1. Phillips on Nyāya and disjunctivism In his celebrated monograph on classical Nyāya epistemology, Epistemol- ogy in Classical India: The Knowledge Sources of the Nyāya School, which builds on his magisterial co-translation of the chapter about perception in Gaṅgeśa’s Tattvacintāmaṇi, Stephen Phillips has advanced an interpre- tation of Nyāya philosophy of perception as consisting in naïve realism about the character of genuine perceptual experience and disjunctivism in response to the so-called problem of perception. 1 His view, as he has pithily summarized it recently, is that “ontologically, Nyāya takes a disjunctivist position: an illusion is a different kind of critter than a genuine perception, since its intentionality is different.” 2 Here is how the argument goes, in the full formulation from his 2012 book. Phillips writes: The intentionality or having-an-object (viṣayatā) of cognitions is a di- rect relation between cognitions and things in the world, with no inter- mediate realm of sense data, ideal forms, or propositions. A veridical cognition indicates something’s being some way that it is. That is its object. Strictly speaking, cognitions do not have content. They have intentionality which by nature is the hitting of things. . . . What about cognitions that are non-veridical, whose indications do not hit the facts? According to Nyāya, a non-veridical cognition also has an intentionality that is directed towards a reality or realities. When we misperceive a rope as a snake, taking a to be F when it is not F, an F-hood bit of intentionality, which originates in previous experience of Fs—of snakes in our example—directs one towards that property, which is thoroughly real, among the world’s furniture, though it is not experi- enced where it exists in fact, which is in snakes, not in the rope at hand. At work would be a mental disposition (saṃskāra) which under normal conditions would prompt a remembering but which in the deviant con- ditions of perceptual error fuses a snakehood bit of intentionality into 7 Is Nyāya disjunctivist? The ontology of illusion Jonardon Ganeri DOI: 10.4324/9781003401780-10