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Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box. Edited by Jessica Frazier. Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xvi + 190. isbn 1409446905.
In Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box, Jessica Frazier has brought together an impressive array of scholars who have contributed nine essays, plus an introductory and concluding chapter, both written by her, which collectively provide a most fruitful perspective for examining classical South Asian traditions of thought. Creating categorial frameworks was certainly a prolific activity among the ancient and medieval authors of the darsanas, and indeed these authors drew heavily from pre-scholastic texts and language to build their systems. Frazier in her concluding chapter gives a helpful synopsis of the various roles played by categories in Indian philosophies, classifying them as "semantic, modal, qualitative, mereological and teleological," as these roles contributed to explanations of everything from the cosmological order to justifying certain practical or spiritual goals to solidifying the identity of the communities devoted to them (p. 160). However, as she reminds us, there were also internal critiques of the entire categorization process forwarded by various movements for various reasons. And while Frazier occasionally invokes more recent Western reflective paradigms for understanding the human, and not worlddictated, functions of categories, offered by such figures as George Lakoff, Mary Douglas, and Peter Berger, she also reminds us that cross-cultural philosophical exploration can also helpfully prompt us to reexamine the ways in which we have become accustomed to cutting up the world (p. 160). The contributions to the volume illustrate all of this well.
A third of the collection's essays address issues of how categorial systems of different schools were applied to analyses of the natural order and epistemology. Stephen Phillips's "Prama?as (Knowledge Generators) as Natural Kinds," teases out the significance of how classical Brahmi?ical logicians went about identifying certain kinds of cognitions as reliable producers of knowledge. Since, after all, different philosophical systems employ variant sets of padartha or "categories," resolving doubts about which set is the most reliable depends upon our ability to garner knowledge in the first place (p. 29). After recalling the basic Naiyayika principle that one becomes aware of cognitions through the apperception of subsequent cognitions, Phillips argues that the apperceiving cognitions are able...