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The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language
The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language presents a systematic survey of philosophy of language in the Indian tradition, providing an up-to-date research resource for better understanding the history and future direction of the field. Each chapter addresses a particular philosophical problem from the viewpoint of seminal traditions and specific thinkers. Covering the philosophical insight on language found in the mainstream philosophies of Vyakarana, Mima?sa, Nyaya, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Alankarasastra, the chapters tackle crucial semantic and pragmatic questions such as the relation of the speaker to reality, the use of metalanguage, the distinction between sentences, elliptic statements, and figurative usages, and the impact of textual structures on the philosophical message.
Complete with further reading suggestions and an annotated bibliography, this collection makes an important contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary philosophy of language.
Complete with further reading suggestions and an annotated bibliography, this collection makes an important contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary philosophy of language.
488 pages, Hardcover
Published March 19, 2020
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May 16, 2021
While the recently compiled Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language assembles an impressive array of scholarship at the zenith of academic excellence – the oeuvre as a whole unduly promotes the esoteric qualities of the discipline such that the average student reader is left feeling uninvited to the party. Spread across four sections beginning with the most granular phoneme and progressing to sentences and entire literary texts, the Handbook is surprisingly bifurcated on the content of its own textual artha: is it primarily a didactical textbook aimed at initiating novices to the study, or is it a research manual intended for Indology experts? The devoted and microscopic focus on the insider intrigue of the field strongly suggests the latter – yet the text painstakingly drags its feet, with Sisyphean effort, to repeatedly retread halfhearted and cursory explanations of assumed common ground. This disjointed presentation of the material excludes the unfamiliar reader from the most interesting discussions, and collectively the text seems to distrust the reader’s ability to accumulate previously provided information (for what other reason would ‘who were the Mīmāṃsākas?’ need to be reexplained seemingly at every possible juncture?). The resulting quality difference between the chapters makes this manual difficult to structure a course around, and it struggles to identify a target audience most likely to benefit from its exposition.
Yet, the highlights of this volume are manifold. For all its circuitous qualities, the Handbook succeeds in one central aim: to inform and provoke interest in the study of Indian philosophy of language. Combining both historiographical and cultural knowledge of Sanskrit thought with the analytical rigours of the philosophy of language – this text exposes key concerns including the process of signification, the ontology and epistemology of meaning, the disputes between Vedic and non-Vedic schools, the comparative between artha and rasa, the problem of intentionality and of prescriptive language, and so on. Throughout the narrative thread of the book, we appreciate slowly the metaphysical significance of a theory of language saturated by religious texts whose relationship to the fundamental fabric of reality is regarded as deep and constitutive, as well as the cosmological, ethical, and aesthetic weight that theories of language hold within Indological studies. At its most neurotic and impenetrable, the text relies on arguments grounded in the particularities of the Sanskrit language – the most poignant takeaway from these passages as a whole is that Sanskrit itself possesses syntactic and morphological features that merit at least an introductory independent study. The presentation of conceptual tools necessary for any philosophy of language, while permeating inconsistently across 21 chapters – is nevertheless generally successful. The first experience of immersion in a new philosophical tradition often involves a radical conceptual restructuring so as to appreciate the tradition’s priorities and key spaces of discourse; in this case the reader is left convinced that the home base of this insider baseball game belongs firmly to the philosopher of language.
Yet, the highlights of this volume are manifold. For all its circuitous qualities, the Handbook succeeds in one central aim: to inform and provoke interest in the study of Indian philosophy of language. Combining both historiographical and cultural knowledge of Sanskrit thought with the analytical rigours of the philosophy of language – this text exposes key concerns including the process of signification, the ontology and epistemology of meaning, the disputes between Vedic and non-Vedic schools, the comparative between artha and rasa, the problem of intentionality and of prescriptive language, and so on. Throughout the narrative thread of the book, we appreciate slowly the metaphysical significance of a theory of language saturated by religious texts whose relationship to the fundamental fabric of reality is regarded as deep and constitutive, as well as the cosmological, ethical, and aesthetic weight that theories of language hold within Indological studies. At its most neurotic and impenetrable, the text relies on arguments grounded in the particularities of the Sanskrit language – the most poignant takeaway from these passages as a whole is that Sanskrit itself possesses syntactic and morphological features that merit at least an introductory independent study. The presentation of conceptual tools necessary for any philosophy of language, while permeating inconsistently across 21 chapters – is nevertheless generally successful. The first experience of immersion in a new philosophical tradition often involves a radical conceptual restructuring so as to appreciate the tradition’s priorities and key spaces of discourse; in this case the reader is left convinced that the home base of this insider baseball game belongs firmly to the philosopher of language.
Displaying 1 of 1 review