Parimal Patil (Harvard University)
With responses fromBronwyn Finnigan (University of Auckland)

"Humeans and Kantians in Early Modern India? Desire, Motivation and Action in Sanskrit Philosophy"

 

The purpose of my presentation is to explain why students of Indian philosophy (especially those interested in ethics) ought to be extremely interested in the question of what Vedic utterances convey. Through my presentation, I hope to show how and why early modern Sanskrit philosophers took this question to be at the center of debates in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of action. Central to the presentation will also be the question of how Indian approaches to these issues compare, philosophically, to more contemporary Euro-American ones.