Philosophy on Stage: Theatricality, Ritual and Logic in Ancient India

The article analyses the public debates in ancient India, distinguishing the different modalities of these practices as they appear in the compendiums of logic (Nyāyasūtra) and in the medical Sanskrit literature (Carakasamhitā). A special attention is paid to one of these kinds of debate, called vitandā, which allows a dialectic limited to refutation and dismissed the defence of the own point of view. This type of dialectic, exercised by different schools of thought in which the negative argument would acquire a fundamental role, would find its scope of development in religious traditions as Madhyamaka Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. The justification of such practices, in which the logic is represented as in a theatre, will give way to an ironic philosophy which found many points of contact with contemporary thought