Elements of Knowledge-First Epistemology in Gaṅgeśa and Nyāya

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper I argue that there are elements of Tim Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology that can be found in the work of the fourteenth-century philosopher, Gaṅgeśa. He is the father of the new school of Nyāya. I delineate his view about perception and knowledge by comparing it to his predecessor, Gautama Akṣapāda, the father of Nyāya. On Gaṅgeśa’s knowledge is not composed of parts. And a perceptual event, understood as a veridical awareness, is a transient occurrence of perceptual knowledge. I cash out his view of perception as a special form of disjunctivism that focuses on positive and negative causal factors. I apply it to several cases to show how the theory works. I then go on to discuss Gaṅgeśa’s two-tiered theory of knowledge where there is a distinction between perceptual knowledge and certified knowledge and how it relates to the KK-principle, that when one knows they know that they know.