Universals in Indian Philosophy of Language

This project examines the Jatisamuddesa a chapter of Bhartharis Vakyapadiya (5th c. CE) together with the commentary thereupon composed by Helaraja (10th c. CE). Made of about 2000 verses arranged into three main chapters (the third one being further divided into fourteen subsections), the Vakyapadiya is one of the most influential treatises on language composed in premodern India, if not anywhere. The work analyses the role language plays in the way humans interact with the world, by exploring various aspects, from the purely grammatical to the strictly philosophical. The Jatisamuddesa is a subsection of the third chapter of the Vakyapadiya and it is mainly dedicated to investigate whether the meaning units of speech convey is a universal feature. The principal objective of the project is the production of a new critical edition of the first part of the Jatisamuddesa, together with Helarajas commentary. In carrying the task out, the project will benefit from the use of all known manuscripts of the Jatisamuddesa twenty-one that contains also Helarajas commentary. This will enable researchers to improve over the currently available editions of these works. This is particularly true for the commentary, which has large margins for improvement. The project will reconstruct the text of both works by employing a stemmatic approach, thus trying to get closer to the text of the Jatisamuddesa Helaraja read in the 10th c. CE. A second purpose of the project is the production of an annotated translation of the part of the Jatisamuddesa under analysis, together with its commentary. Although the verses of the Jatisamuddesa have already been translated in the past, none of these earlier translations were based on a critical re-examination of the Helarajas work, nor were they based on a broader contextualization of the commentary, which is one of the objectives pursued by this project. Finally, though the Jatisamuddesa is mainly concerned with the semantic question of whether units of speech express universals, other philosophical issues often emerge in the discussion. The project will focus on three specific philosophical questions, with the purpose to contextualize Bhartharis and Helarajas ideas within the broader panorama of Indian philosophy. The first issue is whether it is possible to conceive universals of universals; the second concerns the existence of God as the factor which guarantees that between word and meaning there is a fixed relationship. The third and final point regards the way in which these thinkers attempt to harmonize the idea that units of speech express universals with the semantic aspect of Vedic injunctions.

How can a word such as "tree" or "horse" refer not to one single thing, but to many different individual things at once? What connects the words we use, the thoughts we form, and the world we try to describe? Questions like these are still central to philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and even current debates on artificial intelligence. Remarkably, they were already discussed with great sophistication around 1,500 years ago by the Sanskrit thinker Bharthari, one of the most important philosophers of language in classical India. This project studied a key section of Bharthari's main work, the Vkyapadya ("On Sentence and Word", 5th century CE), together with its earliest preserved commentary, written by the Kashmiri scholar Helrja around the 10th century. The section examined, known as the Jtisamuddeśa or "Section on Universals", asks how general categories work in language, thought, and reality. The project produced three main results. First, it offered a much fuller picture of the manuscript tradition than had previously been available. Building on Wilhelm Rau's foundational 1971 catalogue, the project identified and studied dozens of additional manuscripts preserved in libraries across India and Europe, written in scripts such as Devangar, Telugu, and Malayam. This made it possible to distinguish two main lines of textual transmission: one in northern India and one in southern India, with Kerala playing a particularly important role. Second, the project produced the first annotated English translation of the opening verses of the Jtisamuddeśa together with Helrja's commentary. This translation makes Bharthari's difficult and highly compressed text accessible to a much wider audience of philosophers, historians of ideas, and scholars of religion, beyond the small circle of Sanskrit specialists. Third, the project resulted in a series of philosophical studies, published in peer-reviewed international journals and in two monographs, that reconstruct Bharthari's answers to enduring questions about universals, meaning, and the structure of reality. One central finding is that Bharthari draws an original distinction between "linguistic universals", that is, the ways in which language groups things together, and "real universals", that is, whatever in reality may correspond to such groupings. This distinction allows him to address a classical paradox, the so-called "regress of universals", without giving up a realist view of the world. The broader significance of the project is twofold. On the one hand, it contributes to the preservation and understanding of a major strand of South Asian intellectual heritage, much of which still remains inaccessible outside specialist circles. On the other hand, it brings a 1,500-year-old philosophical voice into conversation with contemporary debates about language, meaning, thought, and reality. These debates matter not only for academic philosophy and linguistics, but also for cognitive science and for current reflections on artificial intelligence.