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Thinker · c. fourteenth century CE

Gaṅgeśa

Gaṅgeśa

Gaṅgeśa’s Tattvacintāmaṇi inaugurated Navya-Nyāya’s unusually precise vocabulary for analysing knowledge, inference, absence, and reference.

Intellectual setting

Gaṅgeśa extended the older Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition at a moment of intense interschool argument about perception and inference.

Key ideas

Analysis of knowledge

His work separates conditions and objects of cognition with a technicality that reshaped later debate.

Tarka and inference

Suppositional reasoning tests rival claims by their consequences while remaining distinct from a source of knowledge.

Legacy

Navya-Nyāya’s terminology became a widely shared tool of philosophical analysis in early modern South Asia.