Category Archives: Philosophy
Where are the Yoga philosophers?
Today I read in Philipp Maas’s contribution to Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy (edited by Eli Franco) an intriguing critique of Colebrook and of all the Indologists who, seemingly following him, thought that there was nothing philosophical in Yoga apart from its Sāṅkhya component and that what was typical of Yoga alone was not philosophical.
In my weekly article on “Western” philosophy, I discuss about the requisites for testimony. Reductionists (i.e., scholars who think that Linguistic Communication can be reduced to other instruments of knowledge, the usual candidates being memory and inference) tend to have higher requirements for Testimony, but so do also some Non-Reductionists. Do we agree in ending up with that little “sound” testimonial knowledge?
Comparative Philosophy in Leiden
I received from Peter Bisschop the following ad —if I were not happily in Vienna I would certainly apply!
20/11/2013
Does God want to be loved? If so, how could S/He endure to be loved just because S/He forced us to do so? Is not free love the only type of true love? Have a look at my discussion of predestination, omnipotence and God’s love on a (Western) philosophical blog.
A religion without mystics is a philosophy.”
I cannot enroll the Pope among my supporters, but this quote offers a further interesting insight on a point I raised here.
Does God have a body? And in which sense? Have a look at the whole problem, from the point of view of Western philosophy, but with an answer inspired by Vedānta Deśika in this post of mine.
Mystical perception, God’s intellectual intuition and normal people’s sense-perception
Is mystical perception (aka yogipratyakṣa) a kind of perception? Can we go without it, if we want to ground religious beliefs?
Disciplines, Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity etc. in Sanskrit (and) Philosophy
If you have ever felt comfortable in one discipline… lucky you!
Sanderson is always an incredibly fascinating speaker. In this conference he discusses the dialectics of Śaivism and “orthodox Hinduism”: It is not only the case that Śaiva authors tried to be accepted as “orthodox Hindūs” and “orthodox Hindūs” tried to block them. By contrast, on both sides there were trends towards assimilation and resistance to these trends.
(Full disclosure: I have discussed a similar case of a complex dialectical relationship —this time between Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇava theology and “orthodox Hindūism”— in an article to be published in the proceedings of IIGRS 4).
I guess it should be one, according to Nyāya and the other schools who put the burden on the speaker, but I tried to discuss the topic from the point of view of Western epistemology. Let me know if you think it works.