Indian philosophy was more decisively established with the Upanishads, the first of which may have been written in the 7th century BC. Early Upanishads, which dominate the late ancient period of thought, were key to the emergence of several classical philosophies. In the Upanishads, views about Brahman and atman were proposed. Buddhism, now a major world religion, also appeared in the ancient period of Indian philosophy. The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, lived during the 6th century BC. Religious, or spiritual, metaphysics, a field that currently receives little attention among philosophers in academia in the West, considers the question of the nature of a Supreme Being and its relation to the world. Indian Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and theistic Vedanta all have contributed to this debate. Within spiritual metaphysics, an insistence on spiritual monism is probably the most important consideration that Indian thought upholds, though with numerous variations: Much Buddhist philosophy promotes the idea of the interdependence of everything; theistic Vedanta finds no gap between the world and God; and Advaita Vedanta insists that everyone’s true self is nothing other than Brahman, the Absolute. This book presents information on some of the basic concepts of this subject. Contents: • Zoroastrianism • Judaism • Christianity • Islam • Tribal Religions of India • Phenomenology • Vedanta Philosophy • Maya: Nature and Arguments

This volume traces the impact of colonialism and Western philosophy on the dialogical structure of Indian thought and highlights the general tendency in contemporary Indian philosophy to avoid direct dialogue as opposed to the rich and elaborate debates that formed the pivot of the classical Indian tradition. It defines three possible areas of debate: between Swami Vivekanand and Mahatama Gandhi; V.D. Savarkar and Mahatama Gandhi; and Sri Aurobindo and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya—on state and pre-modern society, religion and politics, and science and spiritualism respectively. This book will be of considerable interest not only to students and scholars of Indian philosophy and religious studies but to scholars of politics and sociology as well.

This selection of previously untranslated documents from the French debates about Christian philosophy provides a long-needed complement to available English-language literature on the subject.

Philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God have been crucial to Euro-American and South Asian philosophers for over a millennium. Critical to the history of philosophy in India, were the centuries-long arguments between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers about the existence of a God-like being called Isvara and the religious epistemology used to support them. By focusing on the work of Ratnakirti, one of the last great Buddhist philosophers of India, and his arguments against his Hindu opponents, Parimal G. Patil illuminates South Asian intellectual practices and the nature of philosophy during the final phase of Buddhism in India. Based at the famous university of Vikramasila, Ratnakirti brought the full range of Buddhist philosophical resources to bear on his critique of his Hindu opponents' cosmological/design argument. At stake in his critique was nothing less than the nature of inferential reasoning, the metaphysics of epistemology, and the relevance of philosophy to the practice of religion. In developing a proper comparative approach to the philosophy of religion, Patil transcends the disciplinary boundaries of religious studies, philosophy, and South Asian studies and applies the remarkable work of philosophers like Ratnakirti to contemporary issues in philosophy and religion.