QUESTIONS ON NYAYA SUTRA

Q1. In Nyaya, Vada reveals  our fundamental unity and the most important function of rhetoric has been largely to bridge our fundamental isolation from one another. How far do you think that uniformity has been achieved in the world after thousands of years of argument? Do you think that the advancement in the rhetoric techniques  has not divided man more from one another instead of blending them together?

Q2. Nyaya Sutra in his Nyaya Sutra of Gotama gives many rhetoric devices that can be useful tool to convince audience? To what extend these devices of ‘Example’, ‘Reaffirmation’, and ‘Conclusion’ are used in 21^st century? How valuable these tools are for us, argue with an example?

Q3. In the Nyaya method, truth and validity occur at once because the argument must be ‘fruitful’. How does the philosophy of Nyaya relative in 21^st century when the standards of argument have shifted to win both by hook and by crook.  What is the value of truth in the modern rhetoric?

Q4. A.H. Ritter write: “[I]n its exposition, Nyaya is tedious, loose and unmethodological. I need the whole form of this philosophy as a proof of the incapacity of its expositors to enter in to the intrinsic development of ideas, whatever knowledge they may have possessed of the external laws of composition. ” Comment on the above statement.

QUESTIONS ON IBN RUSHD

Q1. Ghazali says, refuting the philosophers: “what you affirm are only suppositions and in fact you do nothing but add obscurities to obscurities.” What is your opinion about Ghazali comment, if he is right than should we exclude art of rhetoric from literary disciplines?

Q2. “…. That the human intellect is too weak to understand how this act works, although it knows that this act exists. He who tries to compare heavenly with earthly existence, and believes that the agent of the divine world acts in the way in which an agent in this sublunary world works, is utterly thoughtless, profoundly  mistaken, and in complete error?” Do you think human intellect is weak to understand the laws of the divine?

Q3. Both Sutra and Rushd belong to what generally is called the eastern tradition of rhetoric, how effective Rushd has been in his argument that “God is the agent and the maker of the world and that the world is His product and act” in the light of the rules and principles of rhetoric devices laid down by Sutra?

Q4. After Studying the prominent rhetorician like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero from the western tradition of rhetoric and Sutra and Rushd from the Indian and the Persian tradition respectively, how do you estimate different rhetoric tradition with reference to their use of techniques, devices, language and style?