I shall examine in this paper the distinctive way in which the prominent Indian philosopher Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya engaged with Advaita Vedānta during the terminal phase of the colonial period. I propose to do this by looking, first, at ways in which Krishnachandra understood the role of his own philosophizing within the colonial predicament. I will call this his agenda in ‘confrontative’ philosophy. I shall proceed, then, by sketching out the unique manner in which this agenda was successfully enacted through his (...) engagement with the Advaitic notion of self-knowledge. Finally, I will suggest that putting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s thought into the historical perspective of cross-cultural philosophy will reveal a number of shortcomings that need to be revised in a postcolonial setup. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonists agree that an aesthetic value is a property of an item that stands in some constitutive relation to pleasure. Surprisingly, however, aesthetic hedonists need not reduce aesthetic normativity to hedonic normativity. They might demarcate aesthetic value as a species of hedonic value, but deny that the reason we have to appreciate an item is simply that it pleases. Such is the approach taken by an important strand of South Asian rasa theory that is represented with great clarity and (...) ingenuity in the work of K. C. Bhattacharyya. Bhattacharyya is an aesthetic hedonist who grounds aesthetic normativity in freedom. (shrink)

Many misappropriations and exclusions have arisen from the Western tendency to reduce and manipulate the ideas and values of non- Western religions and philosophies to fit within Western concepts and categories. How might comparative philosophy and religion change if the concepts and categories of non-Western philosophies and religions were taken as primary? This volume explores this question through Western analytic and phenomenological approaches of eminent scholars from both fields, infused with fresh strategies and modalities derived from or inspired by non-Western (...) traditions. A truly groundbreaking collection,_ After Appropriation_ inaugurates an entirely new integrative discipline of comparative religion and philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of modern Indian philosophy. It examines three engaging articulations of the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge or brahmajñāna provided by three prominent Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, namely, Badrīnāth Śukla (1898-1988), Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975). Particular attention is paid to the existing relation between their distinctive conceptualisations of liberating knowledge and the doxastic attitudes that these authors professed towards the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia and the presence of the Western (...) Other. In the main, it argues that the profound differences to be found, on the one hand, in Śukla’s elucidation of this key Advaitic notion and, on the other, in Bhattacharyya’s and Radhakrishnan’s take on the same, betray their commitment to two radically different doxastic attitudes. Classifying these into (a) non-dialogical and (b) dialogical in relation to the Western Other as well as into (c) exegetic and (d) hermeneutic in relation to the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia, it contends that, in comparison to the conceptual scheme and the parameters of intelligibility that shaped and underpinned the precolonial Advaitic discourse on brahmajñāna in Sanskrit, there is a certain kind of epistemic discontinuity in the dialogical cum hermeneutic stance taken by Bhattacharyya and Radhakrishnan that is not to be found in the non-dialogical cum exegetic engagement enacted by Śukla. It suggests that this particular sort of discontinuity, absent as it is from Śukla’s elucidation of the process of knowing Brahman, reflects the far-reaching commitment of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to appropriate the precolonial Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge hermeneutically and to conceptualise it in the face of Western modernity, that is, rendering it meaningful in terms and within the parameters of intelligibility of the Western Other in order to contest what they took to be a troublesome predicament of Western modernity. By examining their ways of engaging with the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge, this dissertation contributes to the on-going debate about the nature and the driving forces of modern Indian philosophy. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of "crisis" in the context of the city of Detroit's bankruptcy under the rule of the Governor-appointed Emergency Manager. In their recent book, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou discuss the concept of dispossession in all its complexity, in the context of enforced austerity measures in Europe and a global Occupy movement. The concept of “dispossession” clarifies how we actually depend on others in a sustained social world, that in fact the self is social. I will (...) use their reflections as a springboard for analysis of the imposition of an emergency manager on the City of Detroit and the subsequent bankruptcy hearings for the city, which along with the mortgage and foreclosure crisis and now recent water shut-offs have resulted in dispossessing the poorest of the poor from their modest possessions. However Detroit is also the scene of a robust response, as people take to the streets in acts of solidarity to demand their city back. As Athena and Butler caution, activists should not fall into reinforcing the disastrous concept of personhood reinforced by possession. There are other ways of engaging with each other politically to forge a common cause that escape the negative aspects of “possession.” The project of getting people together at the grassroots, knowing each other, finding strength in leaning on each other, finding confidence to challenge the status quo that is tearing communities apart – that is the activism that is ongoing in Detroit. (shrink)