Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. The chapters provide a synopsis of the liveliest areas of contemporary research and set new agendas for nascent directions of exploration. Each of the chapters provides compelling evidence that in the global exercise of human intellectual skills India, throughout its history, has been a hugely sophisticated and important presence, host to an astonishing range of exceptionally creative minds engaged in an extraordinary diversity of the most astute philosophical exploration conceivable. It spans philosophy of law, logic, politics, environment, and society, but is most strongly associated with wide-ranging discussions in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and metaphysics, ethics, meta-ethics, and aesthetics, and meta-philosophy. The reach of Indian ideas has been vast, both historically and geographically, and it has been and continues to be a major influence in world philosophy. In the breadth as well as the depth of its philosophical investigation, in the sheer bulk of surviving texts and in the diffusion of its ideas, the philosophical heritage of India easily stands comparison with that of China, Greece, the Latin West, or the Islamic world.