Customer Reviews

Universals: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics

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I bought this book based on a bibliographical entry in Burton Stein's "A History of India." Perhaps I was being conceited as Stein calls it "very deep stuff" and I thought "I like very deep stuff." This book, however, uses formal logic of the third-semester-logic-course variety, two semesters beyond what I took ever so long ago. Additionally, most of the essays require working knowledge of Sanskrit, a dead language. If you fit either of these qualifications then, by god, read this book and make your education worthwhile. Otherwise you're up a creek on this one.

The introduction, incidentally, is very interesting, but pertains more to his book "Exploring Mysticism" which I've just ordered as he made it sound so fascinating. Read that one.

In this volume Staal tries to make an important point that needs emphasis: That C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' slogan, which insists that the humanities are not a science, (and which derives from the German Romanticists), is a mistaken one. Thus, linguistics and logic (as the study of discourse and reasoning) can be studied by empirical methods. These methods must be based on, or will eventually uncover, universals of logic and language, that is to say commonalities that can be subject to rational investigation. This at once torpedos the whole hermeneutical dilemma and the fashionability of much current thinking on the uniqueness of cultures. However, as Staal, says, this is only partially a philosophical presumption. There is also empirical evidence, and this book attempts to present some of that evidence.

The only trouble with this volume is its rather technical nature. Contrary to the other reviewer, I do not believe that the symbolic logic used in it is much of a barrier. Anyone familiar with the predicate calculus will understand it. The additional symbolism is clearly explained in the book. Some of the papers, however, are marred by some unfortunate typos that make the symbolism harder to understand than it really is. As well, it is not necessary to have a knowledge of Sanskrit. That being said, some knowledge of the grammar of an inflected language (like Latin or Greek) and phonetics is necessary. It would also be helpful to have some aquaintance with the technicalites of Indian philosophy, some of which are rather not very well explained in the original papers that went into this book, written as they were for an academic audience that would have been familiar with them.