Contributed articles on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.

Mohanty, J. N. Kalidas Bhattacharyya as a metaphysician.--Deutsch, E. On meaning.--Potter, K. Towards a conceptual scheme for Indian epistemologies.--Ganguly, S. N. Rationality versus reasonableness (freedom: a reinterpretation).--Sen, P. K. A sketch of a theory of properties and relations.--Mohanty, J. N. Perceptual consciousness.--Chattopadhyaya, D. P. Theory and practice.--Bhadra, M. K. The idea of self as purpose, an existential analysis.--Matilal, B. K. Saptabhaṅgī.--Banerjee, H. The identification of mental states and the possibility of freedom.--Chatterjee, M. A phenomenological approach to the self.--Banerjee, S. P. (...) Alienation and freedom.--Sinha, D. Cognitive language in Shahrukh. (shrink)

The History of Indian Philosophy is a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the movements and thinkers that have shaped Indian philosophy over the last three thousand years. An outstanding team of international contributors provide fifty-eight accessible chapters, organis[=z]ed into three clear parts: knowledge, context, concepts philosophical traditions engaging and encounters: modern and postmodern. This outstanding collection is essential reading for students of Indian philosophy. It will also be of interest to those seeking to explore the lasting significance of this rich (...) and complex philosophical tradition, and to philosophers who wish to learn about Indian philosophy through western philosophical and contemporary comparative lens. For complete Contents and authors' abstracts per chapters go to title of the book under Routledge Taylor & Francis ; it is a usual http link not allowed to enter here.> Click on the External Links below . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Jitendra Nath MohantyArindam Chakrabarti (bio)The only philosopher in the global history of philosophy who read and taught (in the original Sanskrit, German, and English) Patañjali, Vyāsa, Śaṅkara, Gangeśa, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Wittgenstein, Hume, McTaggart, Russell, Davidson, and Dummett with equal expertise, depth, and hermeneutic originality is no more. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, who passed away on the 7th of March 2023, was emeritus professor of philosophy at (...) Temple University, Philadelphia. In the last decade of his life, he used to spend long periods in his home in Kolkata, the city where he studied as an undergraduate. Born in in 1928 in Cuttack, Orissa, India, Mohanty ranked first in all public examinations and in his B.A. at Presidency College, Kolkata and his M.A. examination at the University of Calcutta. After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1954, he came back to India and continued his traditional-style tutelage under two great Sanskrit Pandits: Ananta Tarkatirtha (for Navya Nyāya) and Mahamahopadhyaya Yogendranath Bagchi (for Advaita Vedānta). In his long academic career, he taught at the University of Burdwan, the University of Calcutta, the New School for Social Research, the University of Oklahoma, Emory University, and Temple University and held visiting professorships at All Souls College Oxford and Jadavpur University, Kolkata.JNM was trained equally thoroughly in three distinct traditions and styles of philosophy. Even great modern Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, such as K. C. Bhattacharya, B. N. Seal, R. D. Ranade, Radhakrishnan, B. K. Matilal, Daya Krishna, and R. C. Gandhi, could claim scholarly fluency in at most two traditions (of course the "Indian tradition" itself is a maddeningly complex plurality of traditions often sharing very little in common—e.g., Abhidharma Buddhism and Mādhva Dualist Vedānta). But Mohanty was well-versed in and collected insights and inspiration from European (Continental) Phenomenology, and Analytic Anglo-American Philosophy and several of the diverse Sanskrit Indian Philosophical schools of thought. More importantly, as can be demonstrated in detail, it is his expertise in the pluralistic yet both logically and phenomenologically rigorous styles of classical Indian philosophies that made him uniquely capable of doing the bridgework between continental and analytic philosophies of the West—between Husserl and Frege, for example. [End Page 1]Within philosophy in general his interests ranged from metaphysics to epistemology, ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of physics (especially Time), Logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language and mind. Among his numerous publications, the following books achieved bench-mark status in their respective fields: Gaṅgeśa's Theory of Truth: Containing the Text of Gaṅgeśa's Prāmāṇya (jñapti) vāda (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, India, 1966); Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2002); The Self and its Other (Oxford University Press, 2000); Logic, Truth, and the Modalities (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999; Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 1999); The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972); Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1997); Husserl and Frege (Indiana University Press, 1982); Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning (Springer, 1976); and The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development (Yale University Press, 2008). His charming and inspiring intellectual autobiography was published in 2012 by Oxford University press with the title Between Two Worlds: East and West, an Autobiography. Some of his classic papers are collected in the volume edited with an introduction by Purushottama Billimoria: J. N. Mohanty: Essays on Indian Philosophy Traditional and Modern (New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). Philosophy East and West is going to publish a special issue devoted to JNM's life-time achievements in different branches and traditions of philosophy. [End Page 2]Arindam Chakrabarti Philosophy Department, University of Hawai'[email protected] © 2024 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

The last work of the eminent philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal, this book traces the origins of logical theory in India.

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

Here the collected papers explore the whole question of the relation between the mythopoetic and the moral in the context of the Mahabharata. Here we have a story of extreme complexity, characters that are unforgettable, and a cosmic context in which gods and men alike grapple with destiny. The obligations of kinship and friendship jostle with each other. The women characters, as in everyday life, seem to bear a very heavy load of the burden of life and to stand in (...) a key position in almost every conflict. We are presented with predicaments at every turn. At times these predicaments seem to be aggravated by social structure. At other times they are cushioned by it. Philosophical tangles tied up with karma and dharma are interwoven with the mythopoetic material. Perhaps philosophical issues are pinpointed rather more than they are in Greek epic literature. The essays in this book treat the Mahabharata from an unusual angle, fastening on the moral dilemmas it presents. How universal are the dilemmas faced by the characters in the story, and are the dilemmas in fact resolved? In dealing with these questions, the discussions range over the meaning of the purusarthas, the institutions of marriage and the family, the concept of action in the Gita and the special predicaments faced by Draupadi, Arjuna and others. These studies invite the scholar to reflect afresh on the text and encourage the general reader to find in epic literature much that is relevant to life today. (shrink)

In this volume, Bimal K. Matilal blends knowledge contained in original Sanskrit texts and modern philosophical terminology in interpreting and reconstructing early philosophical theories, highlighting the critical and analytical nature of the Indian philosophical tradition.

These essays, as the editor has very aptly put it, indeed “provide insights into both Indian philosophy and Mohanty—Indian philosophy via Mohanty and Mohanty via and beyond Indian philosophy”. Though the articles were written on different occasions, I think there is a central idea around which colorful strands of thoughts are woven. Mohanty’s main preoccupation here is to build a bridge between tradition and modernity through hermeneutic reinterpretation. This is how in every epoch outstanding philosophers have advanced philosophical thinking by (...) examining issues from within the tradition. For like men, concepts and words too grow in course of time. So, shows Mohanty, Samkara, Gandhi, Aurobindo, K. C. Bhattachryya, N. V. Banerjee, B. K. Matilal, P. K. Mukhopadhyay—all were engaged in this exercise in their own way, at their own times; only the tools of analysis were different in each case. (shrink)

four ancestry, is that there are . A proposition may be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, neither true nor false , ,.

This article addresses the problematic perspectives of drone culture. In critiquing focus on the drone’s apparent ‘autonomy’, it argues that such devices function as part of a socio-technical network. They are relational parts of human–machine interaction that, in our changing geopolitical realities, have a powerful influence on politics, reputation and warfare. Drawing on Žižek’s conception of parallax, the article stresses the importance of culture and perception in forming the role of the drone in widening power asymmetries. It examines how perceptions (...) of autonomy are evoked by drones, to claim that this misperception is a smokescreen that obscures the relational socio-technical realities of the drone. The article therefore argues that a more critical culture of the drone emerges by shifting the focus and perception from autonomy to anonymity. This allows us to engage more fully with the distributed agency and decision-making that define how drones are developed and deployed. Rather than focusing on the drone as a singular, fetishised, technical object, a relational approach to the drone assemblage is proposed that highlights the competing human interests that define and resist drones in global politics and culture. (shrink)

The problems of internationalism often look different and require different solutions depending on one’s particular cultural standpoint. Contemporary Indian philosophers find that their philosophical efforts have long been too much oriented to the West, and that what Indian philosophy now needs is less international influence and more rootedness in their own rich tradition. This is needed for a more balanced international dialogue. The goal of internationalism in philosophy is not to bring into being a world‐philosophy, but a global conversation on (...) philosophical problems that is not inhibited by differing approaches. (shrink)

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe (...) is improbable, thus no explanation of the fine tuning, theistic or otherwise, is required. (shrink)

This work throws light on this and clarifies the concepts, and clarifies the amazingly complicated simple question: Is pramanya svatah or paratah? This is one of those question: Is pramanya svatah or paratah?

Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument.Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a (...) dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation.Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes.Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introduction and editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

"'Buddhist Ethics' presents an outline of Buddhist ethical thought. It is not a defense of Buddhist approaches to ethics as opposed to any other, nor is it a critique of the Western tradition. Garfield presents a broad overview of a range of Buddhist approaches to the question of moral philosophy. He argues that while there are important points of contact with these Western frameworks, Buddhist ethics is distinctive, and is a kind of moral phenomenology that is concerned with the ways (...) in which we experience ourselves as agents and others as moral fellows"--. (shrink)

Franz Brentano’s thesis that the mental is characterised by a peculiar directedness towards an object or by intentionality, has been recognised, in contemporary philosophy, by a large body of philosophers of widely differing persuasions. Those who have come to terms with this phenomenon have found a place for it within their larger philosophical positions: this affects the way they understand the nature and role of intentionality. In this essay, I will distinguish four types of theories of intentionality—each of which is (...) characterized by a certain understanding of its nature and function, an understanding which derives from the overall philosophical framework within which the phenomenon of intentionality is situated. These are the naturalistic-causal, the descriptive psychological, the existential, and the transcendental-constitutive theories. I review them in that order, as representing four levels of our understanding of intentionality. For all four, Brentano’s thesis remains the “neutral” and indispensable starting point. (shrink)

Franz Brentano’s thesis that the mental is characterised by a peculiar directedness towards an object or by intentionality, has been recognised, in contemporary philosophy, by a large body of philosophers of widely differing persuasions. Those who have come to terms with this phenomenon have found a place for it within their larger philosophical positions: this affects the way they understand the nature and role of intentionality. In this essay, I will distinguish four types of theories of intentionality—each of which is (...) characterized by a certain understanding of its nature and function, an understanding which derives from the overall philosophical framework within which the phenomenon of intentionality is situated. These are the naturalistic-causal, the descriptive psychological, the existential, and the transcendental-constitutive theories. I review them in that order, as representing four levels of our understanding of intentionality. For all four, Brentano’s thesis remains the “neutral” and indispensable starting point. (shrink)

This is a book for scholars of Western philosophy who wish to engage with Buddhist philosophy, or who simply want to extend their philosophical horizons. It is also a book for scholars of Buddhist studies who want to see how Buddhist theory articulates with contemporary philosophy. Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy articulates the basic metaphysical framework common to Buddhist traditions. It then explores questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, epistemology, the philosophy of language and ethics as (...) they are raised and addressed in a variety of Asian Buddhist traditions. In each case the focus is on philosophical problems; in each case the connections between Buddhist and contemporary Western debates are addressed, as are the distinctive contributions that the Buddhist tradition can make to Western discussions. Engaging Buddhism is not an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, but an engagement with it, and an argument for the importance of that engagement. It does not pretend to comprehensiveness, but it does address a wide range of Buddhist traditions, emphasizing the heterogeneity and the richness of those traditions. The book concludes with methodological reflections on how to prosecute dialogue between Buddhist and Western traditions. (shrink)