"Difficult to put down.... I have studied these issues for the better part of a decade and learned from this book not only about new cases but also about the intersection of law, science, and government."—Daryl E. Chubin, author of Peerless Science: Peer Review in United States Science Policy "Thoughtful, clear, and very well written... will be the basis of how the issues are defined, what the options and their problems are, and what other features lurk on the horizon."—Lawrence Badash, (...) University of California, Santa Barbara. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to analyze, classify and illustrate different scholarly approaches to the Sanskrit philosophical commentaries as reflected in some influential and especially thoughtful studies of Indian philosophy; at the same time it highlights some specific features involving commentary and annotation in general, drawing from results of studies on commentaries conducted in other disciplines and fields, such as Classical and Medieval Studies, Theology, and Early English Literature. In the field of South Asian Studies, philosophical commentaries may be assessed (...) from various overlapping and not always exclusive points of view, such as preservation of otherwise lost historical information, historical authenticity and reliability, interpretational innovation, spiritual or experiential insight, philosophical creativity, intellectual liveliness, doxographic intent, degree of incidentality, expository breadth and explanatory depth. The essay provides numerous examples taken from classical to early modern philosophical literature, especially of the Brahminical and Buddhist traditions, and also discusses their diverging perception by modern scholars and interpretators. (shrink)

Studies of Indian philosophy have generally overemphasized the con-sistency of philosophical systems over time, and consequently slighted later works as derivative. This paper seeks to reassess the “system” as a basic category for analyzing Sanskrit philosophy, in particular by examining the changes that took place in hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it became commonplace for Mīmāṃsā authors to criticize long established Mīmāṃsā positions. At first this criticism is selective and largely directed at more recent authors, (...) but the margins of acceptable criticism are gradually broadened to the point when even the foundational works of the tradition are routinely attacked, and works are produced whose sole purpose appears to be to attack established Mīmāṃsā tenets, sometimes without even attempting to replace them with a more workable set of views. It becomes increasingly difficult to see what if anything one must believe to be considered a Mīmāṃsaka. (shrink)