A Symphony of Looking-Glasses: Hindu Systems of Thought as Cultural “Existents”

Abstract

The title of this lecture must sound unfamiliar and exotic at the Colloquium for the History and Philosophy of Science. So it will be the first of my tasks to show how the subject of the lecture belongs or, rather, should belong here. To start with, the material presented really covers, in some parts, the proper content of a certain group of Indian philosophies. But it is used mainly as an essential illustration in a much broader project of reformulation of the very idea of philosophy, by constructing it as an object for a new science which, in the full right, can be called the “science of philosophies.”

D. B. Zilberman died before publication of this work was completed.

Zilberman Archive at the Mugar Library, Boston University, Folder 9. 4.1.1/7, lecture “A Symphony of Looking Glasses,” 1976.

From Catalog of Zilberman Archive at the MUGAR Memorial Library Boston University, 1.8.23, 1994: “The Family of Hindu ‘Visions’ as cultural Entities. It is a completed expanded text based on this lecture. Final version of this elaboration was advanced further and published as Chapter I (Hindu Systems of Thought as Epistemic Disciplines) of the book The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought (see item 1.1.1.); 69 pp. This text reflects detailed and persuasive discussion on different types of understanding and interpretation of classical Indian philosophies in Western philosophy and substantiation of the point that all these so different positions were trying to insert into Indian material an alien Western influence. As an alternative Zilberman proposed modally-methodological explication of this problem, when Indian classical philosophies as if permitted to speak about themselves through their modal comparison and correlations. The whole idea is greatly strengthened by numerous modal formulas which Zilberman used in order to show specific modal nature of each of Indian Darśaṇas, as well as possibilities and ways of its connection and relationship with neighboring philosophies.” – DZF.