Action

It is broadly accepted that one of the most important functions of language is to describe the world outside it. Could it be the case that when it comes to the Indian systems, they all (whether it is Advaita vedanta, Yoga vasistha, visista advaita) are teaching one to act, to live in a particular way? In other words, they are not saying what there is in the world but are manuals in a manner of …

I want to respond to three of your points Claus. First you are not talking only about the Greeks and the Romans because all the problems arising with respect to the phenomena of non-Western societies and culture are/were equally the problems in the frameworks of different varieties of culture. You not only talk about the Greeks and the Romans, you gave examples about the French and the English as …

In the examples you refer to, you touch on an approach to situations and problems that are Indian (in the sense of culture) contrasted to which stands another culture’s way of dealing with situations. The simplest way to explicate this difference in a general way, using your examples as a reference point, would be this: when we speak of problems and solutions, there are two ways of looking at …

There are three ideas in the West about Law that are taken as axioms. The first: all societies are founded on Law; if they are not, they ought to be. The second is that Law teaches and educates a people. Third is their corollary: only thus do a people become a Nation. As far as I know, none has shown their empirical truth or proved that they are logically necessary. But their truth-value is …

If we want to grasp the nature of the discussions in the Indian traditions, there is much we need to do beforehand: (a) identify the entity they were talking about; (b) identify the specific questions they were answering; (c) identify the generic questions that defined both the outlines of the acceptable answers and the formulation of the specific questions; etc. (The ‘cetera’ indicates that I do …

A Disquieting Suggestion Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaced a book he wrote in the 70’s on oriental thought and moral philosophy titled Mysticism and Morality with the following words: The factual beliefs (that the civilizations of the East) take for granted are …too alien to our (the West’s) representations of the World to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their …

[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107] Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, the …