The lost age of reason : philosophy in early modern India 1450-1700 / Jonardon Ganeri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ganeri, Jonardon.

Series:

Oxford history of philosophy

The Oxford history of philosophy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy, Indic.

Physical Description:

xii, 284 pages : map ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2011]

Summary:

The Lost Age of Reason deals with a fascinating and rich episode in the history of philosophy, one from which those who are interested in the nature of modernity and its global origins have a great deal to learn. Early modernity in India consists in the formation of a new philosophical self, one which makes it possible meaningfully to conceive of oneself as engaging the ancient and the alien in conversation. The ancient texts are now not thought of as authorities to which one must defer, but regarded as the source of insight in the company of which one pursues the quest for truth. This new attitude implies a change in the conception of one's duties towards the past. Having reconstructed in detail the socio-political and intellectual context, and after proposing a new methodological framework, Ganeri reviews work on the concept of inquiry, the nature of evidence, the self, the nature of the categories, mathematics, realism, and a new language for philosophy. A study of early modern philosophy in India has much to teach us today-about the nature of modernity as such, about the reform of educational institutions and its relationship to creative research, and about cosmopolitan identities in circumstances of globalization. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I India Expanding 11

1 The World and India: 1656 13

François Bernier and his pandit 13

The public profile of the 'new reason' 16

2 Dara Shukoh: A Spacious Islam 22

Migrating texts 22

Translating Sanskrit into Persian 23

A religious cosmopolitanism 24

Meeting of two oceans 26

Another affinity 28

3 The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yasovijaya Gani 31

Studying the 'new reason' in Varanasi 32

Secular intellectual values 33

Reflections on the self 35

Yasovijaya and Dara Shukoh: a cosmopolitan ideal 36

4 Navadvipa: A Place of Hindu-Muslim Confluence in Bengal 39

A Bengali sultanate independent of Delhi 40

The curious biography of a teacher 41

Raghunatha Siromani (c. 1460-1540) 44

The final years of Navadvipa 51

Part II Text and Method 61

5 Contextualism in The Study of Indian Philosophical Literature 63

Quentin Skinner and performative speech-acts 63

Intertextual intervention 65

Prolepsis and anticipation 68

Cultural indexicals 70

Immersion and Indian intellectual practice 72

6 Philosophers outside Academies: Networks 74

The new reason and the court of Akbar 75

A less embedded network 79

A Navadvipa-based network 81

Rivalry over Raghunatha 84

New developments ill Navadvipa 85

7 An Analysis of the New Reason's Literary Artefacts 89

Commentaries 91

Internal critiques of Vaisesika metaphysics 95

Research monographs 96

Manuals for new students 98

8 Commentary and Creativity 102

Commentary as mediating a conversation with the past 102

Towards a typology of commentary 104

Commentary as weaving a text 107

The singly authored principles-and-gloss text 112

Part III The Possibility of Inquiry 117

9 Inquiry: The History of a Crisis 119

Inquiry in the knowledge disciplines 119

Inquiry in early Nyaya 122

Ways of gaining knowledge 125

Sriharsa's 'refutations' 127

10 Challenge From the Ritualists 131

Scepticism and truth in the Gentstouc 131

Two models of inquiry 135

An intrinsicist theory of error in action 139

Knowing naturalized 142

11 Interventions in a New Research Programme 145

Difficulties in Gahgesa's theory 145

The Precious Jewel of Reason: a genealogical state-of-research review 147

Self-conscious modernities 149

The w8 of evidence 153

A method for rightly conducting reason in the Garland of Principles 157

Part IV The Real World 163

12 Realism in Question 165

The reach of Vaisesika realism 165

Realism and reference 168

Grades of existence 170

Epistemic constraints on the concept of truth 172

Whatever is, is knowable and nameable' 175

Realism and reduction 179

13 New Foundations in the Metaphysics of Mathematics 181

Mathematics and the philosophical theory of number 181

Counting and construction 182

Numbers as properties of objects 187

Indefinite pluralities 191

Raghunatha's non-reductive realism 194

14 Metaphysics in a Different Key 200

Raghunatha's challenge 200

Naturalism and reductiomsm in the Essence of Reason 201

Escaping the oscillation between eliminativism and non-reductivism 206

The Garland of Categories: naturalism and reduction 211

Mechanical philosophy in the Garland of Categories? 214

Part V A New Language for Philosophy 221

15 The Technical Language Assessed 223

The importance of disambiguation 224

The syntax of the formal system 226

A semantics for the language 228

Reparsing ordinary language 230

The new language and the predicate calculus 232

16 Rival Logics of Domain Restriction 237

Analysis from Buddhist sources 238

The early modem theory: a unified account 240.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199218745

0199218749

OCLC:

668193471