Language, Indian theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Bronkhorst
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Classical Systems ◽  
Subsequent Period ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Sanskrit Grammar

Language is a much debated topic in Indian philosophy. There is a clear concern with it in the Vedic texts, where efforts are made to describe links between earthly and divine reality in terms of etymological links between words. The earliest surviving Sanskrit grammar, Pāṇini’s intricate Aṣṭādhyāyī(Eight Chapters), dates from about 350 bc, although arguably the first explicitly philosophical reflections on language that have survived are found in Patañjali’s ‘Great Commentary’ on Pāṇini’s work, the Mahābhāṣya (c.150 bc). Both these thinkers predate the classical systems of Indian philosophy. This is not true of the great fifth-century grammarian Bhartṛhari, however, who in his Vākyapadīya (Treatise on Sentences and Words) draws on these systems in developing his theory of the sphoṭa, a linguistic entity distinct from a word’s sounds that Bhartṛhari takes to convey its meaning. Among the issues debated by these philosophers (although not exclusively by them, and not exclusively with reference to Sanskrit) were what can be described as (i) the search for minimal meaningful units, and (ii) the ontological status of composite linguistic units. With some approximation, the first of these two issues attracted more attention during the early period of linguistic reflection, whereas the subsequent period emphasized the second one.

The Background II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Greek Culture

Chapter 2 demonstrates the central importance of travel to Greek culture. By the fifth century, a network of festivals and sanctuaries, where Greeks of all description could gather, perform, and exchange goods and ideas, was already in existence. Moreover, from an early period travel was seen as an essential part of the work of the poet. This is because poets were professionals who wished to display their skills and abilities before as wide an audience as possible. In many cases, they may also have wished to exploit wider opportunities for enrichment and employment than those available in their home cities. As such, though Greek poets come from many cities, their poetry does not belong exclusively to any one region or locality.

Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta on the Freedom of Consciousness

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Ratié
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Recognition System ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Absolute

The Pratyabhijñā (“Recognition”) system, designed by the Śaiva nondualist Utpaladeva (c.925–975 ce) and expounded by Abhinavagupta (c.975–1025 ce) stands out as one of the greatest accomplishments of Indian philosophy. Engaging in a dialogue with all the rival currents of thought of his time, and claiming that the realization of our identity with God (understood as a single, all-encompassing, and all-powerful consciousness) can be achieved through the mere recourse to experience and reason, Utpaladeva transforms the Śaiva scriptural dogmas into philosophical concepts. His “new path” is aimed at demonstrating that the essence of any individual’s consciousness is none other than the absolute freedom characterizing God’s creativity. While examining Utpaladeva’s use of the concept of freedom in several major Indian controversies (such as the debates over the existence of the self or the ontological status of perceived objects), this article explores his phenomenological attempts to uncover the freedom of consciousness in our most ordinary experiences.

Patañjali (c. 2nd century BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Bronkhorst
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Classical Systems

The grammarian Patañjali lived in the second century bc, before the appearance of the classical systems of Indian philosophy. The aspects of his thought that we would call philosophical are concerned primarily with questions of meaning and meaning-bearers in language.

Vedānta

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
True Self ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Classical Systems ◽  
Sri Aurobindo ◽  
Hindu Community ◽  
The Individual

Indian philosophical speculation burgeoned in texts called Upaniṣads (from 800 bc), where views about a true Self (ātman) in relation to Brahman, the supreme reality, the Absolute or God, are propounded and explored. Early Upaniṣads were appended to an even older sacred literature, the Veda (‘Knowledge’), and became literally Vedānta, ‘the Veda’s last portion’. Classical systems of philosophy inspired by Upaniṣadic ideas also came to be known as Vedānta, as well as more recent spiritual thinking. Classical Vedānta is one of the great systems of Indian philosophy, extending almost two thousand years with hundreds of authors and several important subschools. In the modern period, Vedānta in the folk sense of spiritual thought deriving from Upaniṣads is a major cultural phenomenon. Understood broadly, Vedānta may even be said to be the philosophy of Hinduism, although in the classical period there are other schools (notably Mīmāṃsā) that purport to articulate right views and conduct for what may be called a Hindu community (the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ gained currency only after the Muslim invasion of the South Asian subcontinent, beginning rather late in classical times). Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the great popularizer of Hindu ideas to the West, spoke of Vedānta as an umbrella philosophy of a Divine revealed diversely in the world’s religious traditions. Such inclusivism is an important theme in some classical Vedānta, but there are also virulent disputes about how Brahman should be conceived, in particular Brahman’s relation to the individual. In the twentieth century, philosophers such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, K.C. Bhattacharyya and T.M.P. Mahadevan have articulated idealist worldviews largely inspired by classical and pre-classical Vedānta. The mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo propounds a theism and evolutionary theory he calls Vedānta, and many others, including political leaders such as Gandhi and spiritual figures as well as academics, have developed or defended Vedāntic views.

scholarly journals India in Yeats’s Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee and Kālidāsa

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-39
Author(s):  
Ashim Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth

W. B. Yeats’s interest in India persisted throughout his variegated life and career, starting in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the final decade of his life. This article concentrates on his early years when he first came to terms with Indian philosophy, religion, and literature via the Vedāntist-Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee and the work of the fifth-century Sanskrit playwright Kālidāsa. With a view to examining critically Yeats’s creative engagement with, and appropriation of, these disparate materials, this article closely reads a discarded 1880s poem on Chatterjee’s teaching and its later 1929 version, “Mohini Chatterjee,” as well as his early Indian poems, collected in Crossways. The reading of these poems is supplemented by critical analysis of the relevant Indian texts, which will illuminate the poems concerned as well as the extent of Yeats’s imaginative improvisation.

Gaṅgeśa (fl. c.1325)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Multidimensional System ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Indian School ◽  
New School ◽  
Classical Indian Philosophy ◽  
Realist Ontology

Gaṅgeśa launched and solidified advances in logic and epistemology within the classical Indian school of Logic, Nyāya. He is traditionally taken to have inaugurated the ‘New’ school, Navya-Nyāya. Nyāya, both Old and New, is a multidimensional system that belies the stereotype of Indian philosophy as idealist and mystical in orientation. Gaṅgeśa worked with a realist ontology of objects spoken about and experienced every day. He articulated what may be called a reliabilist theory of knowledge: under specified conditions, sense-mediated and inferential cognitions (along with two other types) are reliable sources of information about reality. Gaṅgeśa was a pivotal figure in classical Indian philosophy; most later debate both within his school and outside it presupposed cognitive analyses that he standardized. These analyses focus on properties exhibited by things known, properties central to the processes whereby they are known. Properties relating the cognized to the cognizer are especially important. Though Gaṅgeśa had a lot to say about the ontological status of these properties, others in his school found them problematic. Such controversy appears to have contributed to New Logic’s success: proponents of rival views were able to utilize Gaṅgeśa’s formulas and definitions without abandoning their own positions on what is real.

Buddhism, Mādhyamika: India and Tibet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie S. Kawamura
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mahayana Buddhist

Madhyamaka (‘the Middle Doctrine’) Buddhism was one of two Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, the other being Yogācāra, that developed in India between the first and fourth centuries ad. The Mādhyamikas derived the name of their school from the Middle Path (madhyamapratipad) doctrine expounded by the historical Siddhārtha, prince of the Śākya clan, when he gained the status of a buddha, enlightenment. The Madhyamaka, developed by the second-century philosopher Nāgārjuna on the basis of a class of sūtras known as the Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’), can be seen in his foundational Mūlamadhyamakakārikā(Fundamental Central Way Verses). Therein he expounds the central Buddhist doctrines of the Middle Path in terms of interdependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), conventional language (prajñapti), no-self nature (niḥsvabhāva) and voidness (śūnyatā). He grants that the dharma taught by the enlightened ones is dependent upon two realities (dve satye samupāśritya) – the conventional reality of the world (lokasaṃvṛtisatyam) and reality as the ultimate (satyam paramārthataḥ). Although voidness is central to Madhyamaka, we are warned against converting śūnyatā into yet another ‘ism’. Historically, Madhyamaka in India comprises three periods – the early period (second to fifth century), represented by the activities of Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva and Rāhulabhadra; the middle period (fifth to seventh century) exemplified by Buddhapālita and Bhāvaviveka (founders respectively of the *Prāsaṅgika and *Svātantrika schools of Madhyamaka), and Candrakīrti; and the later period (eighth to eleventh century), which includes Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who fused the ideas found in the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra systems. Many of the Indian Madhyamaka scholars of the later period contributed to Madhyamaka developments in Tibet.

The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes

Pólemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Heather Duerre Humann
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Mind Mapping ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Mur Lafferty’s novel Six Wakes (2017) and the Netflix television series Altered Carbon (2018–present), created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on a novel written by Richard K. Morgan, both portray futuristic societies wherein death as we conceive of it has been rendered nearly obsolete because of technological advancements. In the case of Altered Carbon, the series imagines a twenty-fourth century dystopian society which relies on alien technology to transfer individuals’ consciousness into new bodies (referred to in the series as “sleeves”). In Six Wakes, a novel set in the twenty-fifth century, cloning and “mind-mapping” work together to bring about a similar process. Through these processes, both Six Wakes and Altered Carbon call specific attention to the unstable boundaries between human and posthuman. While in Six Wakes and Altered Carbon alike, beings have not achieved true immortality, they have gained something akin to it. Death remains a possibility for these post-human beings, but they have the potential to download their consciousness into other bodies on a (theoretically) limitless basis. These science fiction narratives thus raise new questions related to embodiment and post-humanism. Indeed, throughout Six Wakes, Lafferty devotes a significant amount of care to mapping out the legal considerations and consequences that human cloning invariably bring about. This facet of her novel works to raise questions about the ethics of cloning as well as about the legal and ontological status of clones. In Altered Carbon, a new legal frontier is likewise explored since the ultra-rich try on and discard bodies (“sleeves”) in a manner which prompts a re-definition of the concept of personhood while they simultaneously manipulate law enforcement and the legal system to suit their whims. Alongside the legal questions they raise, the science fiction scenarios depicted in these narratives serve as cases-in-point to demonstrate a post-human view of embodiment.

scholarly journals Kwestia bogactwa i ubóstwa w Kościele imperialnym na zachodzie w IV i V wieku. Próba syntezy zagadnienia

Vox Patrum ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 495-515
Author(s):  
Dariusz Kasprzak
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Realistic Approach ◽  
Economic View ◽  
Pessimistic Attitude ◽  
The Church

I considered the different views regarding the issues of possession, wealth and poverty in the fourth and fifth century. I focused on the concepts of the fifth-century theologian (St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, St. Augustine the Bishop of Hippo), pioneers of the western monastic theology and also the earliest monastic theologians and the heterodox pelagianist writers. They regarded soteriological perspective of Christianity. In that early period the socio-economic view did not constitute a doctrine. We can distinguish two essential approaches to the issue of possession in the teaching of the Church Fathers in the fourth and fifth century: a realistic and a pessimistic attitude. (The optimistic version regarded the possession of wealth as the result of Divine Protection and as a reward for pious Christian life. Both those models presumed that all the earthly goods were created by God and that people are only the temporary stewards of the goods given them for use. The realistic approach emphasized that everything which God has made was good and there was nothing wrong with owning possessions but it denounced the unjust means by which it is sometimes achieved or used. The pessimistic approach of Anchorites (monas­ticism, orthodox and heterodox ascetics) accepted the possession of goods which were made with one’s own hands. Everything which was not necessary should be given as alms. Coenobitic monks didn’t have anything of their own because everything belonged to the monastery. Their superior decided how everything could be used. The heterodox followers of Pelagius condemned shared of private property at all, and shared the view that voluntarily poverty was the only possible way for Christian.

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