Abdul Halim, of the National Translation Mission (NTM) India, interviews Ranganathan about his contributions to translation theory. Translation Today is a Double-blind, Peer- reviewed journal of the NTM.

Reasons can interact in a variety of ways to determine what we ought to do or believe. And there can be cases where two reasons to do an act or have a belief are individually worse than a reason to not do that act or have that belief, but the reasons together are better than the reason to not do that act or have that belief. So the reasons together―which we can call the accrual of those reasons—can have a strength (...) that is an increasing function of the strengths of the individual reasons. In this paper, we will look at how reasons determine what we ought to do and believe in cases where the accrual of reasons is relevant. Our focus will not primarily be on questions about the nature of individual reasons and their weight. Instead, we will at the outset rely on our pretheoretical grip on what reasons there are and how weighty they are individually and ask the more formal or structural question of how to determine the strength of their accrual based on these facts. In looking at these issues, my goal will not be anything as ambitious as developing a full theory of the accrual of reasons. Rather, my goal will be more modest: I will introducing some of the challenges for providing an adequate model and argue that a promising approach to resolving these challenges involves making use of the familiar distinction in moral philosophy between derivative and non-derivative normative notions. (shrink)

A traditional picture is that cases of deontic constraints--- cases where an act is wrong (or one that there is most reason to not do) even though performing that act will prevent more acts of the same morally (or practically) relevant type from being performed---form a kind of fault line in ethical theory separating (agent-neutral) consequentialist theories from other ethical theories. But certain results in the recent literature, such as those due to Graham Oddie and Peter Milne in "Act and (...) Value", do not sit well this traditional wisdom. My aim in this paper is to argue that both the traditional wisdom and Oddie and Milne are mistaken. I begin by looking more closely at the traditional wisdom and why it fails (§1). Then I develop my account of this fault line in ethical theory and its importance (§2). Finally I show that a diagnosis of where Oddie and Milne go wrong follows as a corollary of this new account (§3). An important upshot will be that discussions of cases of deontic constraints would do best to focus on the account of the nature and importance of the cases identified in this paper rather than continuing to work with the mistaken traditional picture. (shrink)

One of the popular albeit controversial ideas in the last century of moral philosophy is that what we ought to do is explained by our reasons. And one of the central features of reasons that accounts for their popularity among normative theorists is that they can conflict. But I argue that the fact that reasons conflict actually also poses two closely related problems for this popular idea in moral philosophy. The first problem is a generalization of a problem in deontic (...) logic concerning the existence of conflicting obligations. The second problem arises from a tension between the fact that reasons can conflict and a model of how reasons explain ‘ought’s that has been widely accepted. Having presented each of these problems, I develop a unified solution to them that is informed by results in both ethics and deontic logic. An important implication of this solution is that we must distinguish between derivative and nonderivative reasons and revise our conception how it is that reasons explain ‘ought’s. (shrink)

Since at least the 1960s, deontic logicians and ethicists have worried about whether there can be normative systems that allow conflicting obligations. Surprisingly, however, little direct attention has been paid to questions about how we may reason with conflicting obligations. In this paper, I present a problem for making sense of reasoning with conflicting obligations and argue that no deontic logic can solve this problem. I then develop an account of reasoning based on the popular idea in ethics that reasons (...) explain obligations and show that it solves this problem. (shrink)

The authors study the impact of institutional corporate social responsibility —defined as CSR targeted at a borrowing firm’s secondary stakeholders—on bank loans. Findings suggest that higher levels of institutional CSR are associated with lower levels of interest rates and loan spreads. In addition, institutional CSR also tempers the positive impact of loan maturity and firm leverage on interest rates and loan spread. These effects were strongest among firms that demonstrated sustained performance, rather than among firms that showed mixed performance in (...) terms of their secondary stakeholder-related activities. This study indicates institutional CSR is valued by stakeholders for its risk mitigating and transaction cost reducing effects independent of technical CSR, defined as CSR targeted at primary stakeholders. (shrink)

Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 2007). Regretfully, it is not an uncommon view in orthodox Indology that Indian philosophers were not interested in ethics. This claim belies the fact that Indian philosophical schools were generally interested in the practical consequences of beliefs and actions. The most popular symptom of this concern is the doctrine of karma, according to which the consequences of actions have an evaluative valence. Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy argues that the (...) orthodox view in Indology concerning Indian ethics is false. The first half the book deals with theoretical issues in studying ethics: defining moral terms, understanding the subject matter of ethics so as to transcend culturally specific substantive commitments and touches upon issues of cross-cultural hermeneutics and translation. The second half consists of a systematic explication of the moral philosophical aspects of nine major Indian philosophical schools. I argue that “dharma” in its various uses in Indian philosophy is always rationally treated as a moral term—even in so called “ontological” employments of the term as seen in Buddhism and Jainism. In understanding “dharma” in this manner, the Indian philosophical tradition is replete with different versions of moral realism that fit tidily with other philosophical commitments of Indian philosophers. Pains are taken to show the breath of moral philosophical disagreement in this tradition. On a comparative note, some Indian moral philosophy resembles realist approaches of the Western tradition (such as the Non-natural realism of Neo-Platonism, or the Naturalism of Utilitarianism). Out of the major Indian philosophical schools, a slim minority are shown to be committed to moral irrealism while some are shown to regard their entire philosophical orientation as firmly planted within moral philosophy (such as Jainism, Buddhism, Purva Mimamsa and Yoga). In response to those who would argue that what Indian philosophers meant by “dharma” is very different from what moral philosophers in the West have meant by “ethical” or “good,” I argue that this is as vacuous as noting that Utilitarians have a different conception of the good from Deontologists. If philosophy is concerned with theoretical debate, as I argue it is, philosophical terms function to articulate such disagreements. The various seemingly desperate uses of “dharma” in the Indian tradition are no longer confusing or disorderly when we understand the theoretico-philosophical function of this term in Indian philosophical disputes. -/- The second edition contains an additional chapter that addresses the colonial and political context of the study of Indian Ethics. (shrink)

As Mishra Tarc (2020) does through her evocative words on engaging texts today, I contemplate how texts, specifically children’s books, open pedagogical possibilities to reckon, repair, and reworld in a world that is on fire. From climate change to racial justice, it is children’s books, I believe, that can serve as pedagogical interventions and responses for teachers and teacher educators who are interested in addressing and confronting these complex and sometimes ineffable issues. I offer a glimpse of this approach through (...) my practice as an elementary school teacher, a teacher candidate, and a teacher educator. Through these experiences, I consider how children’s books open up productive conversations around “difficult” and “hard” topics while also grappling with the ongoing questions that remain in my practice. Turning to children’s books, I outline both the immense potential of and need for using texts in the field of education. Immersing texts pedagogically and as a site of study, I hope, animates a renewed significance in supporting students to examine and tackle the issues confronting them. (shrink)

Indian thought is often said to be concerned with ethics that leads to freedom. Either this means that we should treat freedom as the end that justifies the ethical life, or that the ethical life is the procedure that causes freedom. The history of Vedānta philosophy—philosophy of the latter part of the Vedas—largely endorses the latter option via the “moral transition argument” : a dialectic that takes us from teleology to proceduralism. It is motivated by a desire to remove luck (...) from moral theory. But this leaves open the Paradox of Development, which posits our moral freedom as a condition of protecting it. I explore the MTA, and Śaṅkara’s, Madhva’s, and Rāmānuja’s response to the Paradox of Development. (shrink)

This paper examines how Western colonialism erases the rich history of moral and political philosophy from South Asia, choosing to at once appropriate from it and depict it as too immature to be taken seriously. And yet, if we attend to methodological questions central to research, the question of whether we ought to explain anything by way of propositional attitudes like beliefs (interpretation) or engage in a logic-based recovery of reasons for controversial conclusions (explication) we see that the latter decolonial (...) method shows that South Asian moral philosophers disagreed about ahiṃsā. Jains depicted ahiṃsā teleologically in accordance with their Virtue Ethics, while Yoga, a radically procedural ethical theory, entails that ahiṃsā is a procedure. The former idea is about not breaking things. The latter is about disrupting systemic harm. Insufficient attention to these contrary approaches to ahiṃsā are part of a pattern of dismissing the importance of learning from South Asian moral philosophers. Deliberate choice in contrast requires attention to this tradition and its exploration of ahiṃsā. Contrary to colonial glosses, we derive our contemporary tradition of progressive, activist politics from the Yogic approach to ahiṃsā. (shrink)

This volume presents essays by pioneering thinkers including Tyler Burge, Gregory Chaitin, Daniel Dennett, Barry Mazur, Nicholas Humphrey, John Searle and Ian Stewart. Together they illuminate the Map/Territory Distinction that underlies at the foundation of the scientific method, thought and the very reality itself. It is imperative to distinguish Map from the Territory while analyzing any subject but we often mistake map for the territory. Meaning for the Reference. Computational tool for what it computes. Representations are handy and tempting that (...) we often end up committing the category error of over-marrying the representation with what is represented, so much so that the distinction between the former and the latter is lost. This error that has its roots in the pedagogy often generates a plethora of paradoxes/confusions which hinder the proper understanding of the subject. What are wave functions? Fields? Forces? Numbers? Sets? Classes? Operators? Functions? Alphabets and Sentences? Are they a part of our map? Or do they actually belong to the territory? Researcher, like a cartographer, clothes the reality by stitching multitudes of maps that simultaneously co-exist. A simple apple, for example, can be analyzed from several viewpoints beginning with evolution and biology, all the way down its microscopic quantum mechanical components. Is there a reality out there apart from these maps? How do these various maps interact/intermingle with each other to produce a coherent reality that we interact with? Or do they not? Does our brain uses its own internal maps to facilitate “physicist/mathematician” in us to construct the maps about the external territories in turn? If so, what is the nature of these internal maps? Are there meta-maps? Evolution definitely fences our perception and thereby our ability to construct maps, revealing to us only those aspects beneficial for our survival. But the question is, to what extent? Is there a way out of the metaphorical Platonic cave erected around us by the nature? While “Map is not the territory” as Alfred Korzybski remarked, join us in this journey to know more, while we inquire on the nature and the reality of the maps which try to map the reality out there. The book also includes a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose and an afterword by Dagfinn Follesdal. (shrink)

Human rights, as traditionally understood in the West, are grounded in an anthropocentric theory of personhood. However, as this chapter argues, such a stance is certainly not culturally universal; historically, it is derivable from a cultural orientation that is Greek in origin. Such an orientation conflates thought with language (logos), and identifies humans as uniquely deserving of moral consideration or standing to the exclusion of non-human knowers. The linguistic theory of thought impedes insight and understanding of both Indian and Western (...) contributions to political and moral thought. It is argued that the idea that we have rights by virtue of being human is problematic. In contrast, the chapter argues for an account of personal rights derivable from Patañjali’s philosophy. On a Patañjalian account, the rights necessary for the good of persons transcend species, sex, caste, race, class, age, ability, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

This chapter serves as a conclusion to the opening part of this book: Western Imperialism, Indology, and Ethics. The topics covered in this opening part traverse the issues involved in the study of philosophy: these pertain to the philosophy of thought, language, translation theory, moral semantics, culture, imperialism, and proper procedure for research.

Although the mathematics of interest is very precise, the practice of charging computing and disclosing interest or cost of credit is full of variations and therefore often questionable on ethical grounds. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the prevalent practices which are incorrect, illogical, unfair or deceptive. Both utilitarian and formalist schools of ethical theory would find these practices to be inappropriate. The paper will specifically look at unfair practices in the areas of estimation of intrayear (...) rates, use of 360 days in a year, the "rule of 78th", interest rate ('APR') advertising, and computation of unpaid balance by credit card issuers to figure interest costs.The current practices are not in the best interest of the average consumer. There is, therefore, an urgent need for new legislation, change in regulatory code and disclosure requirement for eliminating these unethical practices. The author recommends that the Truth in Lending Code of the Federal Reserve should require the disclosure of the effective APR if the periodic rate is determined by dividing the 'APR' by the number of payment period in a year; the use of 360 days in a year methods and the "Rule of 78ths" should be immediately discontinued; Deceptive advertising, which tend to understate the true cost of credit or hides hidden costs and fees should be outlawed; interest should be payable with the same frequency as the frequency of compounding and credit card holders should be provided with a comparative example of various methods of balance computation. (shrink)

How do multiple reasons combine to support a conclusion about what to do or believe? This question raises two challenges: How can we represent the strength of a reason? How do the strengths of multiple reasons combine? Analogous challenges about confirmation have been answered using probabilistic tools. Can reductive and nonreductive theories of reasons use these tools to answer their challenges? Yes, or more exactly: reductive theories can answer both challenges. Nonreductive theories, with the help of a result in confirmation (...) theory, can answer one, and there are grounds for optimism that they can answer the other. (shrink)

In this paper I address anew the problem of determinacy in translation by examining the Western philosophical and translation theoretic traditions of the last century. Translation theory and the philosophy of language have largely gone their separate ways (the former opting to rebrand itself as “translation studies” to emphasize its empirical and anti-theoretical underpinnings). Yet translation theory and the philosophy of language predominantly share a common assumption that stands in the way of determinate translation. It is that languages, not texts, (...) are the objects of translation and the subjects of semantics. The way to overcome the theoretical problems surrounding the possibility and determinacy of translation is to marry the philosopher of language’s concern for determinacy and semantic accuracy in translation with the notion of a “text-type” from the translation theory literature. The resulting theory capable of explaining determinacy in translation is what I call the text-type conception of semantics (TTS). It is a novel alternative to the salient positions of Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism in the contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

According to the orthodox account of meaning and translation in the literature, meaning is a property of expressions of a language, and translation is a matching of synonymous expressions across languages. This linguistic account of translation gives rise to well-known skeptical conclusions about translation, objectivity, meaning and truth, but it does not conform to our best translational practices. In contrast, I argue for a textual account of meaning based on the concept of a TEXT-TYPE that does conform to our best (...) translational practices. With their semantic function in view, text-types are Archimedean points for their respective disciplines. The text-type of philosophy is no exception. Culture-transcendent conceptual analysis can proceed on firm footing without having to deny the reality of radical cultural and linguistic difference by treating components of text-types as the concepts to be analyzed. Analyses of central philosophical concepts are provided as a means of adjudicating philosophical controversy. (shrink)

Maitreyī has been renown since antiquity for her contributions to philosophy. In this chapter, her views as a proponent of Advaita (Monism) are explained. She was an explicator of a monistic approach to value that argues that the true Self, Ātman, is the basis of the highest values we hold and that knowledge of one’s true identity as Ātman, can be followed by acquiring a first person appreciation of one’s identity as Ātman. That deep axiological understanding, not merely intellectual comprehension, (...) is liberation. Maitreyī (or someone by that name) is reported by the ancient epic Mahābhārata to have remained unmarried, but in one of the earliest of Upaniṣads, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Maitreyī is described as a philosopher (brahmavādhinī) married to the sage Yājñavalkya. Regardless of her marital status, a dialogue with Yājñavalkya is preserved in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad in which she explicates the function of Ātman, its unity with Brahman (Growth, Expansion, Development), and discusses the nature of love and its role in the self who is seeking liberation. That dialogue is explored and discussed in this chapter. (shrink)

Undergraduate students of philosophy are often told that Kant is famous for teaching us that “ought implies can,” and furthermore that this principle implies that it makes no sense to tell someone that they ought to do something if they do not have the ability to execute the action in question. It is thus surprising to find that the words “ought implies can” do not appear conspicuously in popular English translations of Kant’s main moral philosophical texts (such as the Groundwork, (...) and Critique of Practical Reason). I argue that Kant’s writings do not clearly support it, and at points stand opposed to it. One may still attribute the formula “ought implies can” to Kant, but only at the cost of understanding this formula in a nonstandard manner. (shrink)

This is the first lesson of the MA level 1 course in Ethics, which spans the European and Asian traditions. This lesson consists of three main components: Part 2 concerns the discipline of philosophy – its scope and aim. Part 3 is an elaboration of philosophy, the discipline, as an exploration of the GOOD and the RIGHT. This is called “ethics” or “moral philosophy.” In Sanskrit, these explorations fall under the heading of dharma. In Part 4 we shall address some (...) basic concerns about understanding ethics internationally. Part 5 is a brief conclusion. (shrink)

Translation theory and the philosophy of language have largely gone their separate ways (the former opting to rebrand itself as “translation studies” to emphasize its empirical and anti-theoretical underpinnings). Yet translation theory and the philosophy of language have predominately shared a common assumption that stands in the way of determinate translation. It is that languages, not texts, are the objects of translation and the subjects of semantics. The way to overcome the theoretical problems surrounding the possibility and determinacy of translation (...) is to marry the philosopher of language's concern for determinacy and semantic accuracy in translation with the notion of a “text-type” from the translation theory literature. The resulting text-type conception of semantics (TTS) is a novel alternative to the salient positions of Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism in the contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

Yoga is a nonspeciesist liberalism, founded in a moral non-naturalism, which identifies the essence of personhood as the Lord, defined by unconservative self-governance—an abstraction from each of us that is non-proprietary. According to Yoga, the right is defined as the approximation of the regulative ideal and the good is the perfection of this practice, which delivers us from a life of coercion into a personal world of freedom. It is an alternative to Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics, which provides a (...) unitary account of moral well-being and worldly well-being. The seeming antinomy of freedom and determinism is resolved in the ethical life. I argue that Yoga provides a critical and instructive response to alternative ethical theoris and the problem of collective harm. (shrink)

In this lesson I explore the question of moral epistemology by way of the thought of Plato, Aristotle and the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā tradition.

This lesson explores the relationship between ethics and religion. There is a tradition of thinking that religion takes explanatory priority in ethics, but there is a counter tradition of philosophy that shows that philosophical questions of the right or the good take priority over religious questions: without answering the philosophical question we are not in a position to endorse a religious tradition as right or good. But on a global scale the issue is fraught with the realities of the colonial (...) context of the classification and minting of religions from prior philosophical traditions. This serves to delegitimize non-Western moral philosophy as a mere traditional practice in need of further philosophical justification, which by default (owing to this process) ends up being philosophical justification from the West. Thinking critically about ethics involves reclaiming the philosophy under the veneer of the political identification of non-Western moral traditions as religions. The idea of religion on a global scale must be criticized as a means of avoiding moral theory and moral philosophy from diverse sources. The argument involves exploring a revised version of the Euthyphro Dilemma that I call "Euthyphro Dilemma 2.0.". (shrink)

In the previous module, I covered the basics of Early Buddhist metaethics. The core ideas here are: (1) linguistic representation is not the same as reality – linguistic representation depicts reality as static, but reality is relational and dynamic; (2) reality can drift away from linguistic representation causing disappointment – duḥkha; (3) choosing wisely now can result in a better future; (4) ethical choice involves appreciating the justifying relations of states of affairs. In this module, I explore the Four Noble (...) Truths and the Eight-Fold Path as efforts to systematise these findings as the basis of a normative theory and applied ethics. Of special concern is its culmination in Buddhist practices of meditation. In the fourth section, we shall examine the relationship between these meditational practices and Buddhist Consequentialism. Indeed, the very practice of meditation is, in large measure, justified by the outcomes that Buddhists meditate upon. This approach to ethics is not only consequentialist, but provides a uniquely Buddhist approach to overcoming personal challenges. This allows us to revisit the issue of rule following in Buddhism. Contrary to those who would claim that Buddhist uses of "dharma" to identify wrong motives is proof that such uses are amoral, or inconsistent with Consequentialism, I show that this is exactly what we would expect if Buddhist ethics is Consequentialist. Such dharmas (ethical ends) are to be treated as ends, and not as means. Mindfulness is the appropriate means justified by such ends. The absurdity arises if we abandon Consequentialism and treat such ends requiring justification or as procedures that are reasonable, and not what confers justification. (shrink)

Rational outcomes of a social system do not necessarily require its individual participants to be rational. In macro systems, aggregate properties distinct from the behavior of their micro level components can emerge through complex interactions. Caution in building social sciences on assumption of methodological individualism seems appropriate.

While Yoga (also called Bhakti, “devotion”) is a comprehensive philosophy, it is importantly an ancient and basic ethical theory, unique to South Asia (what is commonly called the Indian tradition). It is not a variant of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, but is an additional kind of moral theory. And in its literary articulation, in dialog and story (such as the Mahābhārata and the Upaniṣads), it has a long history of criticizing teleological ethical theories, including – and especially – consequentialism. (...) It is a radically procedural ethical theory, does not require the Good to elucidate the Right, and provides a critical response to all three alternatives. -/- The main obstacle to understanding Yoga is methodological. It pertains to how we can understand philosophical options that we do not necessarily agree with, and which are novel relative to our background assumptions and beliefs. Without methodological clarity, we will be doomed to understand alternatives in terms of familiar options. Yoga's metaethics provides us the tools necessary to engage in this research. In addition, it also sets out a unique normative (ideal) ethical theory and a non-ideal practice that is now the foundation of decolonial practices of direct action. (shrink)

Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation explores Hinduism and the distinction between the secular and religious on a global scale. According to Ranganathan, a careful philosophical study of Hinduism reveals it as the microcosm of philosophical disagreements with Indian resources, across a variety of topics, including: ethics, logic, the philosophy of thought, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. This analysis offers an original and fresh diagnosis of studying Hinduism, colonialism and a global rise of hyper-nationalism, as well as the frequent acrimony (...) between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions. -/- This text is appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate courses on Hinduism, and Indian philosophy, and can be used as an advanced introduction to the problems of philosophy with South Asian resources. (shrink)

As known from the academic literature on Hinduism, the foreign, Persian word, “Hindu” (meaning “Indian”), was used by the British to name everything indigenously South Asian, which was not Islam, as a religion. If we adopt explication as our research methodology, which consists in the application of the criterion of logical validity to organize various propositions of perspectives we encounter in research in terms of a disagreement, we discover: (a) what the British identified as “Hinduism” was not characterizable by a (...) shared set of beliefs or shared outlook, but a disagreement or debate about basic topics of philosophy with a discourse on tenets of moral philosophy anchoring the debate; and (b), the Western tradition’s historical commitment to language as the vehicle of thought not only leads to the conflation of propositions with beliefs, but to interpreting (explaining by way of belief) on the basis of the Eurocentric tradition rooted exclusively in ancient Greek philosophy. Interpretation on the basis of the Western tradition leads to the Western tradition vindicating itself as the non-traditional, non-religious, rational platform—the secular—for explaining everything—the residua are what get called religions on a global scale. This serves the political function of insulating Western colonialism from indigenous moral and political criticism. Given that Western colonialism is the pivotal event, before which South Asians just had philosophy, and after which they had religion (the explanatory residua of Eurocentric interpretation), we can ask about Hindu religious belief. This only pertains to the period after colonialism, when Hindus adopted a Westcentric frame for understanding their tradition as religious because of colonization. Prior to this, the tradition the British identified as “Hindu” had a wide variety of philosophical approaches to justification, which often criticized propositional attitudes, like belief, as irrational. (shrink)

To talk about ethics and the moral life in India, and whether and when Indians misunderstood each other’s views, we must know something about what Indians thought about ethical and moral issues. However, there is a commonly held view among scholars of Indian thought that Indians, and especially their intellectuals, were not really interested in ethical matters (Matilal 1989, 5; Raju 1967, 27; Devaraja 1962, v-vi; Deutsch 1969, 99). This view is false and strange. Understanding how it is that posterity (...) has managed to misunderstand ethics and the moral life in India so profoundly is not something that we can address without thinking about issues pertaining to scholarship, interpretation and translation. Most importantly, studying a culture demands a philosophical engagement with the categories against which one attempts to understand it. If one believes, as many scholars do, that it is a rigorous study of Sanskrit and other classical Indian languages alone that holds the key to understanding classical India, then there is apparently neither need nor room for such reflection. It is this very same failure to engage philosophically with the category of the ethical and its place in translation that has allowed many modern Indians to misunderstand Indians of yore. (This is a paper I wrote in 2008 for an edited volume by Jyotirmaya Sharma for Penguin India, which unfortunately did not come to fruition. Since then, a lot has changed with respect to Sharma’s relationship to Penguin India, so perhaps this was all just prescient karma. I have circulated it with friends, who want to refer to it, so I thought I would upload it. Please refer to it as an online source: PhilPapers being the placed published. SR). (shrink)

The compound “Hindu philosophy” is ambiguous. Minimally it stands for a tradition of Indian philosophical thinking. However, it could be interpreted as designating one comprehensive philosophical doctrine, shared by all Hindu thinkers. The term “Hindu philosophy” is often used loosely in this philosophical or doctrinal sense, but this usage is misleading. There is no single, comprehensive philosophical doctrine shared by all Hindus that distinguishes their view from contrary philosophical views associated with other Indian religious movements such as Buddhism or Jainism (...) on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics or cosmology. Hence, historians of Indian philosophy typically understand the term “Hindu philosophy” as standing for the collection of philosophical views that share a textual connection to certain core Hindu religious texts (such as the Vedas), and they do not identify “Hindu philosophy” with a particular comprehensive philosophical doctrine. -/- Hindu philosophy, thus understood, not only includes the philosophical doctrines present in Hindu texts of primary and secondary religious importance, but also the systematic philosophies of the Hindu schools: Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Pūrvamīmāṃsā and Vedānta. In total, Hindu philosophy has made a sizable contribution to the history of Indian philosophy and its role has been far from static: Hindu philosophy was influenced by Buddhist and Jain philosophies, and in turn Hindu philosophy influenced Buddhist philosophy in India in its later stages. In recent times, Hindu philosophy evolved into what some scholars call “Neo-Hinduism,” which can be understood as an Indian response to the perceived sectarianism and scientism of the West. Hindu philosophy thus has a long history, stretching back from the second millennia B.C.E. to the present. (shrink)

Rāmānuja (ācārya), the eleventh century South Indian philosopher, is the chief proponent of Vishishtādvaita, which is one of the three main forms of the Orthodox Hindu philosophical school, Vedānta. As the prime philosopher of the Vishishtādvaita tradition, Rāmānuja is one of the Indian philosophical tradition’s most important and influential figures. He was the first Indian philosopher to provide a systematic theistic interpretation of the philosophy of the Vedas, and is famous for arguing for the epistemic and soteriological significance of bhakti, (...) or devotion to a personal God. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rāmānuja defended the reality of a plurality of individual persons, qualities, values and objects while affirming the substantial unity of all. On some accounts, Rāmānuja’s influence on popular Hindu practice is so vast that his system forms the basis for popular Hindu philosophy. His two main philosophical writings (the Shrī Bhāshya and Vedārthasangraha) are amongst the best examples of rigorous and energetic argumentation in any philosophical tradition, and they are masterpieces of Indian scholastic philosophy. (shrink)

Evil in the Vedas and the Upanishads undergoes a theoretical transformation as this literature itself moves away from its consequentialist and naturalistic roots to a radical procedural approach to moral questions. The goods of life on the early account were largely natural: evil was a moral primitive that motivated a teleological approach to morality geared towards avoiding natural evil. The gods of nature (such as fire, and rain, intimately involved in metabolism) were propitiated to gain beneficent results, and to avoid (...) hunger and illness. To please the gods of nature involves eating, which is merely the imposition of natural evil on sacrificial victims so that one avoids the evils of disease and hunger oneself. The entire system is one of resentment: the goods of life are defined by way of the bads that they displace. Authors of the latter part of the Vedas, such as the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, show themselves to be concerned about the irreducibility of evil on the naturalistic account, but also more broadly with the irreducible phenomenon of moral luck that comes in tow with a teleological approach to ethics. Whether one is able to ward off evil and enjoy the goods of life is not under one’s control and is within the purview of the forces of nature. This motivates the transition to a procedural account of ethics---yoga---where evil is not a primitive but a side effect of the non-yogic life, characterized by a lack of self-governance. As Death teaches us, evil is not a moral primitive and can be reduced out of the moral equation by taking responsibility for a lack of autonomy, which transforms this external threat of a lack of autonomy into a self lack of autonomy, or self-governance. With this transformation we are delivered into the realm of preservation (Vishnu). (shrink)

In contrast to a stereotypical account of Indian philosophy that are entailments of the interpreter’s beliefs (an approach that violates basic standards of reason), an approach to Indian philosophy grounded on the constraints of formal reason reveals not only a wide spread disagreement on dharma (THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD), but also a pervasive commitment to the practical foundation of life’s challenges. The flip side of this practical orientation is the criticism of ordinary experience as erroneous and reducible to the (...) agent’s mental states. If we ignore the background practical orientation in Indian philosophy, this seems not like an error theory, that I call Ironic Idealism, but as a defense of idealism. I consider salient candidates for Indian Idealism (Advaita Vedānta, Yogācāra Buddhism, Kāśmīra Śaivism and the Yogavāsiṣṭha) and note that these positions continue a theme in Indian philosophy of articulating Ironic Idealism. Ironic Idealism depends upon the very Indian distinction between ultimate and provisional truth, and Ironic Idealism criticizes the mundane, provisional sort of "truth" as psychological and mental --- and ultimately false. Interpretation, the common approach to the study of Indian philosophy, is an example of what Ironic Idealism criticizes. This explains why authors incorrectly find Idealism everywhere in Indian thought. (shrink)

This article, addressed to Yoga Therapists, sorts out the historical roots of our idea of Yoga, elucidates the colonial interference and distortion of Yoga, and shows that trauma and therapy are the primary focus of Yoga. However, unlike most philosophies of therapy, Yoga's solution is primarily moral philosophical---Yoga itself being a basic ethical theory, in addition to Virtue Theory, Consequentialism and Deontology. This article goes some way to elucidating that it is quite ironic (and absurd) that many feel the need (...) to bring being “trauma-informed” into the title of Yoga education. That’s like the vacuous “chai tea” moniker (“chai” being the Hindi word for tea). Decolonizing our understanding of Yoga involves retrieving the original theory as the primary explanation of the topic, which allows us to understand how various activities, called "yoga," can be ways of practicing the moral philosophy of Yoga. The idea that "yoga" means many things and projects relies upon a contra logical methodology of interpretation which violates constraints of basic reasoning. Putting aside interpretation for explication is part of critical thinking but also our own self therapy. (Originally published in Yoga Therapy Today, a publication of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. Shared with permission.). (shrink)

In this chapter I respond to objections that we should shift our focus from truth to objectivity, from prejudice to research, and from doctrine to disciplinarity. Disciplines are the same practice from differing perspectives and they allow us to triangulate on objects of interest. This entails that objects are discipline relative, and hence the insertion of social scientific concerns in the study of philosophy, as is common place in Indology, is groundless. Having entertained and shown that disciplines aside from philosophy (...) have nothing to teach us about the history of philosophy, I show that the common view that Indian philosophers were uninterested in ethics is a straightforward outcome of failing to employ the standard practice of philosophers (explication) in the study of Indian thought. (shrink)

A famous Indian argument for jus ad bellum and jus in bello is presented in literary form in the Mahābhārata: it involves events and dynamics between moral conventionalists (who attempt to abide by ethical theories that give priority to the good) and moral parasites (who attempt to use moral convention as a weapon without any desire to conform to these expectations themselves). In this paper I follow the dialectic of this victimization of the conventionally moral by moral parasites to its (...) philosophical culmination in the fateful battle, which the Bhagavad Gītā precedes. Arjuna’s lament is an internalization of the logic of conventional moral expectations that allowed moral parasitism, and Krishna’s push for a purely procedural approach to moral reasoning (bhakti yoga) does away with the good as a primitive of explanation and provides the moral considerations that allow us to see that the jus ad bellum and jus in bello coincide: the just cause is the approximation to the procedural ideal (the Lord), which is also just conduct. Jeff McMahan is correct in claiming that it is wrong for the unjust to attack the just. But it is also not obviously correct that it is the same set of moral considerations in war and peace that mark out the sides, for peace is largely characterizable by conventional morality, which all are forced to abandon in war. Walzer is correct that there are different sets of standards at play at war and peace, and that getting hands dirty in immorality is a price worth paying in war, but Walzer is thereby incorrect for a subtle reason: conventional standards by way of which jus ad bellum and jus in bello appear corrupt are themselves actually corrupt when the need for a just war arises. It is because moral parasites use conventional morality as a means of hostility and not as a means of fair, inclusive social interaction that conventional morality is corrupted and turned into a tool of the unjust. It is hence unjust to employ these standards to judge those whose cause is just, though such a judgement is conventional. Those who fight for a just cause thereby justly get their hands dirty by departing from conventional moral standards. But this is to the disadvantage of parasites who can only function in a climate where the conventionally good are constrained by conventional morality. Just war so understood deprives parasites their weapon of choice. (shrink)