 Śrīharṣa’s incisive arguments against Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika informal logic, epistemology and metaphysics were influential amongst the defenders of both Advaita Vedānta and Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika  philosophy.[6]  However, they should also be of considerable interest to the contemporary reader. In the second half of the twentieth century, Anglophone philosophers have grappled with various difficulties that arise for definitions of epistemological notions like knowledge and metaphysical notions like causation. While attacking the method of definition pursued by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers, Śrīharṣa anticipates many of these difficulties. His reaction to these difficulties is pessimistic: he takes these difficulties to demonstrate the futility of offering definitions for commonsense epistemological and ontological categories. Śrīharṣa’s arguments for this conclusion remain as relevant to our current philosophical concerns as they were to those of his contemporaries: if his arguments are successful, they will show that philosophical inquiry doesn’t really take us very far when it comes to illuminating fundamental epistemological and metaphysical concepts.