Category Archives: books/articles
IABS, IDhC, etc.: which paper did you like more? UPDATED FOR THE THIRD TIME with further papers
UPDATE: I received further new suggestions per email or personally. You can add yours in the comments below.
I cannot help but enjoying papers dealing with Mīmāṃsā (especially if from a philosophical viewpoint, as it happened during the last IABS), they are just more interesting to me, but I asked friends and colleagues to forget about their personal interests and to tell me which papers of the IABS and IDhC they enjoyed more and why. The following ones are the results I collected.
Theology in a community of believers in methodology? (On Ram-Prasad 2014)
Can one speak of theology without partaking a given faith and belonging to a given community of believers? Religious texts can be read as historical or literary documents, but can they also be read as theological ones outside a community of believers?
Dharmakīrti Conference—Summary of my posts
You can read my views on the written version of the paper presented by Kei Kataoka on apoha (and of the views by Kiyotaka Yoshimizu discussed in it) here, here and here.
A discussion of K. Yoshimizu’s paper (on the chronology of Kumārila and Dharmakīrti) can be found here.
A summary of likes and dislikes of my readers and colleagues can be read here (don’t forget to add your own favs).
Philosophers’ Carnival No. 167
The 167th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival can be found here! It includes also a post by Eric Schwitzgebel on the unavoidability of studying Chinese philosophy and a post by Amod Lele on the “double standard” we adopt while looking at re-readings of the tradition by contemporary or ancient authors. I am grateful to the compiler of this edition of the Carnival (D. Papineau) and to the readers who signalled these posts. May the discussion of philosophical blogs always be broad enough to reach beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries!
You can signal your favorite posts of September for the October’s Philosophers’ Carnival here. Don’t forget to include some non-mainstream philosophy in your recommandations!
In the Indian tradition, by and large, people have tried to emphasize continuity and underplay the change or novelty except in some fields of arts. […] On the contrary, what happens in the west is that because novelty is valued very much, so, every new thing is claimed as novel, So, what the historians do there is to tell us that it is not really so new and they find the seeds of it or the sources of it in the past. In the Indian context therefore we should try to find out where the difference is occurring or where the change is occurring.
You do not have time to care for a fancy website? Neither have I.
You dislike fancy websites which make scholars look like they were trying to sell a new product? So do I.
But this new website (more…)
Is bhakti a philosophy? Daya Krishna 2000
I am grateful to Elise Coquereau for bringing me back to one of my past interests, namely Daya Krishna‘s philosophy. Daya Krishna was a polyedric genius, who wrote on economics, sociology, history of Western and Indian Philosophy, aesthetics, etc., always with a revolutionary and unconventional spirit.
Enough with the “eternality of sound” in Mimamsa!
F.X. D’Sa Sabdapramanyam in Sabara and Kumarila (Vienna 1980) is one of the very first books on Mimamsa I read and I am thus very grateful to its author. Further, it is a fascinating book, one that —I thought— shows intriguing hypotheses (e.g., that Sabara meant “Significance” by dharma) which cannot be confounded with a scholarly philological enquire in the texts themselves.
Andrew Ollett has just posted some interesting comments on K. Yoshimizu recent workshop and on the impact of his theories from a linguistic point of view. Andrew especially elaborates on the topic-comment opposition and on the possibility to read along these lines the vidheya–upadeya opposition found in Kumarila.
If you missed the workshop, you can read about it also here.
I am often inclined to think that some battles have been won and that people will, like Brian Leiter notes, ignore Indian philosophy, but probably also feel they should not. Then, sometimes I am brought back to reality, in this case by the introduction of an otherwise interesting book about the function of images in Christian theology. The blurb says that
None, really? What about the so-called Hinduism? What about the importance of the localisation of deities in a precise icon in which God is not only re-presented, but actually present? Could not we stop using comparison to enhance the value of what we are doing? Could not we start saying that “Christian faith has had a deep relation to the images of God” without claiming what we do not know?