Indian Philosophy

Catalog description

This class will an introduction to specific philosophical topics that were discussed and debated in ancient South Asia. The first two weeks of the course will involve a broad introduction to the topic, and how to study it. Topics covered in this period will include an overview of the various schools of philosophy active in India between roughly the 4th and 17th centuries, as well as an introduction to the types of issues they debated, the structures of the arguments they used, and the basic vocabulary in which they spoke. After this we will focus on more specific topics, and we will begin looking more closely at primary material in translation. These will include inference and logic, metaphysics (theories of relations, inherence, causality, time, motion, etc), categories/ontology (substance, property, universal, absence etc), philosophy of language (sense and reference, semantics, pragmatics, speaker purport), proofs and refutation of God's existence, hermeneutics (theories and methods of linguistic interpretation), and various cosmologies and soteriologies (Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, etc). Focusing on one of these topics will involve grasping what the philosophical problems involved are, which positions were taken on the question by which philosophers and schools of philosophy, what was at stake in taking these positions, and what these positions implied and/or entailed about the philosophers in question.