This collection of essays provides the specialist, and also the layman interested in philosophy, with examples of the best philosophical work being done in India today. Indologists and Sanskrit scholars have for generations had access to Indian expositions of ancient texts. Rather less has been known about what is being done in fields of recent and current interest. Indian philosophers today are part of a worldwide community of scholars as concerned with technical logical problems, with analysis and phenomenology, as philosophers anywhere else and this is what this book reflects. It also shows the younger philosophers, many of whom have studied outside India, engaged in the cut and thrust of contemporary debate. Indian philosophers have the advantage of not having been swept off their feet by any one of the movements in contemporary philosophy. But they are alive to them all and have their own contribution to make to on-going discussions. The reader will find treatments of the mind-body problem, the nature of moral language, the experience of nothingness in Buddhism and Existentialism, and an analysis of aesthetic experience, to mention only a few of the chapters in this lively book.

Using recontructive ideas available in classical Indian original works, this book makes a departure in the style of modern writings on Indian moral philosophy. It presents Indian ethics, in an objective, secular, and wherever necessary, critical manner as a systematic, down-to-earth, philosophical account of moral values, virtues, rights and obligations. It thereby refutes the claim that Indian philosophy has no ethics as well as the counter-claim that it transcends ethics. It demonstrates that moral living proves that the individual, his society and the world are really real and not only taken to be real for behavioral purposes as the Advaitins hold, the self is amoral being a non-agent, moksa is not a moral value, and the Karmic theory, because of involving belief in rebirth, does not fuarantee that the doer of an action is also the experiencer of its results, contrary to what is commonly held, and Indian ethics can sustain itself even if such notions are dropped. Rajendra Prasad calls Indian ethics organismic because, along with ethical concerns, it also covers issues related to professions, politics, administration, sex, environment, etc. Therefore, in one format it is theoretical and applied, normative and metaethical, humanistic and non-humanistic, etc., of course, within the limits of the then cognitive enquiry.

Academic legal production, when it focuses on the study of law, generally grasps this concept on the basis of a reference to positive law and its practice. This book differs clearly from these analyses and integrates the legal approach into the philosophy of normative language, philosophical realism and pragmatism. The aim is not only to place the examination of law in the immanence of its practice, but also to take note of the fact that legal enunciation must be taken seriously. In order to arrive at this analysis, it is necessary to go beyond traditional perspectives and to base reflection on an investigation of the conditions for enunciating law in our democracies. This analysis thus offers a renewal of the ethics inherent in the action of jurists and an original reflection on the role of certain legal tools such as concepts, categories, or "provisions". In this sense, the work nourishes its originality not only by the transversality of its approach, but also by the will to situate legal thought in concrete forms of its implementation. The book will be essential reading for academics working in the areas of legal theory, legal philosophy and constitutional theory.