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.