Ana Laura Funes Maderey

Although Irigaray’s approach to Eastern traditions has been strongly criticized, some scholars argue that her engagement with yoga philosophy should be read as a “narrative of transformation” rather than as a theoretical analysis of India or Hindu philosophy. This essay situates that narrative in relation to the yogic sources that inspired it, directly or indirectly, and argues that, despite some inaccuracies, Irigaray’s reflections on yoga philosophy constitute a valuable attempt at a cross-cultural philosophical encounter. I show that her critique of Patañjali’s samādhi, which she understood as implying non-dualism, echoes concerns found in Rāmānuja’s qualified non-dualist Vedānta, an important influence on Krishnamacharya’s yoga, whom Irigaray met in India. This paper suggests that engaging Irigaray’s dialogue with Eastern philosophies with the same rigor scholars apply to her Western influences offers a meaningful response to her call for a new culture of energy that goes beyond the categories of “East” and “West.”

Conceptualizing the image of a dancing Supreme Goddess in the Hindu tradition presents a philosophical challenge because it demands a coherent rational reconciliation between her nature as continuously changing into multiple forms and the realm of pure, absolute, never-changing, formless being. Different strategies have been proposed in the history of philosophy in India. This paper analyzes the image of the dancing Goddess as it appears in the Devī Māhātmya and in the Tantric iconography of the Goddess Kālī. An argument is developed to show that Śākta philosophy resolves this tension through a radical non-dualist understanding of the role that a mental image (vikalpa) plays in accessing supreme reality.

Like many other discussions regarding the nature of self-awareness in Classical Indian philosophical traditions, the commentators of Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra deployed the metaphor of light or luminosity to defend the position that consciousness is self-reflexive. In this paper I discuss the way the commentarial tradition of Classical Yoga misinterpreted Patañjali’s notion of self-reflexivity and articulate his account of self-awareness based on Vyāsa’s preferred metaphor of space (ākāśa). I also show how Patañjali´s notion of self-awareness could be understood in terms of “spaciousness” by using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Dan Zahavi’s studies on the first-person perspective.

Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies to refute the skeptic argument that denies the real and independent existence of physical objects. This essay examines both strategies through the reconstruction of Kant’s and Patañjali’s twofold refutation of idealism: one based on the perceptual distinction between the real and the illusory, and the other one based on the ontological necessity of a permanent external object to understand change. I argue that the second strategy is philosophically stronger due to its phenomenological recognition of the body as a grounding point, and that this is possible only on account of an anti-realist conception of time. Both Kant and Patañjali utilize a similar line of realist argumentation while diverging in the type of realism that they each hold.