Śrila Prabhupāda often talked about the four defects of souls “conditioned” by the material energy—(a) imperfect senses, (b) illusions, (c) committing mistakes, and (d) cheating propensity. He then explained that humans are incapable of acquiring perfect knowledge due to these four defects. Finally, he stated that the Vedic texts are produced by persons free of these four defects, therefore, they constitute...
Truth in Vedic philosophy is defined quite differently than in Western philosophy. While Western philosophy talks about empirical and rational proofs of truth, Vedic philosophy gives the following peculiar conception of truth. If you reject the truth, then you will commit bad deeds; due to those bad deeds, you will suffer; when you suffer, then you will change what you call...
Epistemology in the West is defined as the “theory of knowledge”, especially with regard to the methods of knowing and questions about whether these methods deliver truth. However, owing to numerous dualisms in Western philosophy, including the strict separation between the observer and the observed, it has never been clear if knowledge is possible. Even if we assume that reality is...
All students of epistemology cite many categories of experience that are not knowledge, in order to distinguish them from knowledge. These categories are different in Western and Vedic systems of philosophy. In particular, in the latter, dreams are not considered false, although there are other categories that are false. This post discusses the difference between the various categories that are considered...
This is the transcript of the seventh episode of the Shabda Podcast. In this episode, we will talk about the problem of epistemology or how do we know. We will go over some historical material regarding the methods of knowledge prevalent in Western philosophy and then look at the same problem from the perspective of Vedic philosophy. At the risk of...
How do we know something to be true? This question has preoccupied philosophy for as long as we can remember. Many answers are offered to solve the problem, but each one suffers from a different problem. For example, reason is a useful method of knowing, but reason only compares a claim with the axioms or assumptions; how do you know that...
While going down in an elevator, it recently occurred to me that the elevator doesn’t move unless we indicate the floor it has to go to, quite different from an escalator that keeps moving regardless of whether anyone has anywhere to go to. This difference is a useful way to understand how quantum “motion” is different from classical motion. This post...
Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day. However, to know that the watch is broken, we must observe it when it tells the time incorrectly rather than when it tells it correctly. This analogy is a useful way to understand the problem in modern science because clearly there are times in which science makes correct predictions. Those...
The below is a modified version of a response I wrote recently on Google+ in response to a question about the conflict between reason and faith. The response is also detailed in my recent book Uncommon Wisdom. This essay will argue that the manner in which science has construed the use of reason (and experience) – i.e., the path to discovery – cannot...
The problem in any kind of existence begins from a very old distinction between appearance and reality. Appearances are obviously how things seem to us in our perception although not everything that we perceive does really also exist. How things seem to us is a property of our perceptual apparatus—senses, mind, brain, etc. The reality, on the other hand, is supposed...
