The context of Indian philosophy

India’s progressive emergence on the world stage, in terms unimaginable just a few decades ago, obliges us to reconsider its image as nurtured by the West for over two thousand years: a prestigious image maybe, but also greatly reductive, as the privileged home of occult knowledge, ecstasy and asceticism, or – quite the opposite – of fabulous riches and voluptuous pleasures. Rather than getting to know India, the West has preferred to dream of it: one result has been that Indian thought, albeit unanimously celebrated as the seat of the highest wisdom, has not been granted even the smallest place on the great stage of the history of philosophy. This book presents the thought of pre-modern India first and foremost by outlining the cultural parameters within which it arose and developed, and should be read; often associated with religious experience, but also essentially independent of it; sometimes differing in form and outcome, but more often very close to Western thought, and certainly never ‘alien’. *** “This is a marvellous piece of compact insight in all respects: a summary as well as a fresh view of the whole area, always sound and based on first hand experience with the material. I really mean it when I would like to call it the best modern survey of our field at an extraordinary high level of penetration.” Prof. Ernst Steinkellner, University of Vienna - Austrian Academy of Sciences.

2017

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. The volume aims to be ecumenical, drawing from different locales, languages, and literary cultures, inclusive of dissenters, heretics and sceptics, of philosophical ideas in thinkers not themselves primarily philosophers, and reflecting India's north-western borders with the Persianate and Arabic worlds, its north-eastern boundaries with Tibet, Nepal, Ladakh and China, as well as the southern and eastern shores that afford maritime links with the lands of Theravda Buddhism. Indian Philosophy has been written in many languages, including Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Kannada, Punjabi, Hindi, Tibetan, Arabic and Assamese. From the time of the British colonial occupation, it has also been written in English. It spans philosophy of law, logic, politics, environment and society, but is most strongly associated with wide-ranging discussions in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and metaphysics (how we know and what is there to be known), ethics, metaethics and aesthetics, and metaphilosophy. The reach of Indian ideas has been vast, both historically and geographically, and it has been and continues to be a major influence in world philosophy. In the breadth as well as the depth of its philosophical investigation, in the sheer bulk of surviving texts and in the diffusion of its ideas, the philosophical heritage of India easily stands comparison with that of China, Greece, the Latin west, or the Islamic world.

Philosophy East and West, 1992

Indian philosophy, like Indian culture, seems peculiarly prone to arouse either violent antipathy or fervent enthusiasm. Rarely does it engender an attitude which tries to present and assess it coolly and calmly, without positive or negative emotion. Nothing perhaps stands more in the way of such an attitude than the universally accepted ideas which I wish to explore in this essay. These three ideas are treated as indubitable facts about Indian philosophy. They seem so self-evident to enthusiasts and detractors alike, that to question them is to question the very concept of Indian philosophy as it has been traditionally conceived and presented by almost every writer on the subject. Yet, it seems to me that the time has come to question the traditional picture itself, to raise doubts about the indubitable, to investigate the sacrosanct and the self-evident. Myths have always masqueraded as facts and many a time the emperor's nudity has only been discovered by a child's disingenuity. The self-evident claims about Indian philosophy are legion. First and foremost is the claim to spirituality. Who does not know that Indian philosophy is spiritual? Who has not been told that this is what specifically distinguishes it from western philosophy, and makes it something unique and apart from all the other philosophical traditions of the world? The claim, of course, is never put to the test. In fact, it seems so self-evident as to require no argument or evidence on its behalf. Nobody, neither the serious nor the casual student of the subject, deems it worth questioning. Yet, the moment we begin to doubt the claim

Goodreads.com, 2020

This is a review of volume eight of a 25 volume series on the philosophy of India, a project directed by professor Karl H. Potter. It reviews the second of five volumes on Buddhist philosophy in the series.

Transcultural Studies, 2014

The article shows that the concept of ‘Indian Philosophy’ is the joint product of two philosophical cultures. One culture is Western philosophy that feels the need for wisdom. Therefore Indian philosophy is conceived of as ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’ philosophy. The other is the Indian nineteenth century culture of reform thinking. Together with Western philologist the Indians highlight the ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’ school of Vedanta philosophy as ‘the’ Indian philosophy. Vedanta philosophy as spiritual philosophy distinguished India from the West. It was a political project that functioned within India’s quest for independency. Modern Indian philosophers have been in the process of reconsidering this concept, especially after the appropriation of Western scientific culture.