Can the Vaiśeṣika Individuate Universals? David Nowakowski (Union)

The Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy is known for its distinctive doctrine of “individuators” (viśeṣāḥ), by means of which the various entities of the mundane world—substances, qualities, and motions—can be distinguished as unique individuals on purely formal grounds. As straightforward as the account is for these entities, the problem of individuation becomes much more complicated for universals. This paper uses the question “Can the Vaiśeṣika individuate universals?” to explore the next three categories in the Vaiśeṣika ontology: universals, individuators, and inherence. This is at once a discourse internal to the Vaiśeṣika, raising and attempting to solve a problem as it arises within that school’s basic framework, and simultaneously a comparative project, drawing especially on discussions of individuation in classical Platonism and its contemporary interpreters.

As an historical and interpretive study, the paper shows the inadequacy of Jonardon Ganeri’s “graph-theoretic” account of the Vaiśeṣika ontology, and presents Udayana as an troubled innovator who struggles to fully reckon with the traditional account of individuation and commonality as it was attested in the commentaries of Praśastapāda and Śrīdhara. I argue that the three categories of universals, individuators, and inherence are best understood as metaphysical principles of commonality, peculiarity, and relation quite distinct from the first three mundane categories. This has important implications for Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika understandings of causality, time and eternity, the process of inferential reasoning, and the limited extent to which the basic Vaiśeṣika framework can be understood as describing cosmogony, and not merely cosmology. I conclude with some brief reflections on the challenges of practicing ontology in purely abstract terms, as Udayana and the mature Platonists sometimes attempt.