Claus Oetke

The two essays in this book are united by a common philosophical concern. While the first is dedicated to a problem in systematic philosophy, the second mainly deals with the interpretation of a specific issue articulated in a certain Indian philosophical tradition. In the first essay Oetke focusses on a complex of questions that occupied philosophy ever since a Cretan asserted that no Cretan tells the truth. Since the discussion of the family of truth paradoxes was very intensive in 20th century logic and analytical philosophy, one would not have expected essentially new insights into the source and the range of those paradoxes, and yet this is exactly what this essay offers by emphasizing the need to distinguish different types of meaning. The second essay addresses issues in the hermeneutics of classical texts. It takes its start from Oetke’s final (unpublished) comment on a series of articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy that deal with the interpretation of the sadvitīyaprayoga (“proof-formulation that entails a counterpart”). Oetke generalizes the point of his critical observations by showing the relevance of acknowledging diverse types of both meaning and interpretation in the methodology of research not only in the history of Indian philosophy. His essay is a substantial contribution to the contemporary literature of methodology in the history of philosophy in general.