Jonardon Ganeri

As is the case with most pre‐modern philosophers of India, very little historical information is available about Bhartṛ‐hari. There are many interesting legends, some turned into extensive plays and poems, current about him. However, it is impossible to determine on their basis even whether there was only one philosopher called Bhartṛ‐hari. The appellation “philosopher” could unquestionably be applied to the author or authors of at least two Sanskrit works that are commonly ascribed to Bhartṛ‐hari.

Recent years have seen the beginning of a radical reassessment of the philosophical literature of ancient and classical India. The analytical techniques of contemporary philosophy are being deployed towards fresh and original interpretations of the texts. This rational, rather than mystical, approach towards Indian philsophical theory has resulted in a need for a work which explains afresh its central methods, concepts and devices. This book meets that need. Assuming no prior familiarity with the texts, Jonardon Ganeri offers new interpretations which bring out the richness of Indian theory and the sophistication of its methods. Original in both approach and content, philosophy in Classical India contains many new results, analyses and explanations.

As the broader discipline of philosophy continues to evolve into a genuinely international field, "Indian Philosophy" stands for an unquantifiably precious part of the human intellectual biosphere. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, this ambitious collection of major works simultaneously presents Indian philosophy as an autonomous intellectual tradition, with its own internal dynamic and approach, while also demonstrating how the richness of this tradition can have a crucial role in a newly emerging global and international discipline of philosophy. The materials gathered here will enable users to understand the remarkable range of Indian thinking about the structure of the world and its fundamental constitution, as well providing insight into fundamental Indian philosophical theories.

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"--which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages--from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions.

The author commences with a discussion on the connection between spiritual exercises and aestheticism. Acquiring knowledge of a certain privileged sort is the key spiritual exercise is the fundamental activity in what Hadot described as a “return to the self.” The section on philosophy and therapy talks about “spiritual exercise” as a practice of discrimination which leads to a “return to the self” in the form of the self's isolation from the perceptual world. The author then discusses returning oneself to the present moment based on the philosophy of Plutarch and the Buddha. With references from Santiparvan, the author explains philosophy and the ends of life, elucidating that philosophy enables us to see through the pretences of reason, making it possible for us to direct our efforts towards living of a life free of suffering.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural, and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa's forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a lifelong love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal of travelling throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, mainly in Portuguese but also a substantial amount in English and French. Pessoa is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in twentieth-century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C.P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has as yet hardly been recognized at all.

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. The chapters provide a synopsis of the liveliest areas of contemporary research and set new agendas for nascent directions of exploration. Each of the chapters provides compelling evidence that in the global exercise of human intellectual skills India, throughout its history, has been a hugely sophisticated and important presence, host to an astonishing range of exceptionally creative minds engaged in an extraordinary diversity of the most astute philosophical exploration conceivable. It spans philosophy of law, logic, politics, environment, and society, but is most strongly associated with wide-ranging discussions in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and metaphysics (how we know and what is there to be known), ethics, meta-ethics, and aesthetics, and meta-philosophy. The reach of Indian ideas has been vast, both historically and geographically, and it has been and continues to be a major influence in world philosophy. In the breadth as well as the depth of its philosophical investigation, in the sheer bulk of surviving texts and in the diffusion of its ideas, the philosophical heritage of India easily stands comparison with that of China, Greece, the Latin West, or the Islamic world.

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion-or worse, a deceit. Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections from many of the world's intellectual cultures, ancient and modern, on how each of us creates an inner world. In brief and lively chapters, he ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upanishads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashomon. Ganeri examines the various metaphors that have been employed to explain interiority-shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, rooms and enclosed spaces-as well as the interfaces and boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Written in a cosmopolitan spirit, this book is a thought-provoking consideration of the value-or peril-of turning one's gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.