("new
Nyaya") The Nyaya
philosophical school's later offshoot.
The Nyaya school was one of the six schools of traditional
Hindu philosophy that flourished in the first century, but gradually faded from
prominence.
In the late medieval period (15th–17th centuries), the
Navyanyaya school arose in an effort to revitalize the school and address some
of the issues with the older Nyaya concept of inherence (samavaya).
Inherence was seen by the Nyayas as a weak relational force
that linked things and their properties, such as associating the color red with
a certain ball and therefore making the ball red.
It also linked tangible things, such as the force that kept
two sides of a clay pot together when they were forced against one other.
Finally, inherence linked selves and their qualities—one
became happy when inherence linked happiness to one's self, and unhappy when
inherence linked unhap piness to one's self.
Many phenomena in the perceivable universe were explained by
this concept of inherence.
However, the Nyayas' assumption that inherence was a single,
universal feature at work in diverse locales drew criticism.
According to this critique, a universal and everlasting
inher ence might relate an item to any attribute, even properties that
contradict each other, such as the color brown with the moon or the appearance
of a cow with a dog.
Other assaults questioned if inherence survived the
destruction of one of the items it was linking.
Opponents said that if it did not, inherence was plainly
nothing to begin with, and if it did, the residual linking power would exist
unattached to anything, which was manifestly nonsensical.
Finally, others questioned the need of inherence at all,
citing it as an example of the "need for less complexity" (gaurava).
The Navyanyaya school tries to avoid these issues by
introducing a new kind of interaction known as "self linking
connectors." By their very nature, these connections were considered as an
inherent part of everything, and since they were self-linking, there was no
need for a separate inherence to tie things together.
The connection and the associated things are one and the
same in this understanding.
The Navyanyayas were able to maintain their core notions
that there are genuine things in the world that are related to one another
because to this concept.
For further detail, see Indian Philosophical Analysis, edited by Karl H. Potter and Sibajiban Bhattacharyya, 1992.
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