Online research in philosophy

'When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.' -/- The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is about the art of living - about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs - and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, sometime in the (...) third century CE. It combines an encyclopaedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement. Best known in English through the highly mannered, padded, and inaccurate nineteenth-century translation of Sir Richard Burton, the text is presented here in an entirely new translation into clear, vivid, sexually frank English, together with three commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most famous Sanskrit commentary (13th century) and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators. (shrink)

In this article an attempt is made to detect what could have been the dialectical reasons that impelled the Cārvāka thinker Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa to revise and reformulate the classical materialistic concept of cognition. If indeed according to ancient Cārvākas, cognition is an attribute entirely dependent on the physical body, for Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa cognition is an independent principle that, of course, needs the presence of a human body for manifesting itself. Therefore, he seems to describe cognition according to a double ontology: it is (...) both a principle and a characteristic, both independent and dependent. Two philosophical contexts – Vaiśeṣika and Nyāya – are here taken into account as possible anti-Cārvāka fault-finding points of view that spured Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa to reconsider the Cārvāka perspective. Although we do not have so much textual material on this particular aspect of the ancient and medieval philosophical debate in India, it nonetheless can be supposed that Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa’s reformulation of the concept of cognition was a tentative response to the Vaiśeṣika idea that cognition is not an attribute of the body, rather of the mind (which is here supposed to be eternal), and to the Naiyāyika perspective according to which cognition would be an attribute of an everlasting self. In the case of the Nyāya school, fortunately we have at our disposal the criticism put forward by Vātsyāyana against the materialistic conception of cognition during this time. By examining some Vātsyāyana’s objections, we will see that Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa’s idea of cognition really seems to have the aspect of a consistent answer to them, from a renewed materialistic point of view. (shrink)