Heritage of the Yoga Philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenology: The Interlocution of Knowledge and Wisdom across Two Traditions of Philosophy

Comparative philosophy has been subjected to much criticism in the latter half of the last century, though some of these criticisms were appropriate and justified. However, in our present cultural milieu, where traditions and culture transcend their geographical boundaries, seeping through the global network of views and ideas, it seems to be a legitimate enterprise to understand one’s own traditions and culture through the critical lens of the ‘other culture’. It is such cross-cultural understanding that paved the way towards legitimizing “human rights” as a universal discourse. So also, the discourse on “environmental ethics” has gained acceptance in a similar manner across cultures and traditions. The paper attempts at an understanding of “Indian Philosophy” as a theoretical practice by exemplifying the notion of “sādhanā” in the Yoga system of Indian Philosophy through a reading of the notion of ‘phenomenological reduction’ as espoused in the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. Thus, we reject the claim that philosophy as a pure rational activity was unique to the West as proclaimed in some Eurocentric readings. It is pertinent to recall here that the Sāṅkhya philosophy, which the Yoga system accepts as an allied school of thought was atheistic in its origin and attempted to explain the universe in terms of an evolutionary theory—the “prakṛti pariṇāma vāda”

Consciousness and Society: In Defence of a Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality

With the advent of Postmodernism, the recent discussions in Continental thought has called into question the philosophy of the Subject, particularly the Cartesian “cogito” and the related method of reflection. One of the important ramifications of these questioning of the reflective subject is to do with the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality of consciousness. Recently, David Carr, himself a phenomenologist, has advanced a serious objection to the phenomenological approach to social reality. In what follows, I will be attempting a defence of phenomenology against criticisms like Carr’s

Husserl and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

The idea that science explains or ought to explain every phenomenon finds Cartesian dualism of mind and body to be an unsatisfactory thesis. Consequently we have a variety of materialist theories regarding mind and consciousness. In recent times, we come across many philosophers who are committed to the scientific world picture, trying to locate mind within a world that is essentially physical.The central problems these philosophers have to tackle consist of consciousness and mental causation. In what follows we discuss how Husserlian phenomenology responds to this debate

Making Sense of Other Culture: Phenomenological Critique of Cultural Relativism

The concept of cultural relativism enabled anthropologists to overcome ethnocentrism. Nevertheless, if we hold that every culture is valid on its own terms or all cultures are equally worthy of approbation, then it douses the spirit of a critique of culture. Husserl in his earlier writings deploys the self-contradictory nature of relativism as one of the central arguments against the thesis of relativism and argues for a concept of philosophy that is absolutistic, a viewpoint that is equally problematic. However, in his later writings one can discern a more balanced perspective, one that accepts the challenge of relativism but does not succumb to the same. By making use of the concept of multiculturalism, we argue that each culture is always plural in its constitution and that the plurality of culture is desirable. However, this plurality is not to be understood as engendering relativism, rather multiculturalism undercuts the possibility of any such radical relativism. The Husserlian overcoming of relativism, akin to multiculturalism, is not by dismissing the differences out rightly, rather by traversing the path of relativism through dialogue and mutual understanding that finally one could point to the regulative concept of one world as the correlate of plurality of world-noemata

Questioning the Body: From Technology towards a Sense of Body

Many attempts of contemporary philosophers to reduce ‘mind’ to ‘body’ notwithstanding, where the ‘body’ is understood in the Cartesian framework, the continental philosophers in general repeatedly remind us that body has a significance that goes beyond its materiality as a bio-chemical physical substance. In “questioning body,” we wish to take up the philosophical underpinnings of the significance of body as a framework or tool to understand ‘technology’. By doing so, we are able to see the link between technology and body as more than a fortuitous relation. Relying on the writings of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ihde, the paper attempts to show how a “sense of body,” particularly the notion of “agentive body” as distinguished from the “symbolic body,” hermeneutically evolves from the way in which it is entangled in the technological matri