Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker

Recently, scholars writing on colonial Indian thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) have begun to move away from the “Neo-Hindu” approach, which tends to view their thought reductively as a Hindu nationalist response to Western hegemony, in favor of a more charitable and fruitful cosmopolitan hermeneutic approach, which views colonial Indian philosophers as cosmopolitan intellectuals working on a global stage who actively and creatively drew upon Western and Indian thought-currents to develop original philosophical positions and arguments. The six articles in this Special Issue explore numerous dimensions of Vivekananda’s cosmopolitan thought that have not yet received the sustained attention they deserve, including his theology of religions, his views on rebirth and eschatology, his ethical philosophy, his canny strategies for making Vedānta appealing to Western audiences, his philosophical reconciliation of self-denial with social activism, and his views on knowledge as the final goal of humanity. As a whole, this Special Issue makes the case that Vivekananda’s philosophical ideas and arguments, far from being of merely historical interest, have profound relevance to contemporary discussions and debates in philosophy and theology.