Philosophy & Philosophers

Author: R K Dasgupta
Publisher: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 170
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187332654

Description

The lofty level at which Professors R. K. DasGupta’s scholarship rests waits for no conventional introduction. At once versatile and highly specialized, he has been regarded as the teacher of teachers for several generations. What prompted us to venture into garnering a few gems from the Vast treasure house of his writings may be traced to a particular trait in them which seemed to offer a strikingly new approach to study philosophers and their works. It marks a rare attempt to see philosophical legacy in the light of literary values with a humanistic appeal.

Professor DasGupta’s works are numerous and so wide-ranging that one can put them into many different baskets on the thematic link one likes to find in each. Quite a good number of these are now available in print but many more, perhaps running into scores and scores, have yet to reach the reading public. The present collection contains just a few chosen on the thematic preference for that special literary approach to philosophical works, which is, remarkably, Professor DasGupta’s very own. Even these selected few included certain papers which would have remained inaccessible, if not untraceable, unless they were made available in a handy collection like the present one.

One other thing that needs mention here is the author’s treatment of the subjects he has written on. That helps one measure the perceived intellectual distance or propinquity between the perennial Indian thought and the ideas enunciated from time to time by the leading lights of the West. It would look as though the Professor was anchoring a dialogue between the East and the West, with the followers on both sides becoming more and more enlightened at every turn of hid arguments. Towards the end, however, we reach the culmination of the entire discourse in two illuminating expositions on Indian Philosophy and Swami Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedanta.

Contents

Introduction
Dante and Aquinas
Hegel’s Philosophy of History
Arthur Schopenhauer and Indian Thought
Russell as a Man of Letters
Max Muller as an Indologist
Spinoza and Sankarite Monism
Indian Philosophy
The Ethical Ideas of Auguste Comte
Swami Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedanta