The Notes on the Concept of Delimitation

Abstract

A frequent usage of the terms avacchedaka and avacchinna characterizes the Navyanyaya language. Although such terms had been used in many Sanskrit litertures from a long time before the age of Navyanyaya, we could not find any technical sense there as specified by Navyanyaya in later period. it is, in fact, these terms which play an important role in differentiating Navyanyaya ("new" Nyaya) from Pracinanyaya ("old" Nyaya). However, since the emergence of Navyanyaya as a new methodology for a systematic analysis of a doctrine in the thirteenth century to the fourteenth century A. D. almost all other philosophical systems of Indian philosophy could not but adopt the same style of Navyanyaya language in order to explain even their own doctrines in a most precise, minute, and unambiguous manner. The present paper is intended to try to deduce the nature and scope of the concept of 'delimitation' for the purpose of which these terms are clarified from the aspect of its derivation as well as from that of their historical development exclusively in the Nyaya literature. It also examines the relevance of such a concept of 'delimitation' in the epistemological analysis of Navyanyaya system.