Law

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 …

Check Balu’s piece on Derrida’s the force of law .

So far, our answers have always taken this form: in the moment of secularization, the formal structures or cognitive schemes of Christianity are diffused accordingly as they lose their specific doctrinal content. In this formulation, it is as though the logical form of religion is able to spread itself by disposing of its semantic content. Thus, both the common sense of the West and the scholarly …

I was invited by some Sadhus from Swami Narayan Temple (BAPS) to visit the temple and have a discussion with them. Because they practice very strict Brahmacharya (eight types of avoiding women, each correlated to an organ: it is called Ashtanga Brahmacharya), the Sadhus said that women could not be present during our discussions, while they were welcome to visit the temple. As I remember the …

You suggest that calling Apsaras as “prostitutes in the court of Indra” is an extreme statement. Of course, you would be right if you mean that the English word does not carry all the connotations of ‘Veshya’ or even that our current usage of the word ‘Veshya’ is not as rich as the earlier uses of the same word were. You are right too when you point out that the word ‘Kama’, as a pursushartha, …

We need to tackle the following issues properly if we want to get a handle on normativity and its relation to a configuration of learning. 1.1. Normativity cannot be the product of ethical learning. If it were that, say, by being a biological inheritance, then normative thinking would be the form of all ethics and my claim is that it is not so. 1.2. Nevertheless, we need to explain the success of …

Whenever I discuss the absence of normative ethics in India, people, especially Indians, get agitated. They hear me say that India has no ethics. Consequently, they want to show that I could never be right in my claim. This has happened on the Abhinavagupta forum as well. Perhaps, I should say that the Indian understanding of ethics is different from the western understanding. While this might …

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 …