Philosophical search for the Nature of Reality

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Jan 21, 2011, 3:07:01 PM1/21/11
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India's Nyaya vs. West's Aristotelian Logic:-----

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyaya :

"The most important contribution made by the Nyaya school to modern
Hindu thought is its methodology to prove existence of God, based on
Vedas. This methodology is based on a system of logic that,
subsequently, has been adopted by the majority of the other Indian
schools, orthodox or not. This is comparable to how Western science
and philosophy can be said to be largely based on Aristotelian logic.
However, Nyaya differs from Aristotelian logic in that it is more than
logic in its own right. Its followers believed that obtaining valid
knowledge was the only way to obtain release from suffering. They
therefore took great pains to identify valid sources of knowledge and
to distinguish these from mere false opinions. Nyaya is thus a form of
epistemology in addition to logic.
According to the Nyaya school, there are exactly four sources of
knowledge (pramanas): perception, inference, comparison, and
testimony. Knowledge obtained through each of these can, of course,
still be either valid or invalid. As a result, Nyaya scholars again
went to great pains to identify, in each case, what it took to make
knowledge valid, in the process creating a number of explanatory
schemes. In this sense, Nyaya is probably the closest Indian
equivalent to contemporary analytic philosophy."
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