Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

Contemporary consciousness studies, where it is not explicitly religious, is mostly physicalist. Theories of self and consciousness in classical Hindu thought can easily be seen to contribute to religious issues in consciousness studies. But it is also the case that there is much in that that can be useful within broadly physicalist parameters of study as well. The Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya schools, while having (nonphysicalist) soteriological goals for the metaphysical self, nonetheless provide theories of its relationship with consciousness that allow for interpretative strategies that can make their theories relevant to a broadly physicalist study of consciousness. Advaita Vedānta cannot be so interpreted, but its inquiry into the nature of consciousness can provide material for a fundamental critique of the project of objectifying consciousness

We perform conceptual acts throughout our daily lives; we are always judging others, guessing their intentions, agreeing or opposing their views and so on. These conceptual acts have phenomenological as well as formal richness. This paper attempts to correct the imbalance between the phenomenal and formal approaches to conceptualization by claiming that we need to shift from the usual dichotomies of cognitive science and epistemology such as the formal/empirical and the rationalist/empiricist divides—to a view of conceptualization grounded in the Indian philosophical notion of “valid cognition”. Methodologically, our paper is an attempt at cross-cultural philosophy and cognitive science; ontologically, it is an attempt at marrying the phenomenal and the formal

The dramatic title Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India, while accurate enough in some respects, does not do justice to this subtle, densely argued, technically demanding, and often astonishingly wide-ranging book by Parimal Patil. The traces of the doctoral thesis that it was in a previous life are still there, evident in the concern to explain methodology to inquisitorial examiners and the reluctance to let any footnote go by if it can possibly be included. That said, it is a powerfully realized book. Against a Hindu God is structured in such a way as to gradually focus in on the subject of the core third chapter that gives the book its name, Ratnakīrti’s argument in the ..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Studies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of ConsciousnessChakravarthi Ram-PrasadStudies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of Consciousness. By Sukharanjan Saha. Kolkata: Jadavpur University, 2004. Pp. 231.Studies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of Consciousness, by Sukhar-anjan Saha, is a collection of papers each of which has something to say about consciousness in Advaita, although some of the papers have a rather tenuous connection to this theme. Saha brings to bear a lifetime of study of Advaita and its philosophical contexts in these essays. The one notable lacuna in his approach is the tendency to ignore virtually all contemporary literature on Advaita, and to concentrate almost entirely on the original Sanskrit texts themselves—although he is clearly at home in a variety of modern philosophical techniques. His views are, in themselves, interesting and carefully spelled out.In "The Many Faces of the 'I,' " Saha draws on well-known uses of aham in Śaṅkara, Vācaspati, and Padmapāda to draw the larger conclusion that Advaita is willing to allow for multiple, context-variant senses of 'I,' in contrast to both a Naiyāyika like Gadhādhara and Western thinkers like Husserl."Advaita Analysis of Suffering" is an elegant and surprising essay. Much of it appears to be a fairly general survey of the manner in which different Hindu and Buddhist thinkers identify a positive cognitive error in understanding reality—avidyā—as the cause of suffering. But Saha notes that the classical consensus on suffering is not an empirical statement; there are ordinary success stories, after all. He then ingeniously uses this fact to show that suffering is something structural to existence. Śaṅkara's example of someone who feels "I am fair-complexioned" is a smug indication of the suffering brought to bear on others who are not, in a society that favors fair complexion. Suffering, Saha argues, is socially relative; it relates to value structures more than mere physical discomfort. If all were of the highest or lowest varna, there would be neither pride nor striving, neither bragging nor lamenting. The metaphysical discussion on suffering, it turns out, is really a commentary on Hindu society.Saha heroically—in the light of modern, especially Western scholarship, which sees Śaṅkara as an arch-conservative proponent of brahminical values—tends to see the Advaitin as a social reformer. In the essay above, he sees ś an.kara as teaching precisely the social lesson against discrimination when he talks of suffering. Saha returns to this theme in "Śaṅkara and Varna Distinctions in Hinduism." He puts forward the argument that since Śaṅkara held that all social distinctions were not ultimate (pāramārthika), and since class/varna distinctions are social ones while liberating knowledge is ultimate, varna is irrelevant to liberation. How those traditionally excluded from brahminical philosophy will respond to this generosity is another matter. [End Page 107]In "Inner Sense and Higher Order Consciousness," Saha usefully explains how Nyāya takes an awareness of awareness to be a matter of inner sense, while Advaita denies this. It is sometimes hard to follow him through the essay, as it is not always clear what is being argued. But the contours of the standard Nyāya and Advaita positions on putative higher-order consciousness are laid out competently. The Nyāya position is clear enough, in that the higher-order awareness is an inner perception, with the mind playing the role of an 'inner' organ for the self. So the self becomes conscious of an object through the mind, and that act of consciousness itself becomes an object of the mind; in the latter instance, the mind functions to generate a higher-order consciousness, taking the first mental state as its object. This is relatively clear, but puts a great burden on Nyāya to give a cogent theory of mind, such that the idea of the mind as an inner sense organ becomes persuasive. But this challenge lies beyond the scope of Saha's essay.Gradually, Saha's argument emerges. Advaita takes the mind to be separate from consciousness, which is the untouched ātman. So, there may well be mental...

Thus one should define, in a double way, name and form in all phenomena of the three realms. …In this essay, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, "nāma-rūpa," literally, "name-and-form," by Buddhaghosa, the influential fifth-century Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors and their formulaic ordering;1 and an interpretation of phenomenology as a methodology. We argue that Buddhaghosa does not use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but rather as the contemplative structuring of human phenomenology....

Liberalism and pluralism are seen as being in tension in liberal Western nation-states, while multiculturalism, as a policy of resource allocation to minority groups, has been the standard response to pluralization. This limits the pluralist potential of a constitutional liberalism. The fusion of a liberal theory of autonomous individuality with a pluralist theory of multiple belonging has to look beyond multicultural policy in order to enhance liberal commitments to citizens through pluralist provisions. An analysis of the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Rights, as a normative document, shows that the citizen can be understood as an autonomous individual given identity through belonging to a plurality of groups. Consequently, rights are taken to accrue to all citizens equally as autonomous individuals, but also by virtue of their belonging to groups, with special provisions made available for vulnerable ones. Rights for a plurality of vulnerable groups should not be seen as illiberal additions but integral to the conception of liberalism. If such a view of citizenship were to be integrated into the liberal constitutions of irreversibly pluralizing Western democracies, then a pluralistic constitutional patriotism could be fostered amongst members of vulnerable groups, while demonstrating that standard liberal rights guarantee equal citizenship for all

The problem which seems to remain with the Advaitin's non-realist account is that in giving up both the robust realist use of existenthood and the strong idealist use of cognitive verification, he seems to have weakened the connection between what must be the case and what is experienced. In explaining the nature of cognition, the realist says that existenthood (objects ontologically independent of cognition)must be the case; the idealist says that existenthoodmust not be the case. But in saying that existenthood and non-existenthood are both outside the purview of the explanation of cognition, and then further, in saying that there is only a weak connection — of coherent assumption or best justification through confirmation — between objects and cognition, in other words, refusing to say whatmust be the case, is the non-realist not making his ontology acutely contingent on the current features of cognition? Is his ontology not, in this sense, provisional upon current cognition? As any reader even glancingly acquainted with Advaita would see straightaway, that understanding of ontology as aprovisional state (samv $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{r} $$ tti-sattā) is precisely what the Advaitin has striven to establish. We must leave the examination of the purpose of this effort for another occasion

Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory is a conceptually ambitious book, because it seeks to articulate a program and a position so novel that there is scarcely any extant literature to draw on. The reader with a background in the study of Hinduism and Indian philosophy is likely to be puzzled by the juxtaposition of topics indicated by the title of the book. But what Jonathan Edelmann is setting out to do is to create an area of work in the study of Hindu thought that is almost entirely missing in comparison to the work that has been done on Christianity : how should a person or community committed to a particular sacred...

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.

Arindam Chakrabarti is something of a connoisseur's philosopher, best appreciated by those who know him. Books by him have not piled up over the years of his lengthy career, books which might have made their way into the obtuse consciousness of departments of Western philosophy, which might have made Indian thought somehow sensible to those comfortable with the norms of the dominant Anglo-American analytic tradition. Yet there is hardly anyone working today who was so thoroughly trained in that Anglo-American tradition, who also has at his command a wonderful range of Sanskrit philosophical materials, and is so well-positioned to write such...

Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.

Reading a passage in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata—the attempted disrobing of Princess Draupadī after her senior husband has gambled her away (after losing all his wealth, his brothers and himself)—I suggest that we see in her attitude and angry words an expression of contempt. I explore how contempt is a concept that is not thematized within Sanskrit aesthetics of emotions, but nonetheless is clearly articulated in the literature. Focusing on the significance of her gendered expression of anger and contempt, and the positive acceptance of it in the text, I suggest that contempt can be understood as a transformative attitude in a woman (even a high-born one) towards iniquities in a patriarchal culture.

This book presents a collection of essays, setting out both the special concern of classical Indian thought and some of its potential contributions to global philosophy. It presents some key arguments made by different schools about this special concern: the way in which attainment of knowledge of reality transforms human nature in a fundamentally liberating way. It then goes on to look in detail at two areas in contemporary global philosophy - the ethics of difference, and the metaphysics of consciousness - where this classical Indian commitment to the spiritually transformative power of knowledge can lead to critical insights, even for those who do not share its presuppositions. Close reading of technical Indian texts is combined with wide-ranging and often comparative analysis of philosophical issues, to derive original arguments from the Indian material through an analytic method that is seldom mastered by philosophers of non-western traditions.