A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
Cross-posted on Love of All Wisdom. Last time I examined Andrew Ollett’s distinction between “decision-oriented” texts like Kant’s Grounding and “capacity-oriented” texts like Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, and the ways in which that distinction might suggest a “philosophical” versus a “historical” approach Continue reading Philosophical and historical uses together
Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom. Andrew Ollett has recently taken up the point I made earlier this year that Buddhist ethics, in distinction from modern analytical ethics, is not primarily concerned with decision procedure. He identifies Indian non-analytic approaches Continue reading Decision and capacity, philosophical and historical
Last week there was a call from political science professor Nicholas Tampio to narrowly define philosophy as a discipline responding either directly to Plato’s Republic or at least part of a self-consciously Socratic-Platonic tradition of inquiry. I recommend reading Tampio’s essay, “Not Continue reading Where is Philosophy?: A Response to Nicholas Tampio
I’ve been thinking about intersections between comedy and philosophy for some time. I plan to post a recurring, if perhaps disjointed, series of reflections on such intersections here. Recently, I heard one of my favorite comics make what I think Continue reading Comedy and Philosophy I: Topical jokes and comparative philosophy
About a year ago, I teamed up with my colleague Omar Farahat to do a roundtable discussion on the topic of the normativity of language in Mīmāṃsā and Uṣūl al-fiqh. The occasion was the annual graduate student conference of Columbia’s Continue reading Mīmāṃsā and Uṣūl al-fiqh: On comparison
Anand Vaidya, a contributor here on the blog, has written a series of new posts over at the Blog of the APA (American Philosophical Association). Anand is responding to some recent discussions about the value of philosophy as a discipline Continue reading Has Philosophy Lost Its Way? — Vaidya on the Case of Indian Philosophy
I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes particularly interesting in the light of David Chapman’s critiques of Buddhist Continue reading On the very idea of Buddhist ethics
The Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta is a philosophical and theological school active chiefly in South India, from the last centuries of the first millennium until today and holding that the Ultimate is a personal God who is the only existing entity and Continue reading Why studying Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta through Veṅkaṭanātha: An introduction for lay readers
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”
A reader of the blog, Satyanarayana, sent in the following question. Could any of our learned śāstrīs provide any insight? * * * The asatī : Strīsvabhāva, Kāvya, Śāstra A dominant theme of Brahminical patriarchy as reflected in the Sanskrit Continue reading A reader’s query