A Philosopher's Ruminations

  THE NYAYA BUDDHIST DEBATE ON PERCEPTION   [This article is a very brief presentation of an interpretation of the debate between Nyaya and Buddhism on Indeterminate and Determinate Perception. I try to bring to the fore the main philosophical issues in the debate and in the end show that Gangesha’s solution of the problem of the ‘myth of the given’ is very different from Kumarila or Vacaspati Mishra and is a vindication of the theory of perception found in Nyaya Sutras.]   The question before us is about the intentionality of perception or in other word’s its world directedness. Exactly what in perception is revealed to us purely because of our senses and how much is ‘conceptually interpreted’ so to say. The nature of the philosophical problem in front of us is nicely elaborated in the words of Sextus Empiricus when he said that sight, “is receptive of figure and size and colour but the substance is neither figure nor size nor colour, but if anything, is that in which these co