{"title":"The New Attitude","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter features Vijayīndratīrtha, the grand-pupil of Vyāsatīrtha, author of Conquest of the Closing (Upasaṃhāravijaya), which attacks Appayya Dīkṣita’s monograph. However, he and his nemesis had much more in common than either was prepared to acknowledge. Appayya Dīkṣita had pioneered the technique of inverting any principle that prioritizes the closing by showing that it cuts both ways and could be used to support the power of the opening. Vijayīndratīrtha adopts this technique and shows that Appayya Dīkṣita’s arguments can work against him in the same way. He thereby effectively defuses Appayya Dīkṣita’s arguments for the power of the opening, without decisively confirming the counterposition. This method leaves him, possibly by design, with a strong debater’s argument against his opponent but with a weak and possibly insincere defense of his own position. This mode of argumentation gives Vijayīndratīrtha’s work a distinctly flippant tone, rarely seen in earlier Sanskrit scholastic thought.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131965170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New Math","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1201/9781439863640-48","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1201/9781439863640-48","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the first concentrated effort to theorize and defend Madhva’s inversion against traditional interpretive theory. The protagonist of this chapter is Vyāsatīrtha, the great architect of Dualist Vedānta as a major philosophical, social, and political movement under the auspices of the Vijayanagara Empire. Vyāsatīrtha assembles a systematic defense of the power of the closing. He builds his argument out of existing Mīmāṃsā case law, gathering an array of interpretive decisions in which, he argues, it is really the closing that is the deciding factor. He also reexamines the cases traditionally thought to illustrate the power of the opening, demonstrating in each that some interpretive criterion other than sequence really dictates the agreed-upon conclusion. Thus, without actually challenging the existing interpretive conclusions of the entire Mīmāṃsā tradition, Vyāsatīrtha develops (or, in his mind, reveals) a “new math” that both upholds Madhva’s theory and explains a variety of old results.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127397651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behind the Veil of the Old","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins by surveying the petering out of the debate over sequence in interpretation in seventeenth-century India and speculating about the reasons for its decline. At this point, the chapter returns to the broad question of innovation with which this book began, and places the story in the context of the “New Intellectuals” in South Asia and that of a few comparative case studies in order to present a broader survey of modes of novelty in scholastic traditions. The rhetorical stance of traditionalism that masks substantive innovation in the book's main case study has significant parallels in other intellectual traditions, suggesting a larger pattern that may merit further investigation. The “oldness of the will” discussed in chapter 1 may be only a pretense, after all, and a new one at that.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134388377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Origins of the Debate","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter lays out the prehistory of the book’s main controversy. Sequence is not mentioned in the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, and the precedence of earlier over later is only rarely invoked by its commentator, Śabara. Śabara’s follower Kumārila Bhaṭṭa develops the most important argument for why earlier should be stronger than later in cases of contradiction. For the founder of Nondualist Vedānta, Śaṅkara, sequential priority was not at all a factor; his emphasis is not on how either beginning or ending could overrule the other, but on harmony between them as one of several factors that direct the ideal reader toward the correct interpretation of the Veda. Madhva, founder of Dualist Vedānta, introduced a sequential priority in which later overcomes earlier, seemingly by misreading or misrepresenting an earlier list of such factors compiled by one of Śaṅkara’s important followers, Prakāśātman. With this provocative inversion, our debate begins in earnest.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133494458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New Hermeneutics","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the response to Vyāsatīrtha by Appayya Dīkṣita, one of India’s most influential intellectuals in the sixteenth century. In his Power of the Opening (Upakramaparākrama), Appayya Dīkṣita responds to Vyāsatīrtha’s case law argument by showing that each case Vyāsatīrtha presents as decided by the power of the closing is really decided by some other factor. He then proceeds to develop a new cognitive model of interpretation based on a set of hermeneutic (and sometimes psychological) needs, in which sequence plays hardly any part. While ostensibly defending the traditional position of Mīmāṃsā, Appayya Dīkṣita can be seen as undermining it, rendering the whole question of sequence moot. He also brings the debate back home to Vedānta interpretive cases. In doing so, he constructs for the first time a general defense of the entire body of existing Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā, leaving only the Dualists out in the cold.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":"178 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120976057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Newness in Scholastic Traditions","authors":"Yigal Bronner","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197583470.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter surveys previous treatments of innovation in South Asian cultural studies and shows the strong resistance among scholars to the very possibility of meaningful innovation in this world. In recent decades, this resistance has begun to erode, and several scholars have identified the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an era of heightened creativity. However, the main voices in recent scholarship still find serious restraints holding back full-throated novelty, characterized by Sheldon Pollock as a situation wherein the “newness of the intellect” is constrained by the “oldness of the will.” This chapter argues that the controversy over the role of sequence in scriptural interpretation charted here in fact shows radical changes disguised by a thin veneer of traditionalism. It also sets this controversy against the background of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutic approaches to “early” and “late” in scripture.","PeriodicalId":289076,"journal":{"name":"First Words, Last Words","volume":" 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132011356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：