How did the Bhagavadgãtà first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgãtà around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, (...) W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgãtà and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

English summary: The Spitzer Manuscript is one of the oldest Sanskrit manuscripts found on the Silk Road. The work preserved in it is unique; no further manuscripts of it have been discovered so far, nor is it transmitted in Tibetan or Chinese translations. The present volume contains an introduction which summarizes previous research and discusses grammatical, lexical and palaeographical aspects of the work, together with an outline of its content. It is followed by a complete facsimile edition of the fragments (...) accompanied by transliterations. These are supplemented by transcriptions of some fragments which are no longer available, recovered from the estate of the Indologist Dr. Moritz Spitzer. A concordance juxtaposes the earlier and present-day arrangements of the fragments, and an extensive character table documents the peculiarities of the Ku'a'a-Brahma script used in the manuscript. A complete word index and a study which aims at reconstructing the last part of the manuscript conclude the volume. As well as Buddhist scholastics the work also deals with a number of non-Buddhist topics, such as a theory of Vaise'ika qualities completely unknown from other sources it contains, inter alia, the oldest list of books of the Mahabharata and an enumeration of the sixty-four arts and sciences. The last part of the work is devoted to dialectics. German description: Das Spitzer-Manuskript ist eine der altesten Sanskrithandschriften, die an der Seidenstrasse gefunden wurde. Das in ihm erhaltene Werk ist ein Unikum; bis jetzt wurden keine weiteren Manuskripte dieses Werkes entdeckt und es ist auch nicht in tibetischer oder chinesischer Ubersetzung uberliefert. Der vorliegende Band enthalt eine Einleitung, die den Forschungsstand zusammenfasst, grammatische, lexikalische und palaographische Aspekte des Werks diskutiert und eine Inhaltsubersicht bietet. \nHierauf folgt eine vollstandige Faksimileausgabe der Fragmente zusammen mit ihren Transliterationen. Diese werden erganzt durch Transkriptionen einiger verloren gegangener Fragmente, die dem Nachlass des Indologen Dr. Moritz Spitzer entnommen wurden. Eine Konkordanz stellt die heutige und fruhere Anordnung der Fragmente gegenuber; eine ausfuhrliche Zeichentabelle dokumentiert die Besonderheiten der Ku'a'a-Brahma -Schrift des Manuskripts. Ein vollstandiger Wortindex und eine Studie, die die Rekonstruktion des letzten Teils des Manuskripts zum Ziel hat, beschliessen den Band. Neben Themen der buddhistischen Scholastik behandelt das Werk auch eine Zahl nicht-buddhistischer Themen, wie eine Vaise'ika-Theorie der Eigenschaften, die aus anderen Quellen nicht bekannt ist; ferner enthalt es u. a. die alteste Liste der Bucher des Mahabharata und eine Aufzahlung der vierundsechzig Kunste und Wissenschaften. Der letzte Teil des Werkes ist der Dialektik gewidmet. (shrink)

What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology, in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling logic of an idea, an idea “by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.” “The movement of history and the logical process of this notion,” Arendt continues, “are supposed to correspond to each other, so that (...) whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.’”2Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history on the basis of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class—and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders—unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the “insecurity” of philosophical questioning . 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute and, related to the topic of politics, “The Jewish People Don’t Dream” . Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography and La Fiction du politique . Nancy has written “Sharing Voices” in Transforming Hermeneutics and La Communauté désoeuvrée . Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle. He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. (shrink)

The West has long had an ambivalent attitude toward the philosophical traditions of the East. Voltaire claimed that the East is the civilization "to which the West owes everything", yet C.S. Peirce was contemptuous of the "monstrous mysticism of the East". And despite the current trend toward globalizations, there is still a reluctance to take seriously the intellectual inheritance of South and East Asia. Oriental Enlightenment challenges this Eurocentric prejudice. J. J. Clarke examines the role played by the ideas of (...) Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in the intellectual life of the West and how these ideas, far more than exotic distractions, or even instruments of colonial domination, have been the means towards serious self-questioning and self-renewal, used to dispute and even to undermine Western orthodoxies. (shrink)

Vollstandiger, digital restaurierter Reprint der zweibandigen Originalausgabe von 1912 (X. Auflage, Volksausgabe, 8 Abbildungen) mit exzellenter Auflosung und hervorragender Lesbarkeit. Das aus zwei Halften bestehende Gesamtwerk (1.255 Seiten) wurde aus drucktechnischen Grunden in zwei Bucher gegliedert (Teil 1: 630 Seiten; Teil 2: 630 Seiten), wodurch sich das Ende der ersten Halfte (27 Seiten) des Originaltextes im zweiten Buch fortsetzt. Beide Bucher enthalten den kompletten Originaltext.".