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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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Human 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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Beyond Moral Twin Earth: Beyond IndologyIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Bhagavad Gītā II: Metaethical ControversiesIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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Vedas and UpaniṣadsIn Tom Angier, Chad Meister & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The History of Evil in Antiquity: 2000 Bce to 450 Ce, Routledge. 2016.This chapter explores the role of evil in the development of the Vedas and Upaniṣads. The Vedas and the Upaniṣads, or the Vedas are the repository of veda of the early Indo-European peoples of South Asia. Written and collected over a thousand-year period, from 1500 BCE to 500 BCE, the Vedas says many things about evil. However, the corpus presents a philosophical shift from naturalism to non-naturalism that also mirrors a shift from Consequentialism to Deontology. The problem with naturalism on…Read more
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Kantian Ethics: Indian ResponsesIn The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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