Indian Ethics: Classical traditions and contemporary challenges PDF Download

Author: Purusottama Bilimoria
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754633013
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Indian ethics is one of the great traditions of moral thought in world philosophy whose insights have influenced thinkers in early Greece, Europe, Asia, and the New World. This is the first systematic study of the spectrum of moral reflections from India

Author: Purushottama Bilimoria
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003817394
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
This companion volume focuses on the application and practical ramifications of Indian ethics. Here Indian dharma ethics is moved from its preeminent religious origins and classical metaethical proclivity to, what Kant would call, practical reason – or in Aristotle’s poignant terms, ēhikos and phronēis –and in more modern parlance normative ethics. Our study examines a wide range of social and normative challenges facing people in such diverse areas as women’s rights, infant ethics, politics, law, justice, bioethics and ecology. As a contemporary volume, it builds linkages between existing theories and emerging moral issues, problems and questions in today’s India in the global arena. The volume brings together contributions from some 40 philosophers and contemporary thinkers on practical ethics, exploring both the scope and boundaries or limits of ethics as applied to everyday and real-life concerns and socio-economic challenges facing India in the context of a troubled globalizing world. As such, this collection draws on multiple forms of writing and research, including narrative ethics, interviews, critical case studies and textual analyses. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of Indian philosophy, Indian ethics, women and infant issues, social justice, environmental ethics, bioethics, animal ethics and cross-cultural responses to dominant Western moral thought. It will also be useful to researchers working on the intersection of Gandhi, sustainability, ecology, theology, feminism, comparative philosophy and dharma studies.

Author: Meera Baindur
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 8132223586
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Working within a framework of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, this book describes and postulates alternative understandings of nature in Indian traditions of thought, particularly philosophy. The interest in alternative conceptualizations of nature has gained significance after many thinkers pointed out that attitudes to the environment are determined to a large extent by our presuppositions of nature. This book is particularly timely from that perspective. It begins with a brief description of the concept of nature and a history of the idea of nature in Western thought. This provides readers with a context to the issues around the concept of nature in environmental philosophy, setting a foundation for further discussion about alternate conceptualizations of nature and their significance. In particular, the work covers a wide array of textual and non-textual sources to link and understand nature from classical Indian philosophical perspectives as well as popular understandings in Indian literary texts and cultural practices. Popular issues in environmental philosophy are discussed in detail, such as: What is ‘nature’ in Indian philosophy? How do people perceive nature through landscape and mythological and cultural narratives? In what ways is nature sacred in India? To make the discussion relevant to contemporary readers, the book includes a section on the ecological and ethical implications of some philosophical concepts and critical perspectives on alternate conceptualizations of nature.

Author: Neil Dalal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317749952
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominated by Western perspectives and Western thinkers. This book makes a novel contribution to animal ethics in showing the range and richness of ideas offered to these fields by diverse Asian traditions. Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics is the first of its kind to include the intersection of Asian and European traditions with respect to human and nonhuman relations. Presenting a series of studies focusing on specific Asian traditions, as well as studies that put those traditions in dialogue with Western thinkers, this book looks at Asian philosophical doctrines concerning compassion and nonviolence as these apply to nonhuman animals, as well as the moral rights and status of nonhuman animals in Asian traditions. Using Asian perspectives to explore ontological, ethical and political questions, contributors analyze humanism and post-humanism in Asian and comparative traditions and offer insight into the special ethical relations between humans and other particular species of animals. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian religion and philosophy, as well as to those interested in animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies.

Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians, literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned, among other things, with the relation between cultural and scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is one of the main aims of this book.

Author: Anthony Cerulli
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520383559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. His fieldwork in south India illuminates the nature of philology and ritual in the ayurvedic gurukula and showcases how knowledge is exchanged among students, teachers, and patients. The result, Cerulli shows, is that the Sanskrit classics are presented and applied differently in the college and gurukula, producing a variety of relationships with these texts among practitioners. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, this book reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India.

Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350286184
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Karen O'Brien-Kop's introduction to the Yogasutra highlights its status as a significant work of philosophy. Approaching the Yogasutra as living philosophy, this book elucidates philosophical conceptions of yoga, recognises the logical structure the sutras follow and explains the rules and principles that have sustained Patañjali's system of thought for centuries. Moving beyond standard interpretations of Patañjali's text and commentary as an aphoristic practice manual, O'Brien-Kop uses branches of philosophy to read the Yogasutra. Covering reality, self, ethics, language and knowledge, Patañjali's philosophies come to the fore. The book introduces his reasoned positions on dual and nondual metaphysics, the relationship between mind and body, the qualities of consciousness, the nature of freedom, and how to live ethically. Carefully-selected extracts from the primary text are translated for those unfamiliar with Sanskrit and commentaries run throughout. A glossary provides definitions of key concepts with useful translations. Accessible and up-to-date, this introduction broadens our understanding of Indian philosophical thought and explains why the Yogasutra deserves to be read alongside Parmenides' 'On Nature' and Plato's Phaedo as a classic of world philosophy.

Author: Christopher W. Gowans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190941049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Philosophies in several ancient traditions aimed to alleviate people's anxieties and improve their lives. In contrast to the contemporay world, in which philosophy is mostly an academic subject and personal concerns are commonly addressed by psychological therapies, philosophy in these traditions often played a central role in programs that aspired to enable people to achieve a good life. In this volume, Christopher W. Gowans argues that the idea of self-cultivation philosophy provides a valuable approach for comprehending and reflecting on several philosophies in ancient India, Greece and China. Self-cultivation philosophies put forward a program of development for ameliorating the lives of human beings. On the basis of an account of human nature and the place of human beings in the world, they claim that our lives can be substantially transformed from what is thought to be a problematic condition into what purports to be an ideal state of being. Self-cultivation philosophies are preeminently practical in their aspirations: their purpose is to change human life in fundamental ways. Yet, in pursuing these practical ends, these philosophies typically make significant theoretical as well as empirical claims about human nature and the world. The book shows how the concept of self-cultivation philosophy provides an interpretive framework for understanding, comparing, assessing and learning from several philosophical outlooks in India, the Greco-Roman world, and China. The self-cultivation philosophies in India are those expressed in: the Bhagavad Gita; the Samkhya and Yoga philosophies of Isvarakrsna and Patanjali; and the teaching of the Buddha and his followers Buddhaghosa and Santideva. The philosophies originating in Greece, with subsequent development in the Roman world, are the most prominent Hellenistic approaches: the Epicureanism of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Philodemus; the Stoicism of Chrysippus, Epictetus, and Seneca; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. The self-cultivation philosophies from China are the early Confucian outlooks of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi; the classical Daoist perspectives of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi; and the Chan tradition of Bodhidharma, Huineng and Linji. Though these philosophies developed in very different traditions, Gowans shows the connections between them in this compelling work of comparative philosophy.

Author: Andrew Linzey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429953119
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
The ethical treatment of non-human animals is an increasingly significant issue, directly affecting how people share the planet with other creatures and visualize themselves within the natural world. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics is a key reference source in this area, looking specifically at the role religion plays in the formation of ethics around these concerns. Featuring thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the handbook is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of fifteen of the major world religions’ attitudes towards animal ethics and protection. The second features five sections addressing the following topics: Human Interaction with Animals Killing and Exploitation Religious and Secular Law Evil and Theodicy Souls and Afterlife This handbook demonstrates that religious traditions, despite often being anthropocentric, do have much to offer to those seeking a framework for a more enlightened relationship between humans and non-human animals. As such, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, theology, and animal ethics as well as those studying the philosophy of religion and ethics more generally.

Author: Christopher G. Framarin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317918959
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book argues that the standard arguments for and against the claim that certain Hindu texts and traditions attribute direct moral standing to animals and plants are unconvincing. It presents careful, extensive, and original interpretations of passages from the Manusmrti (law), the Mahābhārata (literature), and the Yogasūtra (philosophy), and argues that these texts attribute direct moral standing to animals and plants for at least three reasons: they are sentient, they are alive, and they possess a range of other relevant attributes and abilities. This book is of interest to scholars of Hinduism and the environment, religion and the environment, Hindu and/or Buddhist philosophy more broadly, and environmental ethics.