Contributed articles on Vedanta, Mimamsa and Nyaya philosophy; previously published in Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy, by Shyam Ranganathan, presents a compelling, systematic explication of the moral philosophical content of history of Indian philosophy in contrast to the received wisdom in Indology and comparative philosophy that Indian philosophers were scarcely interested in ethics. Unlike most works on the topic, this book makes a case for the positive place of ethics in the history of Indian philosophy by drawing upon recent work in metaethics and metamorality, and by providing a through analysis of the meaning of moral concepts and PHILOSOPHY itself- in addition to explicating the texts of Indian authors. In Ranganathan`s account, Indian philosophy shines with distinct options in ethics that find their likeness in the writings of the Ancient in the West, such as Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and not in the anthropocentric or positivistic options that have dominated the recent Western tradition.

Indian philosophy was more decisively established with the Upanishads, the first of which may have been written in the 7th century BC. Early Upanishads, which dominate the late ancient period of thought, were key to the emergence of several classical philosophies. In the Upanishads, views about Brahman and atman were proposed. Buddhism, now a major world religion, also appeared in the ancient period of Indian philosophy. The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, lived during the 6th century BC. Religious, or spiritual, metaphysics, a field that currently receives little attention among philosophers in academia in the West, considers the question of the nature of a Supreme Being and its relation to the world. Indian Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and theistic Vedanta all have contributed to this debate. Within spiritual metaphysics, an insistence on spiritual monism is probably the most important consideration that Indian thought upholds, though with numerous variations: Much Buddhist philosophy promotes the idea of the interdependence of everything; theistic Vedanta finds no gap between the world and God; and Advaita Vedanta insists that everyone’s true self is nothing other than Brahman, the Absolute. This book presents information on some of the basic concepts of this subject. Contents: • Zoroastrianism • Judaism • Christianity • Islam • Tribal Religions of India • Phenomenology • Vedanta Philosophy • Maya: Nature and Arguments

This volume traces the impact of colonialism and Western philosophy on the dialogical structure of Indian thought and highlights the general tendency in contemporary Indian philosophy to avoid direct dialogue as opposed to the rich and elaborate debates that formed the pivot of the classical Indian tradition. It defines three possible areas of debate: between Swami Vivekanand and Mahatama Gandhi; V.D. Savarkar and Mahatama Gandhi; and Sri Aurobindo and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya—on state and pre-modern society, religion and politics, and science and spiritualism respectively. This book will be of considerable interest not only to students and scholars of Indian philosophy and religious studies but to scholars of politics and sociology as well.

Philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God have been crucial to Euro-American and South Asian philosophers for over a millennium. Critical to the history of philosophy in India, were the centuries-long arguments between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers about the existence of a God-like being called Isvara and the religious epistemology used to support them. By focusing on the work of Ratnakirti, one of the last great Buddhist philosophers of India, and his arguments against his Hindu opponents, Parimal G. Patil illuminates South Asian intellectual practices and the nature of philosophy during the final phase of Buddhism in India. Based at the famous university of Vikramasila, Ratnakirti brought the full range of Buddhist philosophical resources to bear on his critique of his Hindu opponents' cosmological/design argument. At stake in his critique was nothing less than the nature of inferential reasoning, the metaphysics of epistemology, and the relevance of philosophy to the practice of religion. In developing a proper comparative approach to the philosophy of religion, Patil transcends the disciplinary boundaries of religious studies, philosophy, and South Asian studies and applies the remarkable work of philosophers like Ratnakirti to contemporary issues in philosophy and religion.

This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule. Bhushan's and Garfield's own essays on the work of this period contextualize the philosophical essays collected and connect them to broader intellectual, artistic and political movements in India. This volume yields a new understanding of cosmopolitan consciousness in a colonial context, of the intellectual agency of colonial academic communities, and of the roots of cross-cultural philosophy as it is practiced today. It transforms the canon of global philosophy, presenting for the first time a usable collection and a systematic study of Anglophone Indian philosophy. Many historians of Indian philosophy see a radical disjuncture between traditional Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian academic philosophy that has abandoned its roots amid globalization. This volume provides a corrective to this common view. The literature collected and studied in this volume is at the same time Indian and global, demonstrating that the colonial Indian philosophical communities were important participants in global dialogues, and revealing the roots of contemporary Indian philosophical thought. The scholars whose work is published here will be unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. But the reader will discover that their work is creative, exciting, and original, and introduces distinctive voices into global conversations. These were the teachers who trained the best Indian scholars of the post-Independence period. They engaged creatively both with the classical Indian tradition and with the philosophy of the West, forging a new Indian philosophical idiom to which contemporary Indian and global philosophy are indebted.