Category Archives: books/articles
…you can read what works for me at the Warp, Weft and Way blog. Don’t forget to comment, here or there, about what works for you.
The 168th version of the Philosophers’ Carnival, with a link to Anand Vaidya’s blogpost on modality in Indian philosophy at the Indian Philosophy Blog, can be read here. Thanks to the reader(s) who pointed to Anand’s post! Keep on alerting the philosophers’ carnival website about interesting blogposts, especially about ones which might escape the editors’ attention because they do not deal with mainstream philosophy.
Jaina libraries in India
Readers might have noticed that I am working on the availability of Buddhist texts after the disappearance of Buddhist communities in South India. Did the vanished Buddhist communities leave beyond libraries of Buddhist texts? —I have no evidence of that. Did Jainas collect Buddhist texts also in South India?
Buddhism in Tamil Nadu until the end of the first millennium AD
Was Buddhism ever predominant in Tamil Nadu? Which Buddhism? And when?
After my last post on the disappearance of Buddhism from South India, I received two emails of readers pointing to the fact that Buddhism must have been prosperous in Tamil Nadu, given that Dharmakīrti himself was born in Tamil Nadu and that the Maṇimēkalai (a Buddhist literary text in Tamil, datable perhaps to the 5th–7th c.) presupposes a Buddhist community and reuses materials from Śaṅkarasvāmin’s Nyāyapraveśa.
The end of Buddhism in precolonial South India
When did Buddhism finally disappear from Tamil Nadu? And which kind of Buddhism was active in Tamil Nadu until its disappearance?
What are the conditions for reusing texts? And what are the reasons for making reuse explicit? UPDATED
What determines the likelihood of textual reuse to occur? The genre, the time, the personality of the author? And what are the reasons for not naming one’s source?
Reuse in art: “adaptive reuse”, “simple re-use”, “recycling”, “conventional re-use” and “new life re-use” UPDATED
Are the categories we use while talking about textual reuse fit also for reuse in art?
EAAA conference in Olomouc
I just came back from Olomouc, where I attended the first conference of the European Association of Asian Art and Archaeology. It was my first conference entirely dedicated to Art and I found out some interesting things:
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 other among the great religions has ever had a comparably deep relation to the images of God as the Christian faith […]”
(Nessuna delle grandi religioni ha intrattenuto con l’immagine un rapporto così stretto come quella cristiana, fede in un Dio trascendente e incarnato, eterno e storico, che, per questo e da subito si è posta come essenziale la domanda su come e dove vedere il «Dio invisibile».)
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?
The 169th Philosophers’ Carnival is online! Among several other interesting things, it has some lines on the interpretation of an alien Philosophy and on the Skholiast‘s contribution to the “doing philosophy in a polycentric world” debate (about which see also this post on the Indian Philosophy Blog).
For personal reasons, I am also happy to see also a link to Gabriele Contessa’s plea for a more inclusive policy of inclusion of philosophers who do not have English as their first language. Why should this be important? Apart from the fact that it is fair to include everyone, independent of their (race, gender, sexual preferences… and) native tongue, inclusion of different perspectives is part of the enterprise of ideodiversity, which is what we (=scholars of non-Western philosophies) are all engaged with, isn’t it?