What are the differences between Nyaya and Navya Nyaya philosophies?

Question

There are six orthodox Hindu philosophical schools. Nyaya is one of these schools. At some point, the Nyaya philosophy got heavily criticized by the Advaita school. It led to the reformation, where Nyaya philosophers reflected and critically examined their own philosophy. As a result, they came up with a better version of Nyaya philosophy, known as the Navya Nyaya school. Scholars from Bengal, specifically from Nabadwip, played a vital role in this revitalization of the Nyaya school. One of the founders of this Navya Nyaya school was Raghunatha Shiromani from Nabadwip. He lived in the 15th-16th century.

In which philosophical aspects Navya Nyaya school differ from the Nyaya school? How did Navya Nyaya (or Nyaya v2.0, if I may say) overcome its weakness? How did it plug its loopholes? So much so that they became a solid philosophical school, which efficiently dealt with its rival schools and remained relevant till the 18th century.

Answer 1

As per my limited understanding, what I've heard is that Navya Nyaya was primarily concerned with the precision of language - for instance, existence of God cannot be truly ascertained without being precise about what is "existence" or "God". The precision of what is subject, what is predicate etc. In a way, it sort of predates Western Analytic philosophy (that arose in early 20th century). Western Analytic philosophy's sole goal was to convert every philosophical proposition into logic statements, based on topics such as Set theory. "Shakespeare exists/existed" for instance is bad syntax as per this school. One ought to convert it to - There exists/existed an entity c, such that "x is the author of Macbeth", when x = c, and not otherwise. So, we keep checking every entity till we land on one that is the author of Macbeth and we say, yes Shakespeare exists/existed; if not none. Of course, there are a lot more complicated ways of converting statements; the primary idea is that the language that is normally used in discussions, is imprecise to decide these topics and hence we need to convert it to logic statements. This idea can be traced back to Leibniz (1646-1716) in the Western philosophy canon, who wanted to create a logical system to discuss about metaphysics.

Navya Nyaya achieves the same end of precision, not by converting to logic statements in another notation (like Set theory), but through modifying the existing language itself to be more clear on what is subject, what is predicate, what is definition etc. It differs from traditional Nyaya in one such way. Best is to therefore learn Sanskrit before diving deep into Navya Nyaya, since English translation would muddle the precision. I'd recommend the following article for more clarity and how Navya Nyaya betters Nyaya -

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/early-modern-india/#MetTheDef