Debates In Indian Philosophy

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.

Contributed articles on Vedanta, Mimamsa and Nyaya philosophy; previously published in Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

About the Author Prof. Radhavallabh Tripathi is known for his original contributions to literature as well as for his studies on Nāṭyaśāstra and Sāhityaśāstra. He has published 162 books, 227 research papers and critical essays. He has received 35 national and international awards and honours for his literary contributions. About the Book Vāda, meaning debates, dialogues, discussions, was the quintessential of Indian spirit, enabling and promoting the growth of different philosophical and knowledge systems of India. It percolated deep into our mindset and enriched the moral, ethical, religious and sociocultural edifice of anything that was essentially Indian in nature. As continuation of Ānvikṣīkī from the bc era, vāda helped thrive Indian traditional knowledge systems. It subsists on diversity and its tradition envisages pluralism. Most of our Sanskrit works, covering a wide gamut of knowledge systems, are structured in the techniques of debate. This reality applies not only to the philosophical writings, but to Indian medical systems (Ayurveda), Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya and Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana as well. Even great epics like Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata are no exceptions. Vāda culture involved verbal duals, attacks and even violence of speech, and all major religious systems — old or modern — were parties to it. This book also elucidates how vāta was vital and critical for the growth of our socio-political fabrics. It shows how some of the major conflicts in philosophical systems were centred around karma, jñāna, choice between violence and non-violence, pravr̥tti and nivr̥tti. It also presents the manifestations of vāda on a vast canvas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern spiritual and religious gurus like Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti and Vinoba Bhave were men of dialogues. Our scholars have applied the varied techniques of vāda against the philosophical and scientific systems of the West to prove them correct. This collector’s issue should enthrall a wide audience of philosophers, scholars and believers in Indian knowledge systems.

Indian philosophy was more decisively established with the Upanishads, the first of which may have been written in the 7th century BC. Early Upanishads, which dominate the late ancient period of thought, were key to the emergence of several classical philosophies. In the Upanishads, views about Brahman and atman were proposed. Buddhism, now a major world religion, also appeared in the ancient period of Indian philosophy. The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, lived during the 6th century BC. Religious, or spiritual, metaphysics, a field that currently receives little attention among philosophers in academia in the West, considers the question of the nature of a Supreme Being and its relation to the world. Indian Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and theistic Vedanta all have contributed to this debate. Within spiritual metaphysics, an insistence on spiritual monism is probably the most important consideration that Indian thought upholds, though with numerous variations: Much Buddhist philosophy promotes the idea of the interdependence of everything; theistic Vedanta finds no gap between the world and God; and Advaita Vedanta insists that everyone’s true self is nothing other than Brahman, the Absolute. This book presents information on some of the basic concepts of this subject. Contents: • Zoroastrianism • Judaism • Christianity • Islam • Tribal Religions of India • Phenomenology • Vedanta Philosophy • Maya: Nature and Arguments

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 selection of previously untranslated documents from the French debates about Christian philosophy provides a long-needed complement to available English-language literature on the subject.

First Published in 2001. While classical Indian philosophy is incredibly rich in rigorous discussion s of topics in epistemology, logic and metaphysics, comparable discussions in the area s of ethics, politics and aesthetics were not as extensive as might have been expected. The selections in this volume discuss Indian treatments of topics in the theory of value like the proper ends of life, the relation of dharma and moksa, liberation and pleasure, the sources of our knowledge of right and wrong, the ethics of non-violence, the status of the supra-moral. egoism and altruism, the theory of rasa, aesthetic experience and catharsis.