Shyam Ranganathan

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.

In this module I set out the Moral Non-Naturalism of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā as a version of Deontology that defines duty in terms of its beneficent properties. It elucidates the scheme of right living according to ordinance or command. Whereas natural accounts of moral terms suffer from circularity (by merely re-naming of a natural property with a moral term, which then serves to justify its moral appraisal), proponents of Mīmāṃsā defend their position by offering the Vedas as constituting independent evidence about what yields goodness. In some ways, the argument provided by the defenders of Mīmāṃsā prefigure Moore's complaint of the Naturalistic Fallacy, but the Mīmāṃsā approach doesn't claim that defining natural properties by ethical terms is a fallacy: it is simply circular.

In this lesson we review the philosophical foundations of ethics as a sub-field of philosophy. Ethics, moral or dharma philosophy is the confluence of dissenting theories and what they have in common as they disagree is the basic concept of ETHICS/DHARMA: THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD. Every theory of ethics or dharma is an account of this concept from some perspective. This allows us to identify three varieties of moral philosophical investigation: applied ethics, normative ethics and metaethics. It also involves discerning four basic, normative theoretical options: Virtue Ethics (the good leads to the right), Consequentialism (the good justifies the right), Deontology (the right justifies the good), and a fourth theory peculiar to the Indian tradition: Bhakti/Yoga (the right leads to the good). Examples of all four ethical theories are found in the Indian tradition.

In this lesson, I review critical responses to Kant that can be understood as having non-Western, Indian roots. One criticism is articulated by the famous contemporary moral philosopher, Thomas Nagel. While Nagel is not a Buddhist, his criticism of Kant’s ethics is Buddhist in essence. The other response is based on an appreciation of the philosophy of Yoga. Yoga and Kantian thought are both versions of a kind of moral philosophy, which we could call Explanatory Dualism. Moreover, Yoga and Kantian moral philosophies attempt to defend Normative Compatibilism, which is a version of Nonnaturalism. Yet, Kant relies upon the idea of Humanity, which is a naturalistic concept, while the Yogi defers to the nonspecisit, abstraction of the Lord to account for moral standing.

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."

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.