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Extra resources for An Introduction to Indian Philosophy

Example text

500 bce), part of the great Mahābhārata epic. The Upaniṣads are sometimes represented as the quintessence of Indian philosophy. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons. First, although these texts are philosophically suggestive, they are nowhere near as systematic or rigorously argumentative as classical Indian philosophical works from, say, the fifth century onwards. Indeed, given a more austere conception of what philosophy is, the Upaniṣads are probably better represented as Indian proto-philosophy.

Why can we not do the same with the Indian practices we now call ‘Indian philosophy’? In sum, then, the secularity condition, the historicist condition, and the lexical equivalence condition all seem implausible candidates for being a necessary condition for philosophy. The argumentation condition is a much more plausible candidate, if construed generously enough, but then the standard works of Indian philosophy would also satisfy that condition. True, a more austere construal of the argumentation condition might disqualify some of these Indian texts from being counted as philosophy, but there would still remain a very large number of Indian texts that would satisfy even such a strengthened condition.

When someone says of something, ‘That is not art’, they may be saying (descriptively) that it is not a member of the class of artworks, or they may be saying (evaluatively) that while it may be a member of the class of artworks, it is not a member of the class of good artworks. After all, something can be art without being good art. Similarly, to say something is not philosophy may be a descriptive claim or an evaluative one, for something can be philosophy without being good philosophy. But determining the descriptive range of the term is, in an important fashion, logically prior to determining its evaluative range: although something can be philosophy without being good philosophy, nothing can be good philosophy without being philosophy.

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