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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

On “philosophy of religion”

06 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, God, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

≈ 5 Comments

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AAR, academia, APA, Bryan Van Norden, Jay Garfield, Maimonides, Rāmānuja, religion, Speculative Realism

A while ago I was contacted by an academic publisher asking me to review a new introductory textbook on philosophy of religion. I didn’t do so, even though the publisher offered me a stipend. The main reason was just that I didn’t have the time for it. But the more interesting reason was my objections to the work’s entire project.

The book’s proposed table of contents spoke of a work devoted entirely to God: the concept of God, and arguments for and against his existence. That is not an idiosyncratic approach; there are many existing textbooks in “philosophy of religion” that take the same approach. So there was nothing especially or unusually outrageous about this textbook and its other. And that is exactly the problem.

Continue reading →

On translating out of order

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Self

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Matthew Dasti, Mrinalkanti Gangopadhyaya, Nyāya Bhāṣya, Nyāya Sūtra, pedagogy, pramāṇa, Stephen Phillips

Last time I expressed my gratitude and praise for Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips’s much-needed recent selective translation of the Nyāya Sūtras and commentaries. I stand by all of it – and also noted that the book drives me crazy.

Why? Dasti and Phillips made two decisions that I think are characteristic of an analytic approach to Indian texts. One was to publish selections and excerpts  – probably the right choice, as discussed last time. The second one, however, was to publish those selections entirely out of order. Continue reading →

On new translations in Indian philosophy

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language

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Andrew Nicholson, Charles A. Moore, Deepak Sarma, Matthew Dasti, Mrinalkanti Gangopadhyaya, Nyāya Bhāṣya, Nyāya Sūtra, pedagogy, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Stephen Phillips, Uddyotakara, Vācaspati Miśra

One of the immediate frustrations one faces in teaching Indian philosophy is that good translations are sorely lacking, certainly into English and I suspect into any Western language, perhaps even any non-Sanskrit language. A Source Book of Indian Philosophy, edited by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, has been one of the most frequently used works since its publication – in 1957. Radhakrishnan and Moore have been dead for decades. And their work leaves much to be desired, filled with so many ellipses that one feels like one is reading Radhakrishnan’s and Moore’s ideas rather than those of the original authors; the ellipses are disruptive enough that the reader can spend more time wondering what was omitted than learning the original.

And yet with respect to some texts at least, Radhakrishnan and Moore still have yet to be surpassed. Continue reading →

A book about everything

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Epics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language

≈ 2 Comments

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G.W.F. Hegel, intimacy/integrity, Karl Marx, Mahābhārata, phenomenology

Recently I’ve been carrying around and reading a copy of G.W.F. Hegel’s masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Carrying a book with such a strange and obscure title, and no cover art, sometimes makes me think: what would I say to a curious onlooker, whether friend or stranger, who asked the deceptively simple question, “What’s that book about?”

To a simple question one wishes to give a simple answer. In the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit I think there is only one good simple answer that one can give to the question “What’s that book about?” It is a one-word answer: everything. Continue reading →

The classical enumeration of categories, and why it matters

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Philosophy of Language, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 10 Comments

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Aristotle, Ken Wilber, Plato, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara

There’s a recurring theme in Indo-European thought that has often perplexed me: categories. The Indian Vaiśeṣika school of thought is known primarily for enumerating a set of categories (padārthas) with which to understand reality. I always had a hard time getting why they spent so much time doing that. The thing is, they’re hardly alone in doing it. In an introductory class I took on reading philosophical Sanskrit, we read an 18th-century Sanskrit introduction to the thought of Rāmānuja, a thinker quite far removed from Vaiśeṣika – and that too was all about dividing the world into categories. I have not yet delved much into Aristotle’s difficult theoretical philosophy, especially his Metaphysics – but most introductions to that work will tell you that it too is all about categories. What’s going on here? Why would so many major thinkers do this sort of thing?

I think a key reasons the categories have puzzled me is that, like the majority of my readers, I have been brought up in a worldview heavily infused by scientism. In the English-speaking world, at least, we usually take it for granted that reality is made of matter; we are materialists. And we are wrong. Continue reading →

Internalism and externalism, in epistemology and ethics

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Judaism, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sophists, Truth

≈ 23 Comments

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Ethan Mills, Hebrew Bible, James Doull, Joe Cruz, John Pollock, Laurence BonJour, Plato

Is man the measure of all things? Or at least, are creatures with subjective internal consciousness the measure of all things? In ancient Greece, the Sophists answered yes. In so doing, they inaugurated Western reflection on a perennial question that stretches throughout both theoretical and practical philosophy, epistemology and ethics.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. Continue reading →

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