Jaipur’s town plan has been the subject of a multitude of suggestions regarding its origin. Jaipur was founded by Jaisingh II in 1727, and has since then been the capital of the State of Rajasthan, India. The city, which remains almost intact in respect of its foundation scheme, is laid out according to a plan with straight streets of varying breadths, residential blocks for different occupational groups, a palace complex and an astronomical observatory in the middle of the city. Such wellplanned cities are rarely found in northern India. In contrast to the absence of excavated planned cities, there are a number of treatises dealing with town planning, which provide detailed instructions for siting and arranging cities. Therefore many have sought the origin of the ground plan of Jaipur among the plans described in Hindu technical literature on architecture and town-planning. Jaisingh also had intensive contacts with Europeans, especially during the years preceeding the foundation of the city. As a result some have taken European town plans as their starting-point in their attempt to find sources of influence. In addition, Jaisingh’s deep interest in astronomy seems to have played a central role in the design of the city.

The present study discusses specific features of the traditions of rulership and education in the Amber House. These traditions included elements of the religious and philosophical sphere of Hinduism, as well as more recent traditions of the Kachvåhå rulers, who had adopted a great deal from the Mughals. After a description of the process of the layout, the town plans that have been proposed as models for Jaipur are presented and discussed in the light of the circumstances under which various beliefs about the model for Jaipur have emerged.

The arrangement of the urban space and the actions of Jaisingh are analysed in an interpretive chapter. Two principle objects of examination in this chapter are the concepts of religion and political power as they are connected with the kingship. Approaching the kingship from the religious perspective, the king is deified. Approaching the kingship from the perspective of political power, the king is proclaimed universal emperor. The town plan of Jaipur is analysed as an expression of these two approaches.

The dominant topic of this study pertains to the relationship between the possession of properties on the part of linguistic items, such as words, concatenations of words or sentences, and the possibility of truly ascribing those properties to the concerned units. It can be verified that among the qualities which linguistic expressions can exhibit there are some which could be correctly attributed to them only by employing items which (numerically) differ from the pertinent expressions. As various properties exist which exhibit this particular feature the question how different phenomena of the impossibility of self-ascription are related to each other attains relevance. There is evidence to the effect that the existence of linguistic qualities exemplifying the pertinent peculiarity has been realized even in some non-Western philosophical tradition. For that reason the present investigation possesses both historical and problem-oriented ingredients. On the one hand the goal is pursued to substantiate the claim that the phenomenon of impossibility of self-ascription has been recognized in a non-Western tradition, at least with respect to particular linguistic properties. This task is performed by an analysis of a textual segment within a work which has been written in the tradition of linguistic philosophy in India, presumably in the fifth or sixth century AD, and by an attempt to demonstrate that a most coherent argumentative structure can be distilled from the textual segment supposing that it concerns the topic of impossibility of self-ascription with respect to semantic functions. On the other hand the question of how the impossibility of self-ascription regarding particular semantic functions is connected with problems of self-ascription regarding lack of truth constitutes a major concern of the study. It is contended that the latter phenomenon involves specific aspects and that accordingly the thesis insinuated by some scholars that the investigated text could provide a basis for the solution of truth-paradoxes is unwarranted. In view of the fact that the supposition that self-ascriptions of lack of truth always lack the property of expressing a truth is not self-evident it has been endeavoured to support the plausibility of this tenet and to show that this stance need not lead to inconsistencies, if it were assumed that only a particular type of content differing from a linguistically expressed content exhibits the qualities of being definitely true or untrue and of always complying with ‘classical’ inference-rules — in particular modus ponendo ponens and reductio ad absurdum — as well as with a principle according to which a linguistic unit expresses a truth exactly if its content is true. A contention is that the postulation of this type of content need not be made merely ad hoc. The envisaged position implies that the existence of indexical elements is by no means the only factor preventing that linguistic synonymy guarantees identity of truth value and that even linguistic items without deictic ingredients can be simultaneously linked to various types of content. As the investigations also refer to other phenomena suggesting that being simultaneously related to a multitude of contents is not an uncommon feature of linguistic expressions they touch on questions of interpretation and translation and thereby affect some general issues of the humanities.

Purpose of the article is to provide support for the contention that two fundamental treatises representing the teaching of Madhyamaka, viz. the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās and the Vigrahavyāvartanī, were designed to establish and justify a metaphysical tenet claiming that no particulars of any kind can exist on some level of final analysis and that this was the only primary concern of those works. Whereas the former text is in the first place dedicated to providing proofs of the central metaphysical thesis the major objective of the second treatise lies in a defense of the claim against possible objections. A correlate of this view regarding the content of those two works is on the one hand that the philosophy of the founder of the Madhyamaka-school essentially consists in a metaphysical teaching implying a radical rejection of a stance propagated in earlier Buddhist schools according to which objects of ordinary experience could be reduced to or explained by the existence of other sorts of particulars that can be theoretically postulated. On the other hand the exegesis advocated in the article implies that theorems pertaining to the nature of language or the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality are not at all a predominant issue in the pertinent texts and presumably were not a major matter of concern of early Madhyamaka in general. Accordingly matters pertaining to questions of semantics attain relevance at best in the form of objective consequences which the metaphysical doctrine might entail. The paper focuses on the second chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās as well as the segment of the Vigrahavyāvartanī which deals with the first major problem, represented by the verses 1 – 4 and 21 – 29. The reason is that a detailed and thoroughgoing investigation of these two textual passages is suited to disprove a contention voiced by Western scholars who suppose that the teaching of the founder of Madhyamaka embodies a particular claim pertaining to the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality.