A Philosophy of Commands

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a CC BY- NC- ND 4.0 licence. Why do individuals obey commands? The Mīmāṃsā school of Sanskrit philosophy has debated this question for millennia, oscillating among three central positions held by philosophers such as Kuṃārila, Maṇḍana, Bhartṛhari, and Prabhākara. Maṇḍana interpreted commands as descriptive statements, suggesting a correlation between enjoined action and expected output. He argued that knowledge of this means-end relationship accounts for command adherence. Conversely, Prabhākara posited that one obeys a command because one feels enjoined, and only later does one analyze what is being asked and why. Bhartṛhari introduced an 'intuition' theory, or a unified account for both commands and descriptive sentences which asserts that the listener's innate inclinations explain command adherence. In A Philosophy of Commands: On Maṇḍana Miśra's Vidhiviveka, contributors discuss these competing models through the lens of Maṇḍana's Discernment about Commands. The book offers the first English translation of a key chapter detailing Maṇḍana's position in the Discernment about Commands, in addition to the original edition of the same text.