- Instructor: Jim Drisko
Smith College's Moodle
Search results: 2011
Did you know Indian philosophy has been around for at least two thousand years? In this course, we’ll get introduced to some highlights of its history. We’ll ask questions like: What is reality, and how do we fit into it? Is the world we experience an illusion? Are there other minds, and can I know them? Can I even know my own mind? Is there a divine being or beings? How can we know the answer to these questions? How should our answers to these questions guide our lives?
Given the depth and breadth of what we call “Indian philosophy” (philosophy on the subcontinent that includes modern-day India, as well as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan), there is no way this course can be comprehensive. Therefore, we will focus on representative texts and topics, leaving an option during the last week for the class to choose a new text to investigate together.
As a textually grounded course in philosophy:
- We focus on texts to understand how to engage with Indian philosophy in translation by careful reading.
- We focus on genre to understand the ways Indian thinkers engage in philosophy: what dialectical methods characterize debates among participants, and what are the norms for different kinds of texts?
- We focus on problems to understand major questions that Indian philosophers take up. Some major questions include: What is the relationship between the world and the self? How can we know things? Is there a divine being or beings? How does language work, in ordinary contexts and poetry? These topics are intertwined, as we will see.
- Instructor: Malcolm Keating
Buddhists and Brahmanical thinkers were frequently philosophically at odds with each other in premodern India. They disagreed over what reality is and how we can know it as well as how we can think and talk about it. This course focuses on key debates between these groups in order to appreciate the range of positions within both Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophy. Topics may include: whether there is a self or a God, what words refer to, what we can know through language, the relationship between language and inference.
- Instructor: Malcolm Keating
- Instructor: Jeffry Ramsey
- Instructor: Joyce Palmer-Fortune
- Instructor: Nathanael Fortune
- Instructor: Joyce Palmer-Fortune
- Instructor: Nathanael Fortune
- Instructor: Joyce Palmer-Fortune
- Instructor: Joyce Palmer-Fortune
- Instructor: Joyce Palmer-Fortune
- Instructor: Will Raven
- Instructor: Will Raven
- Instructor: Doreen Weinberger
- Instructor: Nathanael Fortune
- Instructor: Will Raven
- Instructor: Travis Norsen
- Instructor: Doreen Weinberger
- Instructor: Nathanael Fortune
- Instructor: Travis Norsen