Daya Krishna

Dzieła

• 1966Three Myths about Indian Philosophy (Trzy mity o filozofii indyjskiej)

  Przeciw trzem utartym poglądom: że filozofia indyjska jest z natury duchowa, że zmierza tylko do wyzwolenia i że jej szkoły są ustalonymi systemami związanymi z autorytetem, a nie żywymi argumentacjami.

• 1991Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective (Filozofia indyjska: przeciwna perspektywa)

  Eseje, które na nowo odczytują klasyczne szkoły jako otwarte problemy: Wedy, darszany i idea mokszy wyglądają inaczej, gdy zapytać, jakie argumenty teksty faktycznie wysuwają.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Nature of Philosophy (1955)
• Three Myths about Indian Philosophy (Diogenes, 1966)
• 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)