Editorial
A view from afar into current controversies
22 September 2009
Recent renewed discussion in the West about the question of personal identity and the self has mainly centered around (what is now called) 'reductionism' versus 'nonreductionism'. The reductionist holds that the fact of a person's identity over time just consists in the holding of certain particular facts that can be described without the assumption that a persistent self exists. A person's existence means occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events in a brain and a body. The nonreductionist, however, holds that there are some additional facts over and above those required by the reductionists. This new reductionist view has been claimed to mandate a change in self-perception that provides additional support for the moral theory of consequentialism by rejecting the classical self-interest theory. Since the Buddhist is sort of a reductionist in respect to his conception of selfhood, some Buddhological scholars have been delighted to see this new trend in the analytical tradition. I shall refrain from making any further comment on this issue but simply point out that the problems of such comparative philosophy, which, while they are very suggestive on the surface, at a deeper level become extremely complicated and involved, such that each comparison ends up necessarily in noting stark contrasts; only then does it become philosophically fruitful or rewarding.
Bimal K. Matilal, The Perception of Self in the Indian Tradition, in R. T. Ames, Ed., Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, Albany NY, SUNY Press, 1994; repr. in Jonardon Ganeri (Edited by), The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Philosophy, Culture and Religion, [Volume 1:] Mind, Language and World, New Delhi, OUP, 2002, Ch. 18, pp. 299–314. Ganapati: matilal_perception_of_self.pdf
We would like to address current issues in the Philosophy of Mind and other active areas of contemporary professional philosophy, by availing ourselves of a first-hand training in at least a small amount of South Asian philosophical literature and learned traditions. Taking into account Matilal's admonition in the foregoing citation, we shall try to avoid conflating heterogeneous modes of thought and we shall emphasize stark contrasts between different philosophies each of them ethnographically situated in their specific historical and linguistic context.
The choice of topics to be elaborated upon, on this cluster of websites, will purposely be selective to the point of being idiosyncratic. The conceptual grid mapping our philosophical landscape will definitely not be exhaustive. For purely personal and circumstantial reasons, a privileged position will be given to natural philosophy and bioethics on the one hand, pragmatics, language and the philosophy of mind on the other hand.
Nevertheless, our challenge is to create and promote a speech community, so to say, between researchers who wish to extend the scope of classical and professional philosophy beyond the historical and mental boundaries of the English-speaking world. Our aims and methods are quite different from those of comparative philosophy or critical history. We reject the idea of an “Indian philosophy” conceived of as a philological object of scholarly study. Our mentor is Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya in his inaugural vindication of philosophers as systematisers. Please refer to a short presentation of his Studies in Vedantism (1909) on the following page which introduces this contrast between the critical historian and the systematic philosopher:
http://ehess.philosophindia.fr/inde/philosophes-contemporains/kc-bhattacharyya.html