It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning. This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. (...) I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness : a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms. With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects. (shrink)

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)

In this paper I attempt to understand the implications of a kara's claim that liberation is not an action. If liberation is not an action, how is it up to us and therefore our responsibility? What role do actions have in a life concerned with liberation? The key to understanding a kara's view, I suggest, requires broad reflection on his claim in his commentary on Brahma S tra I.1.4 that cessation of action in accordance with Vedic prohibition is not an (...) action. I will conclude by discussing the implications of this interpretation on the nature of m y in a kara. (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)

This thesis, Böhme and Hegel: A Study of their Intellectual Development and Shared Readings of Two Christian Theologoumena, explores the connections which exist between both the intellectual development of Jakob Böhme and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and in their readings of two Christian theologoumena. As such, this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One consists of a comparative study between the intellectual development of Böhme and Hegel. The course of this development is divided into three phases, periods in which (...) Böhme and Hegel will be shown to share. The examination begins with their reaction against Christian orthodoxy, their subsequent interest in the heterodox, and their eventual return to the Reformation. Through the course of this chapter it will be realised that the progression of Böhme and Hegel from one period to another constitutes development in language, but not in content. Both seek to find a mode of expression which adequately represents eternal truths which they consider to be perennial. Chapter Two analyses an occasion in which Böhme and Hegel attempt to render this perennial content. Through their examination of the Christian concept of God, both are endeavouring to represent a kernel of religious truth, beyond its representational trappings. As such, both Böhme and Hegel will examine, in detail, Christian notions such as the nature of the unrevealed God, the Trinity and its supposed personhood, and the doctrine of the Incarnation. Chapter Three continues Böhme and Hegel’s line of investigation, in attempting to unveil the speculative meaning between the Christian theologoumena of the creation of the world, the psychology of the first created being, and the fall from his original nature. Through the course of this chapter, Bohme and Hegel’s shared thoughts on notions of the conflicting accounts of creation, the primordial unity with the divine, and the necessity of the Fall of Man will be examined. Throughout the course of this comparative study, it is hoped that a clear and direct influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of religion by Jakob Bohme will be shown. (shrink)