These reading sessions are intended for students who have some knowledge of Sanskrit (such as that provided by the Sanskrit Prelims) and are interested to continue reading Sanskrit texts. This term we will be reading the Pañcadaśī (“The Fifteen Chapters”) which is ascribed to Vidyāraṇya, a very influential fourteenth-century teacher of Advaita Vedānta. Written in a simple language, the Pañcadaśī has been used for centuries as a primer in Advaita Vedānta, and therefore also functions, in these reading sessions, as a very accessible introduction to the reading of philosophical and theological Sanskrit texts.
Archives: Lectures
Lecture 4: Religion as Intimacy (HT19)
This last lecture will attempt to draw together the themes and to develop the importance of human person in any account of religion. The lecture will present the argument of Claude Romano that phenomenology can allow us access to pre-linguistic experience, developing this idea for understanding religion and supporting a human centred approach, again with support from the harder sciences about human inter-faciality. This in turn leads to a reflection on the nature of religion in terms of intimacy, as a third space between the third person account of religion as system and the first person account of religion in terms of verticality or a distinctive kind of experience. Viewing religion in this way is simultaneously to develop a phenomenology of religion that places the human in the centre of inquiry, supported by the other sciences, and sets the scene for future inquiry into religion as it develops through what Helga Nowotny calls ‘the molecular age.’
Sanskrit Prelims: Week Eight (HT19)
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.
Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism: Session Eight (HT19)
Beginning with the early medieval period, this paper traces the development of Hinduism in devotional (bhakti) and tantric traditions. The paper examines the development of Śaiva, Śākta, and Vaiṣṇava traditions along with ideas about liberation, ritual, asceticism, yoga and devotion. There will be some exploration of Hinduism and Modernity and there may also be reference to major schools of Hindu philosophy such as Vedānta.
Readings in Phenomenology: Week Eight (HT19)
Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This seminar series seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology, and has turned in the past to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Quentin Meillassoux, and others.
This term we will be reading Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.
Sanskrit Prelims: Week One (TT19)
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.
Readings in Vedānta: Rāmānuja’s Vedārtha-saṅgraha: Week One (TT19)
These reading sessions are intended for students who have an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts. This term we will be reading the Vedārtha-saṅgraha (“A Summary of the Meaning of the Veda”) of Rāmānuja, the most influential teacher of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. The Vedārtha-saṅgraha functions as an accessible introduction to his thought.
Sanskrit Prelims: Week One (TT19)
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.
Readings in Phenomenology: Week One (TT19)
This term we will be reading Thiemo Breyer’s On the Topology of Cultural Memory: Different Modalities of Inscription and Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).
In the wake of the large literature now developed on memory and particularly cultural memory, this book creates a topology of cultural memory, linking anthropological work with phenomenological reflection. Breyer looks at cultural memory, memory as occupying an inter-personal realm, memory in oral and literate cultures, and the philosophical implications of empirical study. I can photocopy relevant chapters.
Being, Substance, and Essence in Indian Philosophy: The Heart of the Matter (TT19)
Sutro Room, Trinity College, Oxford
Friday, 3 May 2019 – 1:30pm to Saturday, 4 May 2019 – 1:30pm
This two day conference on Being, Substance, and Essence in Indian Philosophy brings together international scholars for an afternoon and morning of ‘Comparative Philosophy’ in Oxford on 3-4 May. The conference will explore Indian approaches to metaphysics, and will culminate in an edited volume following up in our Routledge collection on Dialogues in Indian Philosophy.
As the West has puzzled over the ‘material’ of existence since Democritus and Aristotle, so too Indian history has suggested different candidates for that elusive all-explaining idea: the ‘substance’ of things. Indian thinkers spoke of creation as clay taking many forms, energy evolving through many modes, semantic ‘markers’ dividing the blank field of chaos, or words emerging from a bare potentiality. We find thinkers in the philosophical dialogues of Vedānta or the epic debates of the Mahābhārata arguing over whether it is atoms, time, eternal substance, the field of consciousness, or some basic ‘stuff’ or ‘ground’ (satya, dravya, vastu, pradhāna, prakṛti, aśraya, avasthā, or intrinsic svabhāva), that accounts for the world. Others wondered whether substance and identity are merely illusions created by the human desire to see continuity where there is only change. These debates sought to sift what is existent from what is illusory, contingent from contingent, agentive from accessory, transcendental from uncertain… and these debates were also central to whether humans can determine anything to be fundamentally ‘divine’.
This conference will bring together scholars exploring India’s many theories of Being in a sophisticated but accessible way. Speakers will lead discussion on key philosophies and the insights they suggest, presenting both Indian ideas and perspectives from Western traditions.
All welcome, from Philosophy to Oriental Studies, Theology and Religious Studies, History, and other disciplines.
Friday 3 May
1.30-3.30pm: Early Vedanta, Samkhya, and Vaisesika.
4-6pm: Advaita, Visistadvaita, Bhedabheda.
Saturday 4 May
9-11am: Madhyamaka, Kashmiri Saivism, Jainism.
11.30am-1.30pm: Ontological essence (svabhava), Non-being, Western reflections.