Navya‐Nyāya

This entry provides a short introduction to Navya‐Nyāya, a school of classical Indian philosophy. As an example of religious matters discussed by Navya‐Naiyāyikas we refer briefly to their stance on the design inference as a means to prove the existence of God. Their greatest achievements are, however, related to logic, especially as regards the analysis of relational expressions. Navya‐Naiyāyikas created an ideal language, a kind of Leibnizian characteristica universalis based on a canonical form of Sanskrit, which serves to explicate the objective content of verbalized and unverbalized cognitions and to disambiguate sentences formulated in ordinary Sanskrit. The entry focuses on a fundamental concept involved in the Navya‐Naiyāyikas' analysis of relational expressions, namely the “describer” ( nirūpaka ). As an example of the close affinity of Navya‐Nyāya to modern logic we demonstrate in what way the describer functions as a tool to specify the order of the members of a pair of individuals instantiating a relation, a problem which Kuratowski solved by means of his well‐known set‐theoretical ordered pair‐definition.