Daya Krishna

Works

• 1966Three Myths about Indian Philosophy

  Against three received ideas: that Indian philosophy is essentially spiritual, that it aims only at liberation, and that its schools are fixed systems tied to authority rather than living arguments.

• 1991Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective

  Essays that reread the classical schools as open problems: the Vedas, the darshanas and the idea of moksha look different once one asks what arguments the texts actually make.

Position

Daya Krishna’s best-known essay, “Three Myths about Indian Philosophy” (1966), attacked three ideas that had shaped the image of Indian philosophy in the West and in India itself: that it is essentially spiritual, that its aim is liberation (moksha), and that its schools (darshanas) are fixed systems tied to scriptural authority. The texts, he argued, contain arguments about knowledge, language, being and value that can be assessed like any others, and the darshanas changed through debate. In “Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective” (1991) and in his studies of the Vedas he extended this critique, asking what problems the texts actually address. He saw philosophy as an open, creative enquiry and was impatient with a historiography that treated traditions as finished. The samvada project put this into practice: questions about Western philosophy were put to Navya-Nyaya pandits in Sanskrit, and their answers were discussed with philosophers trained in the West. He has been read as a central figure of twentieth-century Indian philosophy in English, together with K. C. Bhattacharya and J. N. Mohanty.

Life & context

Daya Krishna was born in 1924 in Delhi and studied philosophy at the University of Delhi. His first book, “The Nature of Philosophy” (1955), treated philosophy as a reflective activity with its own tasks, distinct from science and religion. He taught at the University of Saugar and from the 1960s at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur, where he headed the philosophy department for many years. He wrote on social philosophy and the theory of social change as well as on epistemology and aesthetics. As editor of the Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research he made it a forum for debate between scholars of Indian and Western philosophy. From the 1980s he organised, together with M. P. Rege and others, meetings in which traditional Sanskrit pandits and Western-trained philosophers discussed each other’s questions. He remained active in Jaipur, where he held informal philosophical discussions until his death on 5 October 2007.

Further main works

• The Nature of Philosophy (1955)
• Social Philosophy: Past and Future (1969)
• Saṃvāda: A Dialogue between Two Philosophical Traditions (editor with M. P. Rege and others, 1991)
• New Perspectives in Indian Philosophy (2001)