Papers by Purushottama Bilimoria
Sophia, 2021
This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic ... more This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith.
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Śabdapramāṇa: Word and Knowledge, 1988
7.0 In concluding this study we intend to examine some crucial epistemological issues that concer... more 7.0 In concluding this study we intend to examine some crucial epistemological issues that concern the analyses of śābdabodha (linguistically derived understanding) in the preceding chapters, against the background of the kind of challenge that has been generally posed, and articulated in the excerpt from J. N. Mohanty (above). The principal issues that we will be concerned with are—a) the problem of the truth or falsity of śābdabodha, in the broader context of the problem of understanding, knowledge and truth, and b) the issue of the the ‘authority’ of the śābdabodha, bearing in mind the context of the discourse that we have been engaged in. Under b) we will also look at the issue of the independence or otherwise of śābdapramāna from other means of knowing. Although, without preempting the discussion, it might be added that this last problem is not considered to be as important as it has been made out to be in traditional scholarship.
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Asian philosophy, 1993
Indian phlilosophy — if the qualification ‘Indian’ is at all warranted here — has in modern times... more Indian phlilosophy — if the qualification ‘Indian’ is at all warranted here — has in modern times suffered from a particular handicap, due largely perhaps to the narrow interests promoted by 18–19th-century Orientalists, in that its concerns have been associated with what is generally classified as religion in the West, and in some measure with an explication of a particular worldview, or metaphysics. The more technical concerns in logic, epistemology and problems of language and meaning have been set aside or have remained largely unknown and unappraised in the West: if these, too, have not also been dismissed as being of little interest and sophistication, from Locke and Hume to Flew et al. (Matilal, 1986:2–5).
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Śabdapramāṇa: Word and Knowledge, 1988
6.0 In this chapter we wish to continue the analysis of the kāraṇas, two of which remain, namely,... more 6.0 In this chapter we wish to continue the analysis of the kāraṇas, two of which remain, namely, yogyatā and tātparya, which, in varying degrees are said to determine the structure of śābdabodha—yogyatā is said to be more important than āsatti, and ākāṇkṣā perhaps the most important of them all. We shall deal with yogyatā in part A and with tātparya in part B.
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Śabdapramāṇa: Word and Knowledge, 1988
1.0 In the Indian theory of knowledge, a properly accredited pramāṇa is fundamental to the produc... more 1.0 In the Indian theory of knowledge, a properly accredited pramāṇa is fundamental to the production of true (valid) knowledge. Indeed, pramāṇa is an instrument for (valid) knowledge and therefore proves to be viable source of knowledge if properly executed. As we said in the Introduction, one such ‘source’ identified in the tradition is śabdapramāṇa or (the) word as a valid means of knowing.
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Śabdapramāṇa: Word and Knowledge, 1988
4.0 While raising several issues about “meaning” we looked at the relation of word and meaning, b... more 4.0 While raising several issues about “meaning” we looked at the relation of word and meaning, but we did not consider complex clusters of words, such as phrases and sentences. Something was said about the syntactic relation of words to the meaning of whole utterances. But does the utterance always take the form of a sentence, or are they two different things? And what relations do words have to the sentence: is a sentence analysable in terms of words, or word-meanings, or some other elements? We could go into great lengths on these issues, but we shall have to limit our concern to the role sentence plays in śābdabodha (linguistically derived understanding), and to that extent we would need a clear understanding of what a “sentence” is or could plausibly be for our purposes at least.
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History of Indian Philosophy, 2017
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Ethical and Political Dilemmas of Modern India, 1993
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The paper examines how “natural” philosophical theology is developed in Hegel from a comparative ... more The paper examines how “natural” philosophical theology is developed in Hegel from a comparative perspective when Hegel charts a history or rather epistemological diagram of world theologies, and locates within this idiosyncratic matrix the respective theologies and cultures of Western, Eastern and other civilizations. The paper demonstrates how Hegel’s thinking and trajectory has had an indelible impact in the Philosophy of Religion discourse, particularly where there is both a silence on and attempted inclusion, or systematic exclusion, of the comparable and incomparable theological cultures other than of the West. For example, the influence on Habermas who attempts to come to terms with religion in his otherwise secular-Enlightenment (neo-Kantian) philosophy bereft of metaphysics and theo-philosophy. How this discourse fares in the perspectives also of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Zizek on world theologies is visited toward showing how tragically ill the closed fields o...
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Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, 2020
In this chapter we opt for a very literal interpretation of materiality and religion by highlight... more In this chapter we opt for a very literal interpretation of materiality and religion by highlighting religious notions that merge the usually mundane material with the divine, with some discussion about how many Christians find such views problematic. There has been much written of late on the topic of panentheism, which is pertinent to religions of the Western and Eastern traditions. Questioning many contemporary descriptions of ‘panentheism’, a good number of which we feel arise out of theistic presuppositions, we produce our own definition of sorts, rooted in and paying respect to the term’s etymology, and the concept’s roots in Indian religion and Western philosophy. We also explore the historical roots of the panentheistic concept and contrast it with its alternatives, i.e. theism, pantheism, and polytheism. Finally, we very briefly comment on the attempts to define panentheism by a few contemporary scholars, who often wish to downplay its plausibility relative to theism.
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Sophia, 2016
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Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, 2016
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Philosophy East and West, 1995
... by this comment, amid his characteristic laughter, shortly after the appointee arrived: &... more ... by this comment, amid his characteristic laughter, shortly after the appointee arrived: "But he doesn't believe in all that Brahman[-atman] stuff, does he ... Most, like Daya Krishna and Sharif, went on to study in the UK Appointments to lec-tureships in philosophy (let alone to a chair ...
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Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2016
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The politics and culture of globalisation : India and Australia, 2009
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Value and Values, 2017
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Hinduism and Tribal Religions, 2022
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In my earlier book-length work, Sabdapramap.a: Word and Knowledge (Reidel, 1988), I explored the ... more In my earlier book-length work, Sabdapramap.a: Word and Knowledge (Reidel, 1988), I explored the relationship between knowing and language and considered why and how it is possible to derive knowledge from linguistic utterances. The material for analysis was · drawn largely from classical Indian philosophy, notably Nyaya and Vedanta. I also gave an analytical account of what would count as adequate 'evidence', i.e. conditions of justification, in (verbal) testimony. The work helped spur a renewed interest in this longforgotten thesis from classical Indian thought. However, the framework I had adopted for the inquiry took for granted the view that words and objects (things) are quite distinct phenomena and their connection is not unlike the connection of cognition with object, i.e. in a relationship of representation, correctness, descriptive fit, and so on. I have since come to be concerned about language in rather different ways less in tenns of its 'objective' function and more in terms of the totality that language is, in the horizon of meaning, its construction, understanding, interpretation, and transmission in history, as well as translation in religio-cultural processes in short, as a hetmeneutical phenomenon. When we perceive that words continue to operate in the absence of objects and the symbolic form of language is forever extended in myths, metaphor, poetics, rhetoric, arts, legends, the laws, etc. we appreciate that language exceeds the representational function and resists reduction to abstract (grammatical) categories and simple conceptual schemes; likewise, language through memory makes present to our world tradition from the past that has ceased to be (and perhaps also futurity), and it enables participation in the sacred or the 'sacramental', albeit, in some limited sense. What then is the enigmatic power and real object of language? It is simply an instrument of human culture with a distinctive capacity to denote and designate? Might language, in all its plurality and ambiguity, be a mode of making things (existent and non-existent) present to consciousness? Might the object of language be language itself? Or could language be the 'house of being'? Such questions about the complexity of language
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Papers by Purushottama Bilimoria