6 – Siderits may complain that this is question-begging since the thesis is in question in our discussion. Perhaps it is so at this early stage, when I have not answered all his objections, but by the end of the discussion the point will stand. 7 – See Chakrabarti, ‘‘Non-Particular Individuals,’’ p. 141. 8 – In the foregoing discussion I admit that non-particular individuals are given to us in indeterminate perception, and thus Siderits may spare me for disrespecting the realist intuitions that are so dear to the Naiya¯yikas. 9 – Both the assumptions reveal the characteristic Buddhist position defended by Siderits in this article and elsewhere. 10 – The preferred Yoga¯ca¯ra-Sautra¯ntika formulation of this assumption would replace the term ‘‘individuals’’ with ‘‘ephemeral particulars.’’ I think Siderits himself would prefer to use the term ‘‘individuals’’ given his hesitant agreement with my positive thesis. He writes that ‘‘there is something odd about the notion of perceiving a pure particular as such. There may well be good reasons for dismissing this as just one more version of ‘the myth of the given’.’’ 11 – It is possible that reality contains particulars and facts; however, the epistemological considerations discussed here cannot offer any support to these metaphysical claims. There may be independent considerations to support the claim that reality displays propositional structure in addition to non-propositional structure. But that is not my concern in this discussion. Perceiving Particulars Blindly: Remarks on a Nya¯ya-Buddhist Controversy Stephen H. Phillips Philosophy Department, University of Texas at Austin Introduction The discussion by Mark Siderits in this issue—‘‘Perceiving Particulars’’—and two pieces by Monima Chadha—the first her article ‘‘Perceptual Cognition: A Nya¯yaKantian Approach’’ (Chadha 2001) and the second her reply to Siderits in this issue—have taught me much.1 I have little to add beyond agreeing on the whole with Siderits and making a few tweaks concerning Nya¯ya. Chadha astutely captures the insight of Gan˙ges´a, the fourteenth-century Naiya¯yika cited by her (and by Siderits): indeterminate perception does not have a ‘‘particular as such’’ as its object (vis ˙ aya), but only, as she says, a non-particular individual such as a universal or another qualifier that is in principle recurrent (recurrent out in the world), perceivPhilosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 3 July 2004 389–403 389 > 2004 by University of Hawai‘i Press able again, and thus expressible by a (repeatable) word. Nevertheless, the holism of Wilfred Sellars and Kant and the attack on the ‘‘given’’ are not in the spirit of the Nya¯ya approach to epistemology, which is thoroughly externalist, as Siderits suggests. In several places (one presented below), Gan˙ges´a shows us controversy within Nya¯ya about indeterminate perception, including a rival Naiya¯yika opinion that bare particulars are indeterminately grasped. This is not his own view, which is that positing indeterminate perception of qualifiers and not also of qualificanda is all that we need. But all in all the issue is not such a big deal, since perception does generate determinate knowledge of particulars, although these are always at least barely clothed. The notion of a ‘‘bare particular’’—that is, the qualificandum thought about as distinct from all of its qualifiers—is an abstraction from what we directly perceive. We know it only by inference (specifically, by an inference of the sa¯ma¯nyato dr ˙ s ˙ t ˙ a type). Indeterminate perception is also known only by inference. Even in Navya Nya¯ya, the big deal is what is known determinately in perception, which is the principal way we know anything (the jyes ˙ t ˙ a prama¯n ˙ a). And, clearly, determinate perceptual awareness is often of a particular—‘‘The pot is blue’’ and ‘‘That’s a pot,’’ for instance. The particular known—indeed, the bare particular—is an intrinsic part of the vis ˙ ayata¯, ‘‘intentionality,’’ which is the relation between the knowing cognition and the world known.2 Contrary to what Chadha says in her first article, ‘‘seeing as’’ does not require mental construction,...