Facing the Boundaries of Epistemology: KumArila on Error and Negative Cognition

KumArila's commitment to the explanation of cognitive experiences not confined to valid cognition alone, allows a detailed discussion of border-line cases (such as doubt and error) and the admittance of absent entities as separate instances of cognitive objects. Are such absent entities only the negative side of positive entities? Are they, hence, fully relative (since a cow could be said to be the absent side of a horse and vice versa)? Through the analysis of a debated passage of the AelokavArttika, the present article proposes a reconstruction of KumArila's view of the relation between erroneous cognitions and cognitions of absence (abhAva), and considers the philosophical problem of the ontological status of absence