Authors
Kees van Berkel, Agata Ciabattoni, Elisa Freschi, Francesca Gulisano, Maya Olszewski
Publication date
2023/3
Journal
Journal of Logic, Language and Information
Volume
32
Issue
1
Pages
19-62
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Description
Centered around the analysis of the prescriptive portion of the Vedas, the Sanskrit philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā provides a treasure trove of normative investigations. We focus on the leading Mīmāṃsā authors Prabhākara, Kumārila and Maṇḍana, and discuss three modal logics that formalize their deontic theories. In the first part of this paper, we use logic to analyze, compare and clarify the various solutions to the śyena controversy, a two-thousand-year-old problem arising from seemingly conflicting commands in the Vedas. In the second part, the formalized Mīmāṃsā theories are analyzed and employed to provide alternative perspectives on well-known paradoxes from the contemporary field of deontic logic. Thus, we go from logic to Mīmāṃsā and back again.
Scholar articles
K van Berkel, A Ciabattoni, E Freschi, F Gulisano… - Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 2023
K van Berkel, A Ciabattoni, E Freschi, F Gulisano… - 2022