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White supremacy and two theories of Ahiṃsā : Jainism vs. YogaIn Jeffery D. Long & Steven J. Rosen (eds.), Ahiṃsā in the Indic traditions: explorations and reflections, Lexington Books. pp. 123-144. 2024.This paper examines how Western colonialism erases the rich history of moral and political philosophy from South Asia, choosing to at once appropriate from it and depict it as too immature to be taken seriously. And yet, if we attend to methodological questions central to research, the question of whether we ought to explain anything by way of propositional attitudes like beliefs (interpretation) or engage in a logic-based recovery of reasons for controversial conclusions (explication) we see th…Read more
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Kant: Freedom, Determinism and ObligationIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Context and PragmaticsIn Piers Rawling & Philip Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, Routledge. 2018.Syntax has to do with rules that constrain how words can combine to make acceptable sentences. Semantics (Frege and Russell) concerns the meaning of words and sentences, and pragmatics (Austin and Grice) has to do with the context bound use of meaning. We can hence distinguish between three competing principles of translation: S—translation preserves the syntax of an original text (ST) in the translation (TT); M—translation preserves the meaning of an ST in a TT; and P—translation preserves the …Read more
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The West, the Primacy of Linguistics, and IndologyIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.Why are we saddled with Eurocentric Interpretation, which results in the depiction of Nonwestern thought as religious, and bereft of serious moral theory, while the history of European thought is depicted as the content of secular reason? Interpretation as a mode of explanation is part and parcel with the dominant account of thought originating in Europe as the meaning of language. Interpretation is imperialistic. As it spreads, so too does the European outlook, rendering anything deviant inexpl…Read more
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Yoga and Sāṅkhya: Freedom versus DeterminismIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Vedānta, Śaṅkara and Moral IrrealismIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Yoga: Moral Freedom, Objectivity and TruthIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Vedas and UpaniṣadsIn Shyam Ranganathan (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Three Vedāntas: Three Accounts of Character, Freedom and ResponsibilityIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.Indian thought is often said to be concerned with ethics that leads to freedom. Either this means that we should treat freedom as the end that justifies the ethical life, or that the ethical life is the procedure that causes freedom. The history of Vedānta philosophy—philosophy of the latter part of the Vedas—largely endorses the latter option via the “moral transition argument” : a dialectic that takes us from teleology to proceduralism. It is motivated by a desire to remove luck from moral the…Read more
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Vedānta – Rāmānuja and Madhva: Moral Realism and Freedom vs. DeterminismIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Pūrva Mīmāṃsā: Non-Natural, Moral RealismIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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The Scope of Moral PhilosophyIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Philosophy, Religion and ScholarshipIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.In this chapter I respond to objections that we should shift our focus from truth to objectivity, from prejudice to research, and from doctrine to disciplinarity. Disciplines are the same practice from differing perspectives and they allow us to triangulate on objects of interest. This entails that objects are discipline relative, and hence the insertion of social scientific concerns in the study of philosophy, as is common place in Indology, is groundless. Having entertained and shown that disc…Read more
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Patañjali’s Yoga: Universal Ethics as the Formal Cause of AutonomyIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.Yoga is a nonspeciesist liberalism, founded in a moral non-naturalism, which identifies the essence of personhood as the Lord, defined by unconservative self-governance—an abstraction from each of us that is non-proprietary. According to Yoga, the right is defined as the approximation of the regulative ideal and the good is the perfection of this practice, which delivers us from a life of coercion into a personal world of freedom. It is an alternative to Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue …Read more
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Nāgārjuna and Madhyāmaka EthicsIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Lao Tzu’s Ethics: TaoismIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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2Human Rights, Indian Philosophy, and PatañjaliIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.The question of how to arrive at a consensus on human rights norm in a diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected global environment is critical. This volume is a contribution to an intercultural understanding of human rights in the context of India and its relationship to the West. The essays in this collection pioneer a distinct approach by examining what it is that the West itself may have to learn from various Indian articulations of human rights as well.
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Moral Philosophy: The Right and the GoodIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.I contrast the methodology that prioritizes truth—interpretation—with the prioritization of objectivity—explication. Explication, the cornerstone of philosophy, allows us to identify the basic concept ETHICS and DHARMA as what theories of ethics and dharma disagree about: THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD. This is objective: what we converge on while we disagree. Four basic moral theories that differ on this concept are: Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, Deontology and Bhakti/Yoga. They are mirror images of …Read more
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Interpretation, Explication and Secondary SourcesIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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From Philosophy to EthicsIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Ethics and ReligionIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Hindu PhilosophyIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.Online, free encyclopedia article on Hindu philosophy, that covers the basic doctrines that do not distinguish Hindu philosophies from no Hindu philosophy, as well as the major textual and scholarstic inovations in this tradition. While it is not claimed that there is some basic Hindu philosophy that differentiates Hinduism, the account is open to a geneological account of Hindu philosophy that links it back to the Vedas.
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Early Buddhism I: MetaethicsIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Early Buddhism II: Applied EthicsIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Ethics and KnowledgeIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Bhagavad Gītā: The Dialectic of Four Moral TheoriesIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Asian Philosophy |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Propositions |
Reasoning |
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Yoga |
Indian Ethics |