Contemporary Indian Philosophy

Contemporary Indian Philosophy has arisen in awareness of the need to reconcile the forces of tradition with those of modernity. It is not merely repetitive. There is, in it, a definite attempt to construct a system. It develops under the conviction that the basic aim of Philosophy is to cultivate a world-view. This requires an awareness of the existential condition of life as also the con-sciousness of life s ulti-mate ideal, viz., redem-ption, not only of the individual, but of the total human race. It emphasises the ultimacy of spiritual values; yet it demonstrates that the roots of spiritual life lie in conditions that are essentially existential. The present study seeks to highlight these aspects of Contemporary Indian Philosophy. It is an attempt to rethink, in an academic manner, the thoughts of the contemporary thinkers, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya, S. Radhakrishnan, and Mohammad Iqbal. Different aspects of their thoughts have been systematised, categorised and placed under suitable philosophical heads in this work.

This collection of essays provides the specialist, and also the layman interested in philosophy, with examples of the best philosophical work being done in India today. Indologists and Sanskrit scholars have for generations had access to Indian expositions of ancient texts. Rather less has been known about what is being done in fields of recent and current interest. Indian philosophers today are part of a worldwide community of scholars as concerned with technical logical problems, with analysis and phenomenology, as philosophers anywhere else and this is what this book reflects. It also shows the younger philosophers, many of whom have studied outside India, engaged in the cut and thrust of contemporary debate. Indian philosophers have the advantage of not having been swept off their feet by any one of the movements in contemporary philosophy. But they are alive to them all and have their own contribution to make to on-going discussions. The reader will find treatments of the mind-body problem, the nature of moral language, the experience of nothingness in Buddhism and Existentialism, and an analysis of aesthetic experience, to mention only a few of the chapters in this lively book.

This book introduces the vast topic of Indian philosophy. It begins with a study of the major Upanishads, and then surveys the philosophical ideas contained in the Bhagavadgita. After a short excursion into Buddhism, it summarizes the salient ideas of the six systems of Indian philosophy: Nyaya, Vaisesika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa, and Vedanta. It concludes with an introduction to contemporary Indian thought.

This volume traces the impact of colonialism and Western philosophy on the dialogical structure of Indian thought and highlights the general tendency in contemporary Indian philosophy to avoid direct dialogue as opposed to the rich and elaborate debates that formed the pivot of the classical Indian tradition. It defines three possible areas of debate: between Swami Vivekanand and Mahatama Gandhi; V.D. Savarkar and Mahatama Gandhi; and Sri Aurobindo and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya—on state and pre-modern society, religion and politics, and science and spiritualism respectively. This book will be of considerable interest not only to students and scholars of Indian philosophy and religious studies but to scholars of politics and sociology as well.

This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule. Bhushan's and Garfield's own essays on the work of this period contextualize the philosophical essays collected and connect them to broader intellectual, artistic and political movements in India. This volume yields a new understanding of cosmopolitan consciousness in a colonial context, of the intellectual agency of colonial academic communities, and of the roots of cross-cultural philosophy as it is practiced today. It transforms the canon of global philosophy, presenting for the first time a usable collection and a systematic study of Anglophone Indian philosophy. Many historians of Indian philosophy see a radical disjuncture between traditional Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian academic philosophy that has abandoned its roots amid globalization. This volume provides a corrective to this common view. The literature collected and studied in this volume is at the same time Indian and global, demonstrating that the colonial Indian philosophical communities were important participants in global dialogues, and revealing the roots of contemporary Indian philosophical thought. The scholars whose work is published here will be unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. But the reader will discover that their work is creative, exciting, and original, and introduces distinctive voices into global conversations. These were the teachers who trained the best Indian scholars of the post-Independence period. They engaged creatively both with the classical Indian tradition and with the philosophy of the West, forging a new Indian philosophical idiom to which contemporary Indian and global philosophy are indebted.

The book includes essay which are all written by philosophers of or about forty -five years of age. They fall into two main groups: those in which the writer devotes himself chiefly to the exposition of the great Vedic tradition as he has apprehended it and made it the basis of his own life’s work; and those in which the writer, while on the whole remining true to the spirit of that tradition, has sought to give new interpretations of it, either by instituting comparisons of it with the Western doctrines most closely allied to it or by treating of modern problems in a way which, though suggested by what he has learned from the West, is yet stamped with the mark of his own racial sympathy. Western readers will naturally find the latter group more attractive; but this volume will have failed of its purpose if it does not give them some sense of the truth that underlies even the essays with which, owing to the presuppositions ion which these are founded, they find themselves least in sympathy.