Indian and Intercultural Philosophy

Reviewed by: Sajjad Rizvi, University of Exeter, UK

Published by: London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 231pp. ISBN: 978-1350174177.

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Douglas Berger is Professor of Global and Comparative Philosophy at Leiden, having moved there to take charge of the new initiative of expanding the scope of philosophy beyond the default analytic and continental traditions of European philosophy. He is an eminent specialist on Indian and Chinese philosophies having turned to them via Schopenhauer and European idealisms. On the face of it, one might wonder what the relevance of this volume is to the study of the Muslim world and the scope of this journal. A simple, if somewhat marginal, response might be that there is a chapter on Dārā Shukoh, the famous Mughal prince’s reception and adaptation of 51 Upanishads into Persian and the idiom of the school of Ibn ʿArabī. But more significant is the category of the intercultural and the grounds for comparison that should make the field of the study of the Muslim world engaged in broader contemporary debates about the nature of the humanities in the spirit of mutuality and recognition.

Berger does not really tell us what he means by the intercultural. But we get a sense of his method from his introduction that includes his intellectual journey, moving from philosophy and European idealisms in search of non-European parallels via the work of Schopenhauer and then spending most of his career adjudicating between idealisms and realisms drawing on various traditions – not just Buddhist or merely Confucian – in a properly evaluative manner having obtained his doctorate from a religious studies department (which often arouses some amusement at the very least among philosophers). The soundness and validity of the arguments do matter. His teachers were JN Mohanty, a very eminent specialist on Nyāya and Vedānta and a German-trained phenomenologist, and BS Yadav, a Buddhist specialist equally at home in European philosophy. At one point, he suggests that intercultural scholarship requires a careful “determining [of] the meaning and significant contexts within which ideas arose and were discussed and only then reflecting on our own evaluation of those ideas,” without escaping one’s cultural environment. But this strikes me as being potentially too determinant and also rather beholden to context, almost akin to the Cambridge school – and as Jonardon Ganeri showed in his critique some years ago, the contexts are very difficult to determine for the Indian traditions anyway.