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)

This companion volume focuses on the application and practical ramifications of Indian ethics. It reports on contemporary wide-ranging social and communal challenges facing people in such diverse areas as women and ethics, politics, justice, bioethics and ecology. As a contemporary volume, it builds linkages between existing theories and emerging issues, problems and questions in today's India. The volume brings together contributions from philosophers and contemporary thinkers on practical ethics, exploring both the scope as well as boundaries or limits of ethics (...) when applied to everyday and real-life concerns and challenges facing India in the context of a troubled globalizing world. As such, this collection draws on multiple forms of writing and research, including classical essay form, reportage and interview, critical case studies and textual analyses The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of Indian philosophy, Indian ethics, women's issues, social justice, environmental ethics, bioethics, animal ethics, and cross-cultural responses to dominant Western moral thought. It will also be useful to researchers working on Gandhi, sustainability, ecology, comparative philosophy, and dharma studies. (shrink)

: It is claimed that Comparative Philosophy of Religion (CPR) mistakenly builds on the dogmas of comparative religion (or history of religions) and philosophy of religion. Thus, the belief that there are things common and therefore comparable between two or more traditions and that these objects of comparison are of philosophical or theological significance are questions that continue to trouble the field. Just what does one compare, how does one choose what to compare or why, through what methodological and epistemic (...) tools, and who is it that carries out the tasks? But what has remained unasked and unanalyzed are the larger meta-questions concerning the motivation, civilizational presuppositions, cultural parochialism, or legacies of orientalism, modernity, and (post-)colonialism that together affect the boundedness of certain key categories and thematic issues in the comparative enterprise such as God or the Transcendent, Creation, the Problem of Evil, the Afterlife, Sin, Redemption, Purpose, and the End. Is difference with respect to alterity and altarity permissible? If so, what a postcolonial, differently gendered, cross-cultural critique would look like and what is left of CPR are two such questions explored here. (shrink)

A stimulating account of the wide range of approaches towards conceptualising emotions in classical Indian philosophical–religious traditions, such as those of the Upanishads, Vaishnava Tantrism, Bhakti movement, Jainism, Buddhism, Yoga, Shaivism, and aesthetics, this volume analyses the definition and validity of emotions in the construction of identity and self-discovery.

The aim of the article is to examine the indian theory of perception given best expression, According to the author, In the school of advaita vedanta. The peculiarity of the indian view is that it is quite unlike the representative theories current in the west. It can best be described as a "presentative" theory, Wherein the mind ("antahkarana") is presented directly with the object, Without the necessary mediation of sense-Organs. The "antahkarana" ('inner-Vehicle'), Unlike the 'mind' of locke, Is not a (...) passive recipient of "data", It is an active instrument ("pramana") in the process of perceiving. The advaita school maintains that the "antahkarana" 'goes out' through the respective sense-Organs (e.G., The eyes), Pervades the object of attention and transforms itself into the form of the object. The study also considers possible criticism of this theory in light of contemporary discussion of perception. (edited). (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 over sixty accessible entries, organised 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, and will also be of interest to those seeking to explore the lasting significance this rich (...) and complex philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Commemorative volume on Jaysankar Lal Shaw, b. 1939, Indian philosopher.

Contributed articles on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.

A number of different kinds of negation and negation of negation are developed in Indian thought, from ancient religious texts to classical philosophy. The paper explores the Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, Jaina and Buddhist theorizing on the various forms and permutations of negation, denial, nullity, nothing and nothingness, or emptiness. The main thesis argued for is that in the broad Indic tradition, negation cannot be viewed as a mere classical operator turning the true into the false, nor reduced to the mainstream Boolean (...) dichotomy: 1 versus 0. Special attention is given to how contradiction is handled in Jaina and Buddhist logic. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral ‘zero’ that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered. The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical (...) adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something., namely, ‘Thinking Negation in Early Hinduism and Classical Indian Philosophy’ ; and ‘Negation, Non-existents, and a Distinctive Pramāṇa in the Nyāya-Mīmāṃsā’ ).After a discussion of interests in being, non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, published later as ‘What is Metaphysics?’ The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of ‘Metaphysical’ at ‘Nihilism’. (shrink)

Apart from the said AAR Symposium, a central part of the paper was also earlier presented in the Philosophy Department Colloquia, in the University of Melbourne; and it has benefited from my research in the Gibson Library as a Senior Fellow in the Department. I note gratidue also to my #259 colleagues, Dr Guy Petterson and Patrick Hutchings for help with research and/or comments on various excerpted drafts from the evolving work. And to many friends who have heard my wailings (...) on this problematic across the Tasman-Pacific-Indian-Atlantic waters. (shrink)

Indian theistic solution to the problem of evil – or universal injustice – is an off‐shoot of the logical theism of Nyāya and philosophical theologies of Vedānta thought. Their respective teleo‐cosmologies embed an ontology of divine creation, sustention and periodic dissolution of our world. An N‐factor is introduced governing the moral sphere, namely, the principle of karma. The presence of karma (admitting freely‐will choices) potentiates individuals’ actions, good and bad; this then mitigates the need to seek justification for God allowing (...) horrendous amounts of suffering to occur. God cannot be held morally responsible for the evil in the world, because he depends on the laws of karma toward maintaining just order. Hence, it is consistent within Hindu philosophy to hold both that there is evil qua karma in our world and there exists an omnipotent God. The role assumed by karma theory is a unique feature of Indian theodicy (theistic and nontheistic). (shrink)

The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly (...) in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere - notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva - and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom. (shrink)

Wilhelm Halbfass deserves to be celebrated as a leading pioneer of the history of Indian philosophy in the modern era. The sheer volume of work in recent times and the extent of citations devoted to Halbfass' works well attest to the impact of his gallant endeavors. Dimitry Shevchenko's article "Wilhelm Halbfass and the Purposes of Cross-cultural Dialogue" in this issue of Philosophy East and West is a most recent attempt to take further the goals and contours charted by Halbfass, with (...) a focus, however, not so much on the history of Indian philosophy as on the prayojana of inter-cultural or cross-tradition discursive engagement and the ramifications thereof for comparative philosophy.This... (shrink)

I wish to take up some of the sentiments we have towards animals and put them to test in respect of the claims to moral high grounds in Indian thought-traditions vis-à-vis Abrahamic theologies. And I do this by turning the focus in this instance—on a par with issues of caste, gender, minority status, albeit still within the human community ambience—to the question of animals. Which leads me to ask how sophisticated and in-depth is the appreciation of the issues and questions (...) that are currently being debated in contemporary circles? What degree of awareness could we say has been present in the traditions—not just in some perfunctory, platitudinal, belief-based descriptions or prescriptions, but in actual explanatory and morally sensitized senses? (shrink)

The article considers the theoretical and practical consequences of the so-called "soft" version of epistemological realism in Bimal K. Matilal's philosophical project. The author offers an analytical view on Matilal's philosophy, which helps to understand it in a broader prospective, comparing his arguments on perception and objectivity with contemporary arguments in Western analytical philosophy; in fact, it is possible to view Matilal not only as the proponent of revised Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika approach, but also as the follower of realistic view on language, (...) following L. Wittgenstein, W. Quine, H. Putnam and M. Dummett. Despite the fact that such interpretation may sound diverse or multivocal, it nevertheless helps to better understand both lineages of argumentation: the critical review of the impossibility of private language can be compared in both Western and Indian philosophical discourses, which leads into the domain of social epistemology. The second part of the article discusses the ethical arguments on the vulnerability of moral virtues, and the place of Dharma as a term in moral philosophy. Poetical and metaphorical language appears to be a fruitful strategy to discover the ineffable - and also via negativa and catuṣkoṭi - which is shown by Matilal on the example of the unacceptability of lying. The ethical ineffability and its interconnection with Matilal's commentaries on practical wisdom play the crucial part in the interpretations of Dharmaśāstra texts. (shrink)

There is a lot of talk around about Globalisation and its mana-like benefits; indeed, there are many, in areas such as the spread of communication capabilities, social media, and wider distribution of goods in the free trade marketplace that in previous decades were ‘protected’ by exorbitant excise tariffs, licensing restrictions, and low turn-overs. Since Weber, Robertson, Wallerstein, Appadurai, Tambiah et al, there has been much theorizing on the inevitability of Globalisation and its neat corollaries, Free Trade, Liberalisation, Parallel Modernities, and (...) Economic Rationalism. Yet, Globalisation has both its protagonists and antagonists alike. The paper focuses on case studies from the Indian-end, impelled by the question: in what ways has Globalisation benefited and hurt India’s economy, the slow growth and periodic stagnation of its capabilities, the stability of the nation and its people? As part of the reciprocal deal on Liberalisation, Free Trade agreement has enabled myriads of TNCs with to reign in large Western capital-investment and start-up industrial bases, which have undoubtedly helped push India to becoming the third largest world economy. However, the encroachments of TNCs and their impact on agro-economics, biodiversity, the plight of farmers, the further disenfranchisement of numerically small from a share in the national weal, the uneven regional deliverance from poverty, malnutrition, the disproportionate gender-ratio, rural illiteracy among the neglected, and other fall-outs, have worried critics of India’s ‘easy ride’ on the highway of Globalisation. The arguments will be developed extensively with illustrations. (shrink)

Ever since some traditional protagonists made the intriguing claim that the Vedas (canonical Brahmāṇical texts) are an inviolable resource of authority on significant matters, extensive debate has raged in Indian thought as to whether word can rightfully be accepted as pramāṇa or autonomous mode of knowing; in western epistemological terms, as testimony? At the mundane level the doctrine underscores the capacity of language, i.e., words and sentences (sabda), to disseminate knowledge from speaker/author to hearer/audience; at a transcendental level it adverts (...) to wisdom-texts delivering knowledge about supramundane matters. Unlike the former, the words of the latter may be literally authorless: truth is begot from what the sages of yore simply ‘heard’, somehow, and came to know. But J. N. Mohanty has rejected this doctrine, arguing that sentences can certainly generate linguistic meaning or intentionality – understanding that p. But since this does not come stamped with evidential warrant (‘fact’), it may not amount to knowledge that p; at best it may generate belief about injunctions and imperatives (‘ought’ but not indicatively ‘is’, nor objective moral knowledge). The chapter is a response to what I call the Mohanty-Gettier Paradox, and a case is argued for the viability of śabda-based testimony, drawing on phenomenology of language and hermeneutics. (shrink)

Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, clearly one of the early modern doyens of Indian Philosophy, remained much enamored of Western thought—of which he took the ancient to classical tradition as his model—and he spent a good part of his speculative life attempting to reconfigure Indian thought to fit the vesture, maybe the toga, of his Greek heroes, namely Plato and Plotinus, and to an extent of Hegelianism that came across via F. H. Bradley: Occidental in form, and Indian in content. It was (...) as if this ‘fusion’ or ‘harmonization’ was easy of making without compromising what since Max Müller has come to be called ‘Indian Philosophy’. The paper intends to demonstrate this worrisome yet compelling motif by advancing an analysis of certain representative texts and arguments from Radhakrishnan’s prolific writing on Indian Philosophy and East-West Thinking; particularly as these relate to the question of the ‘appearances’, their alignment with Platonic ‘shadows,’ while finding their redemption in the realism propelled by modern empirical science. The paper traces the justification for Radhakrishnan’s variegated moves to ‘save the appearances’ through his strained reading of the Upaniṣadic texts and under-standing of Śaṅkara’s nondualism, leading to the argument that although the world is brought about by māyā, it is not an illusion or nonexistent, or unhinged from the Absolute, but rather naïvely real. There may have been a supplementary political motivation as well inspired by the burgeoning nationalist spirit, after Gandhi, and the need for India to become culturally and morally strong in its own terms. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, (...) nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

Indian ethics is one of the great traditions of moral thought in world philosophy whose insights have influenced thinkers in early Greece, Europe, Asia, and the New World. This is the first systematic study of the spectrum of moral reflections from India.

This study, based on Bem’s gender schema theory, investigates gender differences in and the relationship between gender role characteristics and entrepreneurial self-efficacy of 261 female and 265 male entrepreneurs in China. The results show that male and female entrepreneurs did not differ significantly in ESE or in masculine gender role characteristics, but differed significantly in feminine gender role characteristics. Examining four different stages in the entrepreneurial life cycle, we find that for female entrepreneurs, feminine characteristics had a positive influence on (...) ESE in the searching and planning stages of entrepreneurship, and masculine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the searching stage. For male entrepreneurs, feminine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the searching and planning stages, and masculine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the marshaling and implementing stages. In addition, one feminine characteristic, “Friendly,” showed a positive association with male entrepreneurs’ ESE in the marshaling stage. Overall, the feminine gender role factor of “Friendly” and the masculine gender role factor of “Compete” played a greater role on ESE than other characteristics. Implications of the findings are discussed. This study contributes a new perspective to extant research on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and female entrepreneurship. (shrink)

There has been much written of late on the topic of panentheism. Dissatisfied with many contemporary descriptions of “panentheism” and the related “pantheism,” which we feel arise out of theistic presuppositions, we produce our own definition of sorts, rooted in and paying respect to the term’s etymology and the concept’s roots in Indian religion and western philosophy. Furthermore, we consider and comment on the arguments and comments concerning panentheism’s definition and plausibility put forth by Göcke, Mullins, and Nickel.

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

In this article we compare the experiences of women members of the board of directors of U.S. and Norwegian corporations. Based on the personal stories of two women directors from each country, we discuss similarities and differences in the role and characteristics of women corporate directors and the processes and behaviours they are involved in as directors within and outside the boardroom. We also investigate the role of gender-related dynamics in these two countries, focusing on board roles and processes, and (...) the visible and invisible board structures with which women corporate directors contend. (shrink)

Two of the most important contributions that Bimal Krishna Matilal made to comparative philosophy are his doctoral dissertation The Navya-Nyāya Doctrine of Negation: The Semantics and Ontology of Negative Statements in Navya-Nyāya Philosophy and his classic: Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowing. In this essay, we aim to carry forward the work of Bimal K. Matilal by showing how ideas in classical Indian philosophy concerning absence and perception are relevant to recent debates in Anglo-analytic philosophy. In particular, (...) we focus on the recent debate in the philosophy of perception centering on the perception of absence. In her Seeing Absence, Anya Farennikova argues for the thesis that we literally see absences. Her thesis is quite novel within the contexts of the traditions that she engages: analytical philosophy of perception, phenomenology, and cognitive neuroscience. In those traditions there is hardly any exploration of the epistemology of absence. By contrast, this is not the case in classical Indian philosophy where the debate over the ontological and epistemological status of absence is longstanding and quite engaging. In what follows, we engage Farennikova’s arguments, and those of John-Rémy Martin and Jérome Dokic in their response to her work. Using the work of Matilal, Bilimoria and Shaw we show that there are several engaging ideas that can be taken from Indian philosophy into the terrain explored by Farennikova, and Martin & Dokic. Our aim is to provide an updated comparative engagement on absence and its perception for the purposes of enhancing future discussions within global philosophy. However, we do not aim to do this merely by focusing on the history of primary texts or on twentieth century commentary on primary texts. Instead, we hope to show that the living tradition of Indian philosophy that Matilal embodied carries forward in his students and colleagues as they revive, revise, and extend Indian philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned to address the question of voluntary or self‐willed death from two distinct positions—a particular community's socio‐religious practice (viz. Jaina sallekhanā) and as the matter stands in law (penal code, constitution, judicial wisdom, etc.) in India—in the light of the recent move by a bench of its apex court striking down the penal code section proscribing suicide. I also wish to draw out some implications of these deliberations for the beneficence of medical practice and related (...) bio‐ethical ramifications in the Indian context. (shrink)

Studies in Indian Traditions, Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, A Division of Indian Books Centre, 1994.

This book negotiates and engages with the ideas and influence of one of the leading theoreticians in social science research-Gayatri Spivak. It discusses the impact of her arguments on postcolonialism, cultural studies, ethnography, feminist studies, and anthropology.