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This book contains chapters by philosophers and scholars working at the interface of Western philosophy and Buddhist Studies. Many have distinguished scholarly records in Western philosophy, with expertise in analytic philosophy and logic, as well as deep interest in Buddhist philosophy. Others have distinguished scholarly records in Buddhist Studies with strong interests in analytic philosophy and logic. All are committed to the enterprise of cross-cultural philosophy and to bringing the insights and techniques of each tradition to bear in order to illuminate problems and ideas of the other. These chapters address a broad range of topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, and demonstrate the fecundity of the interaction between the Buddhist and Western philosophical and logical traditions.

Sri Ramakrishna is widely known as a nineteenth-century Indian mystic who affirmed the harmony of all religions on the basis of his richly varied spiritual experiences and eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Ayon Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna was also a sophisticated philosopher of great contemporary relevance. Through a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna’s recorded oral teachings in the original Bengali, Maharaj reconstructs his philosophical positions and analyzes them from a cross-cultural perspective. Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical journey culminated in the exalted state of “vijñāna,” his term for the “intimate knowledge” of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. This spiritual standpoint of vijñāna, Maharaj contends, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central issues in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, including the infinitude of God, religious diversity, mystical experience, and the problem of evil. Sri Ramakrishna’s vijñāna-based religious pluralism—when grasped in all its subtlety—proves to have major philosophical advantages over dominant Western models. Moreover, his mystical testimony and teachings not only cut across long-standing debates about the nature of mystical experience but also bolster recent defenses of its epistemic value. Maharaj further demonstrates that Sri Ramakrishna’s unique response to the problem of evil resonates strongly with Western “soul-making” theodicies and contemporary theories of skeptical theism.

We live increasingly in multicultural, multiethnic, cosmopolitan worlds. Depending on one’s perspective, these worlds are grand experiments in tolerant living in which prejudices break down, or they are fractured, wary, tense ethnic and religious cohousing projects, or they are melting pots where differences are thinned out and homogenized over time. The Geography of Morals argues that cross-cultural philosophy provides much needed resources for self and social improvement for those of us who live in WEIRD—Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic—precincts. The Geography of Morals explores the varieties of moral possibility revealed in other lived traditions, and argues that these different systems of value and virtue provide excellent opportunities and tools for self and social improvement. It argues against the dominant view in moral psychology, which says that morality is governed by the twin forces of evolutionarily ancient brain systems and the moral form of life one is born into. It argues that reason and imagination are powerful tools for moral self-cultivation and can override what the old brain systems says and what socialization tries to fix. The book creates a conversation between normative ethics, cultural anthropology, empirical moral psychology, and economic game theory for the sake of exploring prospects for socio-moral growth.

This book publishes English-language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule. The author's own chapters on the work of this period contextualize the philosophical essays collected and connect them to broader intellectual, artistic and political movements in India. This book yields a new understanding of cosmopolitan consciousness in a colonial context, of the intellectual agency of colonial academic communities, and of the roots of cross-cultural philosophy as it is practiced today. It transforms the canon of global philosophy, presenting for the first time a usable collection and a systematic study of Anglophone Indian philosophy. Many historians of Indian philosophy see a radical disjuncture between traditional Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian academic philosophy that has abandoned its roots amid globalization. The book provides a corrective to this common view. The literature collected and studied is at the same time Indian and global, demonstrating that the colonial Indian philosophical communities were important participants in global dialogues, and revealing the roots of contemporary Indian philosophical thought. The scholars whose work is published here will be unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. But the reader will discover that their work is creative, exciting, and original, and introduces distinctive voices into global conversations. These were the teachers who trained the best Indian scholars of the post-Independence period. They engaged creatively both with the classical Indian tradition and with the philosophy of the West, forging a new Indian philosophical idiom to which contemporary Indian and global philosophy are indebted.

This book argues for the importance of an engagement with the Buddhist philosophical tradition by contemporary Western philosophers. It also provides a philosophical introduction to that tradition, addressing topics in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of language and mind, phenomenology and ethics. The book demonstrates the fecundity of the tradition and the relevance of Buddhist philosophical concerns to contemporary global philosophy.