This paper chronicles the cycles of scientism and romanticism that structure the discourse on science and technology in India since 1850. However, it does not promise a detailed review of this enormous archive. On the contrary, it aspires to identify the principle concerns, the important interlocutors, the prevalent frameworks and contextualizes them socio-politically, in both their local and global embodiments. In historical time, as has been suggested elsewhere, the scientism-romanticism dialectic acquires diversified formulations. This review suggests that in post-colonial India (...) there has been an attempt to situate science within culture across this essential dichotomy. (shrink)

Mode of philosophizing in post-colonial India is deeply influenced by two centuries of British rule, wherein a popular divide emerged between doing classical Indian philosophy and Western philosophy. However, a closer look reveals that the divide is not exclusive, since there are several criss-cross modes of philosophizing shaped by the forces of colonialism and nationalist consciousness. Contemporary challenges lie in raising new philosophical questions relevant to our time, keeping in view both what has been inherited and what has been imbibed (...) in these centuries-old civilizational journeys. One needs to recognize India’s rich intellectual traditions based on cultural diversity, and at the same time raise fundamental questions that are transcendental in nature, yet historically rooted in our temporal presence. The challenge to articulate the nature of Indian philosophy has remained one of the daunting tasks for scholars of philosophy. Contemporariness of Indian philosophy is another issue to be deliberated. Contemporariness lies not only in raising new questions to classical Indian philosophies, but also in finding newness in old questions. It should further include engaging the classical philosophies with new methodological questions, be it Western philosophical methods or ones internally generated. Contemporariness will include narrating new stories driven by the dynamics of the present, where drive for questioning comes from the authentic philosophical issues of our time. (shrink)

Materialism is considered to be an anathema to Indian philosophy. Despite this, Indian tradition boasts of a strong materialist trend predating the Vedas. This paper traces the proto-materialist ideas as found in the ancient Tantra and pre-classical or original Sāṃkhya. Representing the naturalistic trend in Indian philosophy, ancient Tantra identified the brain as the seat of human consciousness. The pre-classical Sāṃkhya considered matter as the primal non-intelligent or non-sentient first cause from which the universe was to evolve. It considers the (...) material cause to be self-sufficient for the purpose of producing the world; the principle of consciousness is potentially contained in the primeval matter. This paper aims to provide an overview of the Indian materialist viewpoint for multidisciplinary scholars. (shrink)

Though the resurgence of Hindu nationalism as a political phenomenon is well-understood, Meera Nanda is correct in suggesting that the ascendancy of Hindutva has other dimensions, such as the avent placed by cultural nationalist on 'Vedic science'. However, apart from this rudimentary insight, Nanda's contribution, far from being a resounding demonstration of potmodernism's complicity in the projects of Hindu nationalism, is a striking testament to her own commitment to a rigidly positivist, ferociously intolerant, and intellectually sterile conception of modern science (...) and the Enlightenment rationality which she views as the pinnacle of human achievement. Nanda displays an impoverished understanding of the scholarly contributions of the last three decades and is unable to countenance the idea of a plurality of sciences; at the same time, in veiw of her deliberate conflation of Hindutva with Hinduism, and her attempts to equate Hinduism as such with Nazism, it is clear that Hinduism itself stands condemned, and not merely resurgent Hindu nationalism. Nanda's book is an indiscriminate and uninteresting assault upon the innumerable enemies of reason, and it is, ironically, likely to have the result of further eroding confidence in self-proclaimed champions of rationality such as herself and the modern science of which she claims herself to be a true and peerless inheritor. (shrink)

This special issue of Sophia, titled Living without God: A Multicultural Spectrum of Atheism, deals with the intricate issue of approaching atheism—methodologically as well as conceptually—from the perspective of cultural pluralism. What does ‘atheism’ mean in different cultural contexts? Can this term be applied appropriately to different religious discourses which conceptualize God/gods/Goddess/goddesses in hugely divergent ways? Or would that rather be a sort of hegemonic homogenization of all possible modalities of living without God, as Jessica Frazier argues? Is my ‘God’ (...) the same as yours? If not, then how can your atheism be the same as mine? In other words, this issue of Sophia raises the question: Is it not high time that we proposed a comparative study of atheism alongside that of religions, rather than believing that atheism is centered in the ‘Western’ experience? Besides, how can we explore the modalities of atheist religiosity such as we find in Buddhism and Jainism and also, arguably, in certain forms of Hinduism, as far as the Indic traditions are concerned? How might these negotiations of atheism across the multicultural spectrum interrogate our tendency to place atheism within the context of the binary opposition of science and religion? Besides, there is a need to focus on the philosophical negotiations between atheism, theism and agnosticism and the discourses that emerge from such dialogues, including that of postsecularity. (shrink)

Abstract This essay is a response to three review articles on two recently published books dealing with aspects of Hinduism and science: Jonathan Edelmann's Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory, and my own, Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma and Design. The task set by the editor of Zygon for the three reviewers was broad: they could make specific critiques of the two books, or they could use them as starting points to engage in a broad (...) discussion of Hinduism and science, or religion and science in general. In my response, I first provide a fairly detailed reply to David Gosling's many critiques of my book, and in the process call into question his Advaitic conciliation of Hinduism and science. Thomas Ellis's thesis of basic incompatibility between Hinduism and science is much closer to my own viewpoint. One of the main objectives of my book was to explain and illustrate this incompatibility with specific regard to Hindu and Darwinian perspectives on evolution. In this essay I provide a few examples in support of Ellis's incompatibility thesis, encompassing both epistemological and metaphysical dissonances. Finally, I reflect upon Varadaraja V. Raman's wide-ranging exposition on the all-encompassing nature of the Hindu tradition that readily accommodates both religious and scientific quests for knowledge. Raman uses the two books only as starting points for his own thoughts, without reference to my book. I confine myself, accordingly, to a brief critique of his complementarity approach to Hinduism and science, and of his radical inclusivism that enfolds basically all philosophical positions into the warm embrace of the Hindu tradition, including even the extreme antireligious materialism of the Cārvāka. (shrink)

IntroductionI have aims to shed light on two points in this paper. The first is to illumine that Sāṁkhya realist conception is based on false assumptions, and second is to shed light on the idealistic leanings of the system.Text and MethodsI argue that in the light of textual evidences as well as phenomenological interpretation, Sāṁkhya metaphysics can be viewed as a form of idealism. I begin by proposing that the established realistic interpretation is based on an assumption that prakṛti and (...) its evolutes are material and cosmic. In fact, prakṛti and its evolutes are mental categories, and the ontological dualism of puruṣa and prakṛti enunciated in the Sāṁkhya system is nothing but a form of idealism. The prakṛti and its evolutes are the principles/categories of cognition or experience. The conception that evolution is a process in prakṛti that takes place in the presence of puruṣa can also be conceived after the manner of form idealism. In fact, even the conception of puruṣa being simple and pure consciousness, together with its notion of liberation as aloneness of puruṣa and its separation from prakṛti and its activities, tends to advocate a form of idealism.ConclusionThus, notion of evolution and liberation becomes the apparatus to interpret the Sāṁkhya as idealism. (shrink)

In the history of religious and philosophical thought of India, Charvaka philosophy is a unique school of thought that by having theoretical tenets of materialism, provides a purely materialistic interpretation of existence. This school, through the negation of realm beyond sensory perception, asserts to the pure originality of the material and supposes that the only the material reality has validity and the sole authentic perception is the sensory perception. Expressing of atomistic cosmology, apparently, Epicurean philosophy in Greece is the most (...) similar school of thought to Charvakh. The findings of this article which is obtained by method of comparison and analyze, shows that in both schools of thought, reality is based on the originality of the material, two kinds of causes are rejected, human’s existence is explained only based on his material dimension, as well as any existence after death is denied. However, these two of philosophy offer different interpretations about the component of existence and nature and kinds of them as well as about tangible or intangible of them. (shrink)