 The broader appeal of Śrīharṣa’s work is independent of whether he was a defender of Advaita Vedānta. Throughout The Sweets of Refutation, Śrīharṣa’s aim is to demonstrate the instability of rational inquiry within philosophy. For any argument that a philosopher may offer for her view, there is always an equally persuasive counterargument that undermines its conclusion. Since the deliverances of reason are always vulnerable to rational defeat in this way, they cannot constitute good evidence for any philosophical view. To illustrate this idea, Śrīharṣa targets a philosophical method—what we may call the method of definition—pursued by Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers in informal logic, epistemology and  metaphysics.[5]  The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers use this method of definition to describe a number of ontological categories which are supposed to capture the structure of reality, and a number of epistemological and logical categories which are supposed to capture various components of rational inquiry. What the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher wishes to affirm in the end is a dualistic ontology: the commonsense view on which reality consists of a plurality of things distinct from the self or consciousness, e.g., material things, their qualities, relations amongst them, and so on. Śrīharṣa wants to show that any attempt at defining the epistemological, logical, and ontological categories that the dualist needs for the success of her project must fail: the very standards of rational inquiry that the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers adopt undermine their theoretical enterprise from within.