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 …

I still have some difficulty in figuring out the problem about normative ethics expressed on the Abhinavagupta forum. There is obviously something that bugs people, but I cannot make out what it is. First, about the counter evidence. If the Indian film censor board is a statutory body, then it derives its powers from the laws that have brought such an entity into being. Its tasks (viz. whether it …

X asks: I am unable to figure out what the special significance is of not having a ‘moral ought’ in the Indian traditions. If ‘should not’ and ‘must not’ have the same practical consequences as ‘ought not’, that is we are obligated to behave in a certain way, why does it make a difference how it is expressed in our language? Your question is probably the best way of showing the difficulty we have …

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 …

My proposal addresses itself to the following observation: the natural sciences, as we know them today, arise in the western culture. What ’natural sciences’ mean in the above statement is clarified by other sentences that say, for example, ’the rest of the world has accepted the western science and technology..’ or ‘we need to learn science and technology form the west..’ When we make these kinds …

The absence of supernatural entities in the Indian traditions may seem counterintuitive to many. We can let someone else do the talking for us, namely Dale B. Martin in his interesting book Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians (Harvard University Press, 2004): “One of the basic arguments of this book is that, contrary to many modern assumptions, the category of “the …

Let us retain the translation of ‘Anu’ as ‘appropriate’ or ‘apt’. Let us emphasize the active dimension of the word ‘Bhava’ to translate it as ‘coming into existence’. (‘Existence’ and ‘being’ are also acceptable translations of the word ‘Bhava’.) Then ‘Anubhava’ would mean an apt way of coming-into-existence. The problem here is this: we can ask the question, coming into existence of what? Of …

The biggest issue is: what is experience? All the Indian traditions have been busy with answering this question. But both posing this question and answering it are themselves experiential, as far as the Indian traditions are concerned. For instance, according to the so-called Buddhist traditions, the structures-in-experience are not given in the experience itself: the impermanence and transience …

If we take our English language use as a reference point, it appears as though we can speak sensibly about experiencing our feelings (‘I experience sadness’), experiencing thoughts (‘I can even now experience my jumbled thoughts when …’), experiencing colour (‘I experience a redness’), experiencing actions (‘I still experience my shaking limbs when I…’) and so on. That is, we can experience the …

1.1. Let us begin with the word “Anubhava”, which we use to translate the English word “experience”. There are two sub-words here: Anu and Bhava. ‘Anu’ can be translated as ‘apt’, or ‘appropriate’, whereas ‘Bhava’ can be rendered as ’existence’ or ‘being’. (The word also has an active dimension of ‘becoming’ as one of its meanings.) So, ‘anubhava’ would mean having an appropriate existence or even …

According to your account, Vedanta claims that the world is an illusion and that only the Brahman is real. If the world is an illusion, Vedanta has to deny the reality of the world. To it, in the way you construe Vedanta, the world is the empty set. That is to say, all experiences are on par because they are all illusions. One cannot distinguish between experiences unless one introduces the notion …

(a) Which evidence (what kind of evidence) could prove the existence of Hinduism? (b) Idem. for the non-existence of Hinduism. I think these issues are far too important to allow for their dissipation as debating points. If we could arrive at something approximating a consensus, we will have made a substantial headway. At the least, we can critically read the material on Hinduism with our answers …

X says: Yoga practice of self attainment without the help of external deity worship so common in those days of Patanjali as today was restricted to very few as it required proper initiation from the guru and renunciation of normal humdrum lifestyle of a common man. I say man because fewer women go for that kind of ascetic lifestyle. What has self-attainment to do with worshipping the deity …

While reading Shabnum Tejani’s *Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (*2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform debate on secularism. This is a combination of the old claim that ‘secularism’ has acquired a different meaning in India and a general theoretical point: ‘secularism does not have any essence or universal meaning, …

X says: “Wendy Doniger translates all the Sanskrit words into English and thereby ends up distorting their meaning. Dharma becomes religion, Varna becomes color, and apparently she ends up even translating the names of some tribes into English.” Assuming that this is the case (assumption is on my part because I have neither read her translation nor do I intend reading it), what is the problem? Out …

The issue is simply this: why use Indic categories to describe the world? What is interesting or important about this goal or venture? This, as I said, is the issue but we need to do some amount of thinking before we can identify the real question. That is so because there is a lot of deadwood floating around that makes navigation difficult. So, let me begin the process of clearing some of the …

Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which one can), these usages do not violate the primary distinction between a word from some natural language and its meaning. Consider a classificatory scheme, say, cubes. Here, ‘cube’ is a word, it …

Let me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories. Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’. All these sentences have the same meaning, namely that it is raining. Or it could also be said that they all express the same “proposition”. So, “meaning” and “proposition” are used as quasi-synonyms; and …

Many facts are interconnected within a culture. (The same applies to Nature too.) Some hypothesis or another notices some of these facts as facts, and it is able to provide an explanation (using the term ’explanation’ rather loosely) for them. This explanation helps us understand the phenomenon (means merely the appearance) in question because the theory or hypothesis under discussion is able to …

When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was, is and shall be. So, when I say that religion is such an entity, namely, it claims that it is the word of God and that it claims to be unconditionally true and that it is about the Cosmos, I am accepting the self description of religion. …