Emily Lawson

An emerging narrative links the rise of social epistemology with the decline of a purist epistemological orthodoxy. The thought that motivates this narrative is that impurist epistemologies make space for social, moral, and pragmatic considerations, whereas purist epistemologies did not, which transforms epistemology from something that was once overly idealized and abstract into something that makes meaningful contact with the social realities of knowledge. Despite the intuitive appeal of this narrative, I argue that it owes its plausibility to a lack of conceptual clarity. When we more clearly articulate the contours of the purist orthodoxy, we see that (i) different varieties of impurism make space for social, moral, and pragmatic considerations in importantly different ways, which complicates how this set of views hangs together, and (ii) even the strictest of purists can attend to social, moral, and pragmatic factors in the sense necessary for producing socially engaged epistemology.

Abstract:Subject As Freedom (1930) is correctly regarded as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya's magnum opus. But this text relies on a set of ideas and develops from a set of concerns that KCB develops more explicitly in essays written both before and after that text, which might be regarded as its intellectual bookends. These ideas are important and fascinating in their own right. They also illuminate KCB's engagement with Kant and with the Vedānta tradition as well as his understanding of freedom itself, including its soteriological dimension. These two essays are "Sankara's Doctrine of Māyā" (1930) and "The Advaita and Its Spiritual Significance" (1936). We explore KCB's conception of philosophy and its relation to spiritual practice through a close reading of these two essays.