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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Andrew Nicholson

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 →

The blurry boundary between premodern and modern

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Roman Catholicism

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Andrew Nicholson, Brian Tierney, David McMahan, Donald S. Lopez Jr., G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Michel Villey, modernity, Rammohun Roy, rights, Wilhelm Halbfass, William of Ockham

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two excellent books on very different topics, both of which I’ve written about at Love of All Wisdom before: Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, and Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights.

The idea of human or natural rights has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Michel Villey, shows us it is not that. Villey takes the work of William of Ockham as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of rights, which brings in a very different metaphysics where rights now play an important role. The brilliance of Tierney’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Ockham to the world after him. It preserves Villey’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined.

The idea of Hinduism has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Wilhelm Halbfass and Heinrich von Stietencron, shows us it is not that. Halbfass takes the work of Rammohun Roy as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of Hinduism, which brings in a very different metaphysics where Hinduism now plays an important role. The brilliance of Nicholson’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Roy to the world after him. It preserves Halbfass’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined. Continue reading →

A synthesis beyond Orientalism

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedānta

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A.E. Gough, Andrew Nicholson, Edward Said, generations, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernity, perennialism

[Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.]

I am increasingly getting the impression that the debates over Orientalism in Asian traditions have taken a new turn, and one very much for the better.

Few books of the twentieth century have made as much impact as Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. It is particularly striking that even though Said’s book was entirely about the Middle East, it has been a major scholarly landmark in the study of South and East Asia. Until Said, Western scholarship on Asia was rarely viewed as having a hidden colonial agenda. The perennialism of élitist mystical schools like Theosophy was taken seriously by scholars. And the views of Asian traditions’ popular advocates – such as D.T. Suzuki, Walpola Rahula, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – were widely accepted as accurate portrayals of those traditions.

After Said, all that changed. Continue reading →

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