Living with Circularity: Realist Responses to Nāgārjuna’s Skeptical Attack

Nāgārjuna (c. 200 CE), the founder of Madhyamaka Buddhism, powerfully argued that there is no way to ultimately justify our sources of knowledge. His main opponents, the Nyāya realists of the Hindu tradition, reject this view, and assert that we are entirely justified in trusting things like our perceptual capacity, our ability to reason, and indeed, the testimony of others. This paper examines how Nyāya’s approach to knowledge instantiates one position that Nāgārjuna claims is untenable: that our sources of knowledge are justified in a way that is interdependent with the justification of their very objects. It then considers how Nyāya realism may be reconciled with the apparent circularity that this approach entails