Indian logic doesn’t just argue — it revises reality. Dr. Nirmalya Guha reveals why Nyaya reasoning is fundamentally superior to Western formal logic. The core insight: in Greek logic, fallacies are errors in inference; in Indian logic, a fallacy is a fact in the world that blocks bad conclusions — a profound ontological difference.Dr. Guha demonstrates that Nyaya validity is always contextual, unlike universal Western syllogistic forms. He walks through the machinery of tarka — reductive reasoning tools like prasanga tarka (reductio ad absurdum) and laghava-gaurava tarka (parsimony) — showing how these instruments continuously refine an always-provisional knowledge database (pramana). The Nyaya system doesn’t demand certainty; it demands defeasibility — the capacity to revise.The lecture offers a rigorous comparison with Aristotle’s Barbara syllogism and shows how Indian logicians handled the same inferential structures but embedded them in reality-sensitive, context-dependent frameworks that make them far richer tools for navigating an uncertain world.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Nirmalya Guha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi. His primary areas of expertise and interest include logic, semantics, epistemology, and Indian philosophy.