The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language

About the Author

Alessandro Graheli is a project leader in the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna, Austria.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, and Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought (Palgrave, 2001), Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An outline of Indian non-realism (Routledge, 2002), Eastern Philosophy (Wiedenfield and Nicholson, 2005), India: Life, Myth and Art (Duncan Baird, 2006), which has been translated into French, Polish and Finnish, and Indian Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2007). He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Beyond Belief and Sunday Programme.

Sor-hoon Tan is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Product Description

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.

Review

“[A] useful work for those wishing to find out more about the subject … It brings together some of the best research currently available on the key topics of classical Indian philosophy of language.” - Philosophy East and West

“The essays in this collection offer learned yet clear introductions to the major themes and controversies of Indian philosophy of language. Engagingly written, accurate and well documented, the volume represents a substantial contribution to the field of Indian Studies.” ―John Taber, Regents' Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of New Mexico, USA