Universal Properties in Indian Philosophical Traditions
Early Grammarians on Universals of Words and Meanings
In ancient India systematic metaphysics started with a linguistic turn. Ontological concepts and controversies arose in the context of musings on meanings of words and debates on declensions, unlike in ancient Greece, where metaphysics arose out of wondering about numbers, figures, and nature. In Pāṇini's grammar and his early commentaries (between the fourth and second centuries BCE) the three crucial technical terms for a universal—sāmānya, jāti, and ākṛti—were already explicitly in use. Philosophers of language dabbled in metaphysics since Patañjali's "Great Commentary" to Pāṇini's grammar. The device of adding a tva or tā (roughly equivalent to the English "ness") to any nominal root x, yields, as meaning, the property of being x. From substance (dravya) one can thus mechanically abstract substance-ness (dravya-tva), from real (sat) and reality (sattā). With this device in place it was natural to make the distinction between an individual substance and the property that makes it what it is, its abstract essence. But even to parse this talk of concrete cows rather than of the bovine essence, the grammarians drew the distinction between talking about one particular cow and talking about any cow or a cow in general (VMB on Pāṇini sutra 1.2.58 and 1.2.64).
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