Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge c7.83

c7.83

(110) We may now draw our conclusions. The term 'positivism' has been applied to characterize the philosophy of Comte and his successors because of their anxiety to rid philosophy of speculative elements and have its basis in the data and methods of the natural sciences.³ Empiricists like Hume and Mach have been called positivists because of their forthright rejection of metaphysics and attempt to confine philosophy to the results of observation. More recently, the term has been used of the philosophy of the Logical Positivists¹ (the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein of the *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*, Ayer of *Language, Truth and Logic*) who while rejecting metaphysics have broken away from the narrow empiricism and psychological atomism of positivists like Mach and Hume and have endeavoured to base their positivism on logical foundations.² The term is also sometimes loosely employed to refer to the modern Analytical Philosophers, who are really the successors of Russell and Moore. None of these positivists have attempted to disprove the validity of perception and inference by metaphysical arguments as Jayarāśi does. On the contrary, they have been anxious to preserve the validity of perception and inference as recognized methods of knowing in the natural sciences, although they have tried to rid these concepts of speculative assumptions and linguistic confusions The only point of comparison that we can see is that like Jayarāśi the modern positivist will also say that there are no ultimate 'tattvas' in a metaphysical sense, but the latter would not try to deny or disprove their existence and would merely hold that assertions about such super-sensuous realities are strictly meaningless We cannot therefore agree with Warder's description of Jayarāśi's school as 'positivists according to modern ideas'.