Indian Philosophies

Indian Philosophies

INDIAN PHILOSOPHIES. Over the past four hundred years India has witnessed a break in its sociocultural and intellectual life with which it is still in the process of coming to terms. It is not, contrary to general belief, the legacy of colonialism that Indian philosophy and culture has had to contend with, but rather the compelling influence of the structure, rationality, and method of the European Enlightenment and its modernity. Since the eighteenth century, academic attempts at recovery of the classical tradition, efforts at translation, and philosophical analyses have all been mainly in the shadow of this modernity which separates as well as differentiates the study of science, politics and religion/metaphysics or jñā a, karma and bhakti.

Thus, contemporary scholarship in Indian philosophy is divided between, on the one hand, Indological enquiry engaged in the clarification and preservation of an "authentic" classical Indian philosophy, in all its details, and, on the other hand, an orientalist interest in appropriating the tradition to compare and compete with Western philosophy accepting the latter's standards and parameters of philosophical discussion. For a thorough and comprehensive history of Indian philosophy S. N. Dasgupta's five volumes titled History of Indian Philosophy (1922–1955) still represent the most systematic attempt.

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