This fascinating book explores the evolution of religious dualism, the doctrine that man and cosmos are constant battlegrounds between forces of good and evil. It traces this evolution from late Egyptian religion and the revelations of Zoroaster and the Orphics in antiquity through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mithraic Mysteries, and the great Gnostic teachers to its revival in medieval Europe with the suppression of the Bogomils and the Cathars, heirs to the age-long teachings of dualism. Integrating political, cultural, and (...) religious history, Yuri Stoyanov illuminates the dualist religious systems, recreating in vivid detail the diverse worlds of their striking ideas and beliefs, their convoluted mythologies and symbolism. (shrink)

The history of the Jaina philosophical discourse on the soul is yet to be written. It will inevitably focus on the ways in which the relationship between soul and body is conceived, and what practical implications the various stances carry. For Jaina metaphysics, the existence of the individual soul is an ontological fact. For the history of philosophy, the soul or self is a theory, a concept, 'synthesized from knowledge about the self’ through processes of self-definition. The article explores the (...) history and sociology of the Jaina conception of the soul and the practical implications of variants of two basic stances taken by different Jaina thinkers and traditions along the spectrum between early, classical, and spiritualistic variants of Jaina philosophy. (shrink)

The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, (...) revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination. (shrink)

The book offers twenty indexes unlocking the wealth of data on the history of the Jaina tradition embedded in Johannes Klatt's Jaina-Onomasticon. The indexes were created by the authors by cross-referencing the bio-bibliographical information collated Klatt with the help of the Jaina-Prosopography Database, focusing on the structure of roles and the social, religious and geographical affiliations of more than five-thousand-and-five-hundred named Jaina authors, scribes and patrons. The introduction describes the method of prosopographical analysis and highlights key statistical correlations.

Avicenna’s Neoplatonic account of divine providence and theodicy was hugely influential on later philosophical and religious thought in the Islamic world. However, it was severely criticised by one of his earlier commentators, the theologian-philosopher Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210). While Avicenna champions an optimist theodicean thesis of a plenitude of good to support the theory of providence integrated into his cosmogony, his commentator counters by arguing for a plenitude of evil and an overall pessimist anti-theodicy. Rejecting Avicenna’s ontological-cum-cosmological account of (...) evil, al-Rāzī argues that a theodicy must be strictly subject-centred and is ultimately a futile exercise. This article includes a study and translation of the relevant section in his commentary on Avicenna’s al-Išārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt (Pointers and Reminders). (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s lecture in 1964 ›The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking‹ signaled a crisis and the acknowledgement of substantial changes within Western philosophy. Reflecting upon the concept of critical dialogue among World Philosophies (WP) can be seen as a corrective of this crisis and a novel advancement. I aim to substantiate this by referring to the work of three authors: i) Jean-Luc Marion’s reflections on Heidegger will give us the chance to overcome a narrow understanding of ›philosophy‹ (...) and the possibility of discovering »new horizons« for the discipline which are revealed as a »donation« towards »wisdom«; ii) Reyes Mate’s considerations on ›Thinking in Spanish‹ will offer, aided by Walter Benjamin, a concrete example for renegotiating the space and the place for those »excluded from thinking«; and iii) Paul Ricoeur’s meditation On Translation puts forward the ethical element of »linguistic hospitality« and transformation of the self when encountering alterity. While it is impossible to do justice to these authors in a short article, I maintain that their work deserves close attention because it depicts the struggle within Western philosophy on its way towards maturity: still entangled with so many challenges derived from its troubled history, this maturity appears only faintly, on the horizon, precisely, in the form of ›traces‹. On these grounds, I believe that Anglo-European philosophy can no longer postpone opening up to an indispensable dialogue with other systems of thought wherein the presence of WP and the renewed effort of many philosophers committed to this endeavour is recognised. (shrink)

In the post-1857 colonial era, the Indian social and legal landscape underwent a seismic shift, caused by evermore direct and forceful British rule in many spheres of life, including human-animal and gender relations. This paper provides a brief analysis of this shift through the prism of colonial control of both human and canine pariahs in the Raj, which was fraught with conflicts, debates and moral crises. Since early colonial times, the word ‘pariah’ in the English language has come to denote (...) any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided. It is derived from the Paraiyar (sing. Paraiyan), a low-caste group found in the southernmost part of the Indian subcontinent, which probably owes its name to the Tamil word for a drum (parai). For British colonial masters, however, the word ‘pariah’ was applicable to all of the lowest Indian castes, gender and human outcasts in general and, curiously perhaps, to India’s street dogs. The inherent complexity in the making of the colonial subject—be it the gendered, classed and racialised ‘human’ or, indeed, the non-human ‘animal’—is an often acknowledged fact, which certainly might pose a challenge for historical comparativists. This brief article takes up that challenge and, in doing so, proposes an unorthodox look into the social and political aspects of ‘pariahdom’ in postcolonial studies and beyond. It simultaneously discusses the word ‘pariah’ in a somewhat trans-historical context—one in which its curious ‘social etymology’ and cross-cultural and cross-species semantics point out a type of exclusionary human consciousness. (shrink)