Apóha - nominalismus a poznání v buddhistické filosofii – Holba Jiří (2025)

Apoha, literally “exclusion,” is a Buddhist semantic theory through which Buddhist nominalist philosophers attempted to resolve the status of universals. While Indian metaphysical realists argued that universals genuinely exist and are simultaneously present in many different things, Buddhists held that only particulars were real and understood universals as mere mental concepts without independent existence. The Indian Buddhist philosopher Dignaga, his successor Dharmakirti and others maintained, for example, that the general term “cow” refers to everything that is not a non-cow. They thus defined a cow as a particular without accepting the realist position that the term “cow” is based on a general “cowness” inherently and eternally present in all individual cows. The nearly six-hundred-year debate between Buddhist nominalists and their realist opponents in India sometimes bears a striking resemblance to the medieval debates between realists and nominalists over the problem of universals. The doctrine of apoha, in which semantics, epistemology and the philosophy of language strongly overlap, is one of the most important and sophisticated subjects in Buddhist philosophy. The contents are in Czech.