East Asian RFP The God-Realism Connection in Indian and Analytic Philosophy

The God-Realism Connection:
The project is to unearth a link between Realism and Theism on the one hand and Anti-Realism and Atheism on the other, in Classical Indian and contemporary Analytic Philosophy. Sanskrit classics such as “Flower-Offerings of Logic”(Nyaayakusumaanjali)and “Distilled Truth about the Self”(Aatmatattvaviveka) by the realist theist (11th century Nyaaya philosopher) Udayana, and Epistemology texts reflecting the Atheism and Anti-Realism of his Buddhist targets of attack such as Dharmakirti, Prajnakaragupta and Jnasrimitra, would be my textual focus. This project is continuous with the larger project I undertook two decades back, calling it:
“Realism-Links”. It started with "I Touch what I Saw”(1992)where I defended the claim: (a)Realism about the external world entails realism about the self. In “Non-Particular Individuals”(1995),I argued: (b)Realism about the external world requires realism about property-universals and exemplification/inherence.
In this project, I launch the third Realism-Link: (c)Realism about the external world, combined with the Nyaaya /Dummett insight that existence without knowability/ conceivability is unintelligible, entails the existence of an omniscient, timeless but tense-aware God (who would have to be able to act creatively inside time while Himself staying above time). Out of the comparative analytical study of these 7th--11th century Sanskrit texts side by side with late 20th and early 21st century Anglo American philosophical texts,a culture-crossing engagement with the logical connections between (dis)believing in a mind-independent external world and (dis)believing in an Omniscient God is expected to emerge. Such bridgework between Indian and Western analytic philosophies in the field of metaphysics has been rarely done before.