A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
As a scholar of Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā I am well aware of how the normative is often disguised as descriptive. “It is seven o’ clock” says the mother, but what she means is rather “Get up! You have to go to Continue reading What counts as philosophy? On the normative disguised as descriptive UPDATED
On Sunday I was reading Sundarapāṇḍya’s Nītidviṣaṣṭika, an interesting collection of āryā verses on the subject of nīti (something like: how to act in the world), and later on caught up (very belatedly) on part of the debate occasioned by Continue reading Nīti and the two ways of “using” texts
Opponents coming from the Advaita field figure often in Yāmuna’s Ātmasiddhi, which shows that even before Rāmānuja Vaiṣṇava authors were taking seriously the challenge of Advaita. Even more interesting is the way Yāmuna answers to them. Let us see some Continue reading The subject as knower and doer in Yāmuna’s Ātmasiddhi
I am considering to co-teach a course with a philosopher at the University of Florida, one in which we’d look at Indian and Western writings on the same topics, e.g. mind, self, epistemology, etc. These interdisciplinary courses are given special Continue reading Introduction to Philosophy and/or Philosophy of Mind
Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors claim that the whole world is made of the brahman and that everything else is nothing but a qualification of it/Him. This theological content, it will be immediately evident, crashes against the (Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika) idea of a rigidly Continue reading Viśiṣṭādvaita and Nyāya on qualities