A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
Satyanarayana asked a very interesting question a while back. Literature (kāvya) was widely believed to be a kind of moral education, even if it “seduces us like a lover” (kāntasaṃmitatayā); other types of texts, namely scripture (śāstra) and sacred lore Continue reading Unchaste literature and the “social aesthetic”
The hardest part, I find, about the philosophical vocabulary of Sanskrit is not its enormity or its technicality, but the fact that it includes a couple of “basic” or even “common-sense” words whose import, in any given context, can be Continue reading Tricky words: prāp-
One of the many things I’ve been learning from the special issue of South Asian History and Culture called Discipline, Sect, Lineage and Community is that 16th-century intellectuals like Vyāsatīrtha and Appayya Dīkṣita had an unprecented awareness not just of Continue reading The Appayya One-Two
The seventh and eighth centuries were, as Jean-Marie Verpoorten said, a “Golden Age” for Mīmāṃsā, when the two most important exponents of the system, Kumārila and Prabhākara, lived. But it was also a “Golden Age” for other systems. It was Continue reading Untangling the Golden Age
What are the principles by which we divide texts into portions, and why would we want to do that in the first place? What Elisa has referred to as “the prescriptive portion of the Veda” is what Mīmāṃsā authors call Continue reading Injunction and denotation in the Veda
There is a bit in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Samskara about a young brahman who listens to his teacher’s description of Śakuntalā and gets so hot and bothered that he runs off and jumps into the river, where he meets and Continue reading Erotic poetry will make you a better person
The title of this post is a reference to a “common-sense” principle that might be called skhalīya-nyāya, since it is attributed to an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (and because it tends to trip people up…) But the Continue reading “Words mean what they mean”
I hope that I can start a series on “keywords” here—those seemingly-simple terms which, although they don’t really belong to a technical philosophical vocabulary, do a lot of heavy lifting in a wide range of philosophical discourses. One could think Continue reading Keywords: Bhāvaḥ
(I have not forgotten that this is an “Indian Philosophy” blog, in case you are only reading the first sentence of this post…) The question of how we “do philosophy” is central to Plato’s Protagoras, where two models are on Continue reading Philosophy and Poetry? (A call for comparanda)
As I noted some time ago, the principal language of Indian philosophy was Sanskrit. For some thinkers, Sanskrit’s status as a philosophical language was a direct consequence of its privileged position with respect to meaning and truth: the Sanskrit language Continue reading Linguistic accommodation and philosophical debate