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Victor A. van Bijlert, Nyāya Sūtra—On Philosophical Method: Sanskrit Text, Translation, and Commentary, Routledge, 2024, 251pp., $180.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032758381.
Reviewed by Stephen H. Phillips, Professor Emeritus, The University of Texas at Austin
Within ancient and classical Indian literature, sūtra texts are comprised of aphoristic statements that together frame a subject matter and present core tenets. The Nyāya-sūtra (c. 150 ce) presents the philosophy and methods of nyāya, “critical reasoning,” along with a well-developed epistemology and an ontology borrowed mainly from the Vaiśesika school, whose sūtras predate Nyāya’s by perhaps a century. This translation and commentary by van Bijlert is excellent within the restrictions the author imposes: not to look beyond, chronologically, the terse sūtras themselves along with precursors in pre-Nyāya literature, to determine what they mean. That is, van Bijlert professes not to be guided in his translations by the extensive classical Nyāya-sūtra commentaries, which stretch over more than a thousand years, not even that of Vātsyāyana Pakṣilasvamin (c….
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