and leaving the Vedantan standing that creation comes out of Brahman the one.

And just to back up for a second and take the overview, there's a lot of the points are going to be the same in the Vedantic reasoning and then Nyaya reasoning. Very interesting overlaps. One big difference is not really addressed is that Nyaya takes atoms of matter to be eternal and separate from Ishvara. The material cause of things are atoms and they lie originally disconnected. And you need Ishvara, the Lord God as an instrumental essential cause who's Vibhu Omnipresent, who can bring the atoms together to make bodies, macro objects. But there's a very different conception of material nature in Vedanta.

They don't have atoms, they have this big blob. And so that's what we're talking about here. And that's what's similar with Sankhya. And the differences of course is that that big blob is Brahman and is self conscious. And it's also instrumental. It's also the Ishvara, the way Nyaya, shaping itself. So we've got the two conceptions are with Vedanta it's sort of like self shaping and in Nyaya it's construction. The Lord constructs objects out of the atoms.

18:17 Mark: I know you wanted to address explicitly this distinction between Brahman and Ishvara. So you've been talking about Ishvara as the Creator God. But Brahman is the term that was used when in our last discussion on the Git as this God stuff out of which we are all made. And so a lot of what Shankar is famous for is not this, but is about trying to puzzle out how is it that I can be God, I can be Brahman, but yet I'm clearly separate from Brahman. I am the thing that is being deluded about my nature as Brahman. So by saying Brahman is the stuff, but Brahman itself is not Ishvara, Right? Ishvara has to be some kind of manifestation.

18:56 Stephen: No, this is that yogic dimension, right? Vedanta is mainly concerned with some kind of mystical experience, knowing yourself as Brahman, as the true self. And the theory about the world coming out of Brahman, both materially and agentially. So Brahman is both the material and Ishvara is the best theory for guiding our yogic practice. Now there's this Maya Avidya which gets misunderstood both in the classical context and in. In the modern context. They're trying to make Shankar into an illusionist. No, Shankara is a theist. It's just that from our unenlightened perspective, without that Brahma Sakshatkara or without that mystical knowledge of Brahman, well, even with it, it's not possible to intellectualize exactly how the world originates from Brahman.

So we just take the best theory and the best theory is revealed in the Upanishads and supported by reason, by Tarka. In fact, people have different views of how to interpret Scripture, the Upanishads and other scriptures. So we really are left with reasoning on how to formulate a view that best connects up with our mystic goal of enlightenment experience. That's why Vedanta is a lot like Buddhism, you know, after all, sometimes Shankara is said to be a Buddhist. There is this sort of mystical goal that theory is supposed to serve in the Vedanta context.

That's not true in Nyaya.

20:33 Mark: So we talked in our Buddhism episodes how. Well, of course there's a conventional self. Of course I can talk to you as Stephen, you can talk to me as Mark. It's just that once we get into the metaphysical truth of things, we'll see that those selves are illusory. Well, Vedanta, Shankara here has a similar take. But the illusion sort of goes deeper and we can do science on it. So it becomes much more like. I drew the connection between Kant's phenomenal realm. Well, technically it's not the thing in itself. The thing in itself we just can't know anything about, you know, the universe as it is from God's point of view is inexplicable, as you say.

But we can say quite a lot about the phenomenal world. And in fact, Goddess Ishvara, Goddess Creator is going to end up being a scientific hypothesis about the phenomenal world. It's not a matter, like Kant would say, of having to jump beyond the phenomenal. No, it's actually the best explanation, according to these guys, for what we experience.

21:30 Seth: Can I piggyback on that for a second? One of the things I want to ask about that. So, first of all, it's fascinating to see this discussion of reason and revelation, the tension and the interplay between those two things here, just like we do in the Western Tradition, you know, the truth of revealed religion versus the truths of reason. But is one of the distinctions here that when you're talking about Kant in the Western tradition, there's a certain amount of anguish in the Kantian sense of not having access to the noumenal or the thing in itself, because there's a fixation on knowing a subject, this idea of propositional or subject object, intentional knowing.

Whereas it seems like here what they're saying is they're granting that we can't know, but instead of wringing their hands about our epistemic relationship to it, they're happy to fall into something more like an argument and say, well, given that we can't know, we should just argue and infer our way to the best possible explanation and then accept that. So they're fine with the fact that we don't have this kind of propositional knowledge and they're trying to build a construct that gives us a framework ultimately to make us better at liberation, this doing better, becoming better.

Karma.

22:47 Stephen: That's right. But that's key. That's not part of Kant's explanandum, right? That which is to be explained. And also we do have access to the noumenal realm. We have it in our own subjectivity. If we can meet all the prerequisites through our yogic practice, such as not think, it's very important to see that that's the main concern of Vedanta. But the topic here really with these sutras is why the best explanation of the world, including our seeking of enlightenment or liberation. And notice there's several sutras about that in these 10 is that Brahman is both the material and essential cause of the world. We have choices, we make choices. So maybe none of everything. And also here's a big difference with the West. Eternal objects are not caused. That's why they're not caused. That's very important in the Nyaika context. Atoms are not caused. Lots of things are not caused.

24:01 Mark: So. 2.2.2. The second of our sutras here is saying, because of action, the Samkhya primordial matter cannot be proved. Can we say a little more about Samkhya primordial matter?

24:14 Stephen: So there's this primordial blob. In the beginning, Samkhya says, everything rolls out. They have this materialist view. It just sort of rolls out on its own. And Vedanta says, come on, that's an action, the unrolling, the unfolding of the universe into finite things. And by the way, the argument that in 221 the argument that would establish an insension. That's the argument from delimited measurement, right? That a clay pot is more delimited than the clay. And so eventually get back to this homogeneous, all inclusive clay, this matrix of everything, right?

If it's this homogeneous blob, how can it start unfolding things? Then it continues like that. The opponent says, well, it can act like milk or water just naturally. Then the Vedantin is really kind of pressed to answer this one, right? Because it does seem as though milk or water do act independently of any kind of supervision by primordial beating that I. I was really struck just reading this yesterday how the supposition of interconnectedness is really key to Vedanta. And this it shares with Buddhism this idea that everything affects everything else as interconnectedness.

That's really the heart of the reply. It's pretty weak. Four promotional sense. One, there would be nothing in that which is different from it. So it can't get a push from anything. It does not depend on anything else. That sort of continue with the same line of thought. And primordial matter is not spontaneously active in the matter of grass and the like, because grass does not change into milk anywhere than in a cow's stomach. In other words, there has to be something to interact with it in order for it to get going. There can't be just a big bang out of the cosmic ylem, whatever was the big bang before it banged.

It's got to get a push from something, right? There's got to be something else to get it going. Even if it were conceded that it was to move spontaneously, permanently, still not acting as though because it has no

26:25 Seth: purpose, there's layer upon layer of this response. There's kind of a teleological response and then a bunch of different things. But the argument is from the positive side. So we look at a pot or a palace or a chariot and we see that those things cannot come to be, nor can they have action unless there's some other force involved, right? So that's the clear example.

26:52 Stephen: Vedanta and the Nayaka would say unless there is conscious oversight.

26:57 Seth: Conscious oversight. I didn't want to go that strong, but I'm glad you brought that up. So there's conscious oversight. And so the argument by analogy then is to extend that to the natural world, like trees and so forth. And the objection is, well, wait a second, you know, here's milk and water. These are two things that don't seem to have that same kind of conscious oversight. And yet at the same time they are what they are. Doesn't the inference fail on those? So there's an initial response to that which is, well, no, there is some other element involved and there is this kind of form of, I don't know that they say conscious oversight, but it's that he's trying to challenge the argument from analogy of something that you might think of as a crafted item versus a.

27:45 Stephen: Yes, that it does. It's not really without conscious oversight. He tries to, you know, say, well, you know, hey, men want the milk, that's why they provide the grass and so on. A much better response is in the Nyaya context, excuse me for jumping ahead to Vachaspati's response where he says that these examples can't count as counterexamples because that begs the question against the theists to try to use examples drawn from the natural world. Because the argument is targeting features of the natural world, things in the natural world, and saying, ah, like a pot, they too have an essential cause, an agent that knows the materials, has an idea what's to do with them, shapes them, etc.

That's the heart of the later response. Right. Which is pretty interesting. Right. So what you take to be a counterexample, we take to be in the targeted class about which we are proving that there is conscious oversight by Ishvara Vajraspati's argument.

28:56 Mark: It's just quite a bit clearer because it's not so dependent on the details of what's weird about the Samkhya system that the Samkhya system has built into it that, well, why does the primordial matter manifest itself as things? Well, it's because the gunas are out of balance. Well, what does that mean? They're out of balance because they're responding to human karma. So it's actually human purposes, indirectly that are influencing. That's compared to like, well, the milk comes out of the cow because the baby cow needs it. So in a sense it is the baby cow's desire is bringing forth the milk. But not in any way. Not like a potter makes a pot.

29:34 Stephen: Yes, very good. It's interesting to note, unfortunately, when you have textbook treatments of classical Indian philosophy, let's say the six schools. And Samkhya is one of the six schools, whereas Nya has, if you count up its printed text, there are a few thousand, I mean at least 2,000. And Vedanta, gosh, the guy wanted to make me an editor of just one of the 17 sub schools of Vedanta. And Just in one period there were, I don't know, 436 Sanskrit texts. So Vedanta has thousands and thousands of Sanskrit texts. Sankhya has maybe, I don't know, five classical philosophers lost interest in Sankhya and then no one commented much on it.

It was used as a kind of, I don't know, whipping boy for various schools and that's unfortunate for our textbook but we thought that Shankara's arguments and Vachaspati's in that context were pretty interesting also in that you can see an analog to modern materialism and some

30:35 Seth: of the things that are discussed just generally characterizing. We'll go into more of the arguments in a minute. But just this idea that the atheistic point of view of the material sort of self motivated or self acting material cause has to answer the question, okay, is there a beginning or is there not and why and how that works and has to explain action, spontaneous or otherwise and it has to explain direction of that action, particularly in the context of the sort of standard framework of liberation. And it's really interesting to see the back and forth about the responses and then the sort of furthering of the argument to try and identify and the reasoning from analogy that is commonly used throughout the text. I really like the interplay.

31:26 Mark: Yeah, I think we could probably move on to the Nyaya argument. So listeners haven't lost track here. The first half of the book is we've been talking about the Vedantan school, so it's the Brahma Sutra and Shankara is commenting on this initial text by Badarayana who wrote these very terse sayings. Shankara is expanding on those. And then Vachaspati is commenting on Shankara, elaborating on him. But Vachaspati is not technically part of the Vedantan school.

31:54 Stephen: Yes, he is Vachaspati, but it's very interesting. Some people say he's a professor, you know, like whether you believe that Plato has the right view or not. You can give a, you know, an academic, professional philosopher can give a lecture on Plato. And so maybe Vachaspati is just for his various students. He wears different hats but he wrote commentaries on five different schools under five different banners. But when you study him closely, there's a lot of sharing of position. He's a very interesting figure and so, and he says some of the same things under the rubric of commenting on Shankara's Brahma Sutra commentary as he does in the Nyaya.

I think he. But what he says is a little, little Clearer, let's say in the context of his Nyaya writing. As one might expect within Nyaya, Nyaya's famed for the very word Nyaya means critical reasoning, whereas Vedanta can indulge in the flowery metaphor since they're concerned with religious practice like Nyaya as just concerned with arguments. But scholars believe that Vajraspati's Vedantic work is his latest and he has his own views that are expressed more under Vedanta than Nyaya. But he very interestingly he attacks Vedanta in this. So to some extent he is worried too ass.

Or maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he started out as a Naiyayika and then moved on to Vedanta.

33:23 Mark: That section, just in terms of your presentation, we're just getting Vachaspati's argument here, but it comes in the context of actually three commentaries. Uddyotakara has

33:36 Stephen: very definitely a formal argument. Logic got formalized by the Buddhist first, but then the Nyayakas learned quickly and there was this long interchange about the nature of logic. Whereas they disagree about everything, they agree about logic and fallacies. So they actually they have pretty much the same epistemology, sort of default goodness of awareness and then worrying about there being a defeater. So on the face of our perceptions, they'll tell us the way things are. Inference 2 but we have to be wary that we can always be wrong. What we believe can be shown to be unwarranted.

34:16 Seth: It would be great to get just a couple of textual examples here because I think for listeners we're throwing around a lot of names and a lot of context in history, but I really want them to get a flavor for the text.

34:29 Stephen: Okay, so you know, the standard argument is there is smoke on yonder mountain. And you know that by perception. You also know from wide experience and testimony and so on dispute this, but it's taken as a given that wherever there's smoke, there's fire. And so you know by inference that there's fire. And then when you formalize this to tell this to someone else, you should give examples because that general premise we admit is a kind of leap of generalization where X there Y requires correlations between X and Y and also negative correlations.

Wherever there's no Y, there better not be any X. And so that's the pattern that we're using. There are defeaters. Like for example, somebody tries to prove to you and has a very good inference that fire is cold. Well, you have a standing defeater that you've gotten from perception that Fire is hot. So you're not even going to examine that inference. Also, inference has a social dimension. I mean, here it has a social dimension. Somebody can dispute on various. You have this sort of default right to the results of your inferences, what you make.

And everyday life, just automatically, formally, we try to copy the natural inference that goes on in everyday life. But sometimes we're fallible. We can be wrong about that first premise, that there is this prover property smoke, that qualifies the locus of what we want to prove, namely that there's fire there, namely the mountain. In this case, sometimes you're wrong about that. Also, there's lots of ways you can be wrong about the generalization. Wherever X, there, Y. In fact, if somebody puts forth an inference. Let me use F and G. Say we have this FA perception, and then we know that wherever there's an F, there's a G, and so we include ga.

Well, somebody else may have this other evidence, the same A, the same paksha, as they say, some inferential subject. But it's an H, and it is an H. And they have evidence that everything that's in H's not a G. So that's called counter inference. Well, I mean, and so far as you can tell, say your inference is absolutely good, absolutely solid, and it has a true conclusion. Well, you lose the right to assert that conclusion unless you can refute the counter inference. So there is a social dimension to this that sort of is in the background of these discussions.

In fact, that very fallacy of counter inference dominates, I don't know, three or four pages of Vajraspati's discussion.

37:06 Mark: Yes. So you characterize Vachaspati's argument as trying to overcome this trilemma, which his opponents, you actually give in Appendix B here, one of which is Dharmakirti, the Buddhist. The slightly longer one is Kumarila. And what school was he from?

37:24 Stephen: He's a ritualist. Right? He's a. Mm.

37:26 Mark: So those guys. So the Mimamsakas, even though they're Vedic. So the Vedas are true. They don't like the idea that God could have created the Vedas. Right. Because then the Vedas would somehow be less. The Vedas had to just spiral back into eternity. And so strangely, they're giving a parallel counter argument as Dharmakirti, this Buddhist, is, which then Vachaspati is responding to.

37:50 Stephen: Right.

37:50 Mark: So can we say a little about what that trilemma is and how he

37:53 Stephen: overcomes that in the rich context of inference, understood epistemologically as the way we know something or other that generates fresh knowledge. We are self consciously fallibilist and philosophy goes on by sort of presenting an inference and then people presenting defeaters of that inference or its conclusion. And then it's incumbent upon the person who advances the positive argument that gets the debate going to defeat the defeaters, another potential defeater will come up. So the three defeaters here on page 80, I guess it is the trilemma proving what is already accepted, right?

I mean, you know, you're wasting our time. We already accept that things are influenced, caused, we have multi factor causation. Come on, what people do? The Buddhists believe that, you know, your karma, they believe interconnected us of everything particular. So yeah, so what people do does affect the natural world. So yeah, if that's what you're trying to prove, some kind of involvement of conscious agency in the way the world is arranged, yeah, we accept that. So don't waste our time trying to prove what's already accepted. That's one kind of defeater.

That's a kind of defeater that doesn't really get into the gears of the inference, but in a way sort of attacks the conclusion, you might say, because the Nayaka conclusion is that there's an Ishvara that's overseas everything. And so we have to show that it's not just karma. The second possible defeater is the unestablished. That is taking the paradigm inference. There's smoke on yonder mountain. Wherever there's smoke, there's fire. There's fire on yonder mountain. The second one attacks the idea that the prover, the smoke is actually on the mountain.

No, it's not smoke, it's dust or whatever. Right? It depends on what the particular paksha, inferential subject is. The nature of the mountain, that which is qualified by a certain property which is the property to be proved, namely fire or firehood. And so one way to undermine the inference is to show, well, you can't get started because that premise, that existential premise that asf that the mountain is fiery is not established. There's no reason to believe it.

40:18 Mark: Before we get to the last one, can we just say how that actually applies to the argument about God as opposed to the mountain being fiery?

40:26 Stephen: Okay, so being produced. Okay, so if you render the prover as being produced by a godlike being, which is what we should need to establish that there's. Then we don't find that anywhere. Where's the evidence?

40:43 Mark: So the evidence in the argument is

40:45 Stephen: like a pot because it is produced. Well produced. I mean, yeah, Produced, that's not enough. I mean, that's going to be another kind of fallacy. But if you fill it out the way you need to fill it out, namely as produced by a godlike being, then I'm sorry, we have no experience of something like that. So there's no evidence that we should accept that as the prover as the analog to Smoke on the Mountain.

41:10 Mark: Okay, and then the third one, the

41:13 Stephen: third one is similar. Let's see, the third one is lacking the property to be proved. So that would be that your examples, right? The pot, the cloth, the palace and so on. The property to be proved is produced by a godlike being. Right.

41:33 Mark: Both the second and the third are pointing something about the disanalogy between a pot and the universe as a whole. I think maybe by saying unestablished, you're pointing at one of them, you're focusing

41:46 Stephen: more on the nature of the universe and the number three, you're focusing more on the God concept or the potter.

41:52 Mark: Yeah, on the pot, not applying to the.

41:54 Wes: You know, isn't this like Hume's argument that we observe artifacts being made, but there's no empirical correlation for the universe?

42:01 Stephen: So, yeah, that's number two. That's number two, the unestablished. Right. Yeah, that is very similar.

42:07 Wes: The argument is that if we see something that looks like an artifact that shows evidence of intelligent design, you know, something being actually put together in an ordered way, we can make an inference to someone who's made it, some sentient being who's actually made it. And then the question is whether that inference requires us to actually have observed it being made in the past, or whether we can just do an inference to the best explanation and say, well, we see that pots and other things are made and we don't need to specifically see that the universe is made than any particular artifact. Or the question is, even though the universe and something like a pod, they're in radically different categories, the question is whether the inference crosses from one category to another.

42:52 Stephen: I know on page 80 there are these three fallacies that are very literal translations of the Sanskrit, three defeaters that are delineated. But there's really a fourth argument that is or attacked that Vachaspati takes up, and that's in the last bit there of the paragraph. This starts one way to understand its inductive extrapolation from ordinary makers to a unique godlike creator of the world. Vachaspati spends a lot of time on that. Right? I mean, like number 80, the basic idea is if we can't extrapolate in the best way we can think of. Inference would be useless.

We're always extrapolating. Furthermore, let's look at the nature of what we're trying to explain. You're right, we're not talking about pots here. We're talking about the whole universe. And it's incredible coordination. And I think the most fantastic passage from Vachaspati is on page 50. He's telling us about the attributes of the Lord, what the Lord has to be. If the Maker's knowledge were not eternal, uncreated, and did not range over all things, there could not be what there is. In fact, the simultaneous production of effects throughout immeasurable and unlimited space at every place and location, effects perceptible and imperceptible in animals and plants and the organic world as a whole, and so on, from which we prove that the Maker is the Lord.

44:27 Mark: Maybe to sum this up, let's just read this is page 46 or so, just this five step argument. Again, these other objectors are responding to earlier versions. Vachaspati is responding to that. So number one, which in this form of the. This will serve again to kind of exemplify the kind of argument. So in the first one, you always just state what your conclusion is going to be. So the things that are the subject of dispute, like bodies, trees, mountains and the ocean, have a maker who is knowledgeable about their material causes.

44:58 Stephen: Right. So that's what we're trying to prove. Have a maker who has knowledge about their material.

45:02 Mark: Okay, two, since they are produced, alternatively, since their material causes are insentient. So these are actually two arguments, but produced there. Isn't that a translation I had seen somewhere in here as just having more than one part. So anything that is composite is produced. So it's not saying in a factory. It just means two atoms are put together, therefore it is produced.

45:23 Stephen: Right. Remember, there's a background assumption here, which is never fleshed out, that originally atoms lie immobile and unconnected, which we got

45:35 Mark: a little in that we did the Timaeus recently, where Plato says, okay, there has to be a Creator, but then there also has to be the Kora. What he calls it just some substance that is just around, whether it's a blob or it's atoms, you know, that puts this in order. So number three, whatever is produced and whatever has a material cause that is insentient, like a palace has a maker who is knowledgeable about the material cause. So it's stating the universal. But also you can't just Stay. It's not like all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. It's all are men like Jake, all men like Olympia Dukakis who just died are mortal. You know, you have to give the example. Otherwise it's like what would actually ground that universal if you don't give the example, right?

46:19 Stephen: It's an inductive generalization. But they're very self conscious about number four.

46:23 Mark: Things that are the subject of disputes like bodies, trees, mountains and the ocean are produced and have insentient material causes. Which is just saying this thing at the, you know, in number one also fits into this inductive generalization. Number three, that's supposed to not really add. And then therefore five, they too have a maker who's knowledgeable about their material causes.

46:42 Stephen: That gets the discussion started. Then we imagine various opponents putting forth objections. That's what we have here, these three objections trying to prove what's already been admitted. That's the first one right towards the bottom of 48, there's a lot of dispute about what the maker is like. And then we get this idea that I think Vachaspati should really get the credit for because he makes it very explicit that we have to fill out according to what's required to get the world as we perceive it, the world's arrangement. No ordinary schmuck could do this.

It's pretty fantastic what's done. And so that's why we think of the Lord as having knowledge that's not an effect that ranges over all things. Because actually we start with the universe as all interconnected. We explained this on page 51 as Paksha Dharmata Vat from being a property of the inferential subject. But this is not that one that gets the prover property. This is after you prove that there is a maker, what's the maker like? And that's where we just start filling out. And that's where it vary very definitely coalesces with Vedanta because it is sort of reasoning to the best explanation, right?

48:04 Mark: There's an example. If you're just consider an axe or like an ax is hitting something, then it doesn't seem like that necessarily involves somebody that has perception. But if you consider striking with an ax, it's not just a blind thing. But no, it's of course once you get that out there there's somebody who's working with an axe, well clearly that is an action. It is not just one billiard ball bumping into another. And so therefore the person needs to be able to see what they're hitting with the axe. And therefore we can. Even though we didn't say anything about a person at all, we just said, oh, you know, there's an axe chopping right now.

48:37 Stephen: Just say you saw the axe mark, right? And maybe it's even been, I don't know, grown over by the tree. But you can sort, sort of see it.

48:44 Mark: And we can. We can. Therefore, just by using the best explanation, it's somebody that had sense organs. We can derive something as remote from an axe as sense organs just by that. And so likewise, Vachaspati thinks that he can look at the. Okay, just because it's a cause, you know, something that put two atoms together, we should be able to say, because as you said, well, it's not just two atoms, it's the majesty of creation. And therefore, even though we've only ever seen makers like individual potters, you know, mortals like us who have bodies, who have knowledge in the ordinary way, we can derive all this other stuff.

So this is very much like the Avicenna episode that we had recently, where he likewise, just from being, you know, the one necessary being that everything came out of, then could derive all this other stuff to make it like what the folks at this time would consider to be the personal God, you know, something with intelligence, something that has. So a lot of, again, a lot of like the Buddhist objections are, well, how can you cause something if you don't have a body? Everybody that you've ever seen causing anything are like using their hand. How can you know anything without having eyes or mind?

But yet God knowing everything clearly doesn't need.

49:57 Stephen: Well, God can't have a body because bodies are made. You can get in an infinite regress.

50:02 Mark: Exactly. Yep.

50:03 Stephen: So there are various considerations that are brought to bear on this. So, yeah, and that one about all of our experience of production of agency has to do with the agent having a body. That's the counter inference. And that not only commands a lot of attention from Vachaspati, but later people, the Nayak I've worked the most on as a person named Gangesha Pitchfork. It's so expensive. It's in three volumes. Yeah, Gangesha, he has a long section on this counter inference that goes, everything has the key entailment relation, as every agent that produces things has a body.

50:46 Seth: That was actually my favorite part of the book. When I said earlier, I was like, we should get to the text and actually read something so you can get a flavor of this. Page 18 and 19. I'll just I gotta read this because it just made me feel good. But a conscious being is not observed to be a sole locus of action the way a chariot is. Rather, the subtle true nature of the conscious self is that it's connected to things like the body, which are the loci of action. The situation of a living body is found to be entirely different from, for example, a chariot, which on its own is insentient just for this reason.

Furthermore, the materialists understand consciousness, as well as other properties to belong to the body alone. Because when a perceivable body exists, consciousness is observed, and when there is no perceivable body, it is not observed. Therefore, action does not belong to a conscious being by itself. You have a nice commentary and there's a beautiful response. This is our answer. We Vedantans do not deny that action is found and something insentient belongs to it. Let us assume that it belongs to that alone. We do say, however, that action comes to be because of consciousness.

When consciousness is present, action occurs, and when consciousness is absent, no action proceeds. For example, even though the change characterized by the burning in the light is nested in wood, and even though the change itself is not directly perceived, it happens only when there is flaming heat, just because of the flaming heat. This is because it is observed in conjunction with the heat and never observed in its absence. The reasoning about action and consciousness is similar. I just found those two paragraphs to be just beautiful. I mean, beautiful in the sense that they're clear.

They have the use of examples. It's argument from inference and analogy. And to get a flavor of the text, if folks are interested, this is what it's like. It's just beautiful.

52:33 Stephen: And it's particularly interesting there on page 19 on the fourth line. The Lokayatas were famously materialist and made fun of liberation too, and mystical experience and so on. They made fun of everything. They had these obscene jokes about yoga and, I don't know, rituals and inferences to God. You know, the living body is the self, there's nothing else. Their slogan was drink ghee even though you run into debt. Right? Because, hey, when you die, you don't

53:07 Seth: have to pay it.

53:08 Stephen: So, yeah, so it's very interesting that this. So that conjunction that this multi factor causation view that Shankara is positing is that there can't be any kind of action without. As one of the factors, not the only factor, but that requires consciousness.

53:27 Mark: Yeah, the fact that there were atheists, not just as a small group, but like controlling whole countries and things that these folks had to argue against just makes it so much more exciting. Both then, you know, the older the Bhagavad Gita and like Catholic or Avicenna, you know, anybody who's in a. This is still religious philosophy, but it is not in a uniform religious environment that, you know, they were actual real live, respectable opponents and not just those bastard atheists who are all gonna fry anyway.

53:57 Stephen: Yeah, they're mentioned again on the second next page. On page the materialists too can see, blah, blah, blah. You have to qualify that observation with there are not many Lokayata texts, the materialist texts, they're quoted all the time, ones that are lost. And we think that there are not a lot of Lokayata texts because unlike Vedantic text, where you have a revered teacher, the Lokayatas are telling you, look, hey, pleasure is all there is in life. Go out and have fun. You're not going to bother writing down your teacher's precepts. And also if there.

Even the texts that we know that they didn't survive because people had to recopy them and the Lokayatas were such sort of, I don't know, carpe diem hedonist that who wants to spend the time the tedium of recopying these texts. And they had to be recopied. And in that hot climate of the Indian subcontinent, are they descendants writing on leaves that would.

55:02 Mark: Yeah. Fall apart after a couple hundred years? Yes. If they, if somebody didn't like them enough to recopy them.

55:09 Stephen: That's right, exactly. That's my theory for saying why they're not. I mean they're, you know, maybe they weren't very prominent, but they are mentioned also in a lot of drama. So you're mainly right. But still in broad overview, I mean, Vedanta Nyaya and the Mimamsa and the Buddhist text, they were very, very substantial traditions. And materialists don't have anything.

55:31 Seth: We're clearly not Lokayata hedonists here because we're sitting here on zoom when it's a beautiful day outside in Austin, Texas and we could be doing something different. I will say this. I mean, I appreciate the engagement with materialism. It doesn't feel like a strawman. I mean, whether or not, you know, there's this preponderance of texts, there's a legitimate engagement with the opposing view here. And as Mark said, perhaps bolstered by the fact that these opposing traditions had substantial socio political power behind them. I thought that was one of the strengths of the text.

56:09 Stephen: Yeah, that's Right. Some kings. Yeah, some of the kings. Right. I mean, they had to get funding for their various schools. So I. There are lots of records of sort of open debate you can imagine you gotta win.

56:21 Seth: There was no tenure for these folks,

56:23 Stephen: or at least you gotta make a good showing. Right.

56:27 Mark: Thank you so much, Stephen, for joining us. Do you have anything else you want to promote before you get out of here? I looked at the version you had done of the whole Nyaya Sutra, which some of the material in this book repeats a little of that.

56:39 Stephen: Yeah. With Matthew, not the whole of Nyaya Sutra, just selections.

56:42 Mark: Well, it's still much more of it. I would recommend that to listeners. Is there anything else specifically you want to point out to folks to learn more?

56:50 Stephen: You know, the Stanford Encyclopedia is sometimes written, it seems, only for specialists and advanced professional philosophers. But not all of the articles are like that and I think there are quite a few. I can claim 2. One on classical Indian epistemology and one on Gangesha. Who was the founder of New Nyaya, Navya nyaya, around the 13th or 14th centuries. And there are hundreds of texts that develop from Gangesha and I try to make it accessible. And there are lots of others right there. I don't think there is one on Indian rational theology, but there's lots of classical and then references. I think Matthew Dasti is on the whole responsible for the bibliography and references we all contributed, so. But of course, the Stanford Encyclopedia gives fabulous references for any kind of future interest.

57:54 Mark: All right, we'll link folks to that and to the book directly, which is a nice, short, manageable entryway into this really vast realm that I was at least very, very glad to get a glimpse of.

58:05 Seth: Thank you, Stephen.

58:06 Stephen: Okay, well, thank you very much.

58:08 Wes: Thank you.

58:09 Mark: Hey, thanks for listening. We're going to continue for another hour or so. We'll hit more of the specific quotes in the text. Talk about some of the issues that were raised here. This should be next selection your feed. Check it out.