A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
[Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.] Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime might be the most popular book in a Western language ever to deal with Indian aesthetic theory. The book’s official subject is the aesthetics of computer science. Though I am getting Continue reading An aesthetic of extremes
I’m taking a cue from Malcolm’s contention that the tradition of poetics (alaṅkāraśāstra) can and should be brought into “philosophical” conversations. And since I recently attended a workshop in Jerusalem (organized by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Charles Hallisey) devoted Continue reading Daṇḍin and the Philosophy of Poetics
Over at the Language Log, Victor Mair has a post about spoken Sanskrit at the recent international workshop, “A Lasting Vision: Daṇḍin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Letters”. The workshop itself may be of interest to readers of this Continue reading Spoken Sanskrit and Daṇḍin
As promised, this (a bit belated) post summarizes some talks from the October 2015 Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy in Monterey, CA. To keep the post brief, I’m choosing to discuss only those SACP talks which I attended, have Continue reading Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy 2015
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”
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
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