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& Chapter 14 Radhakrishnan and the Construction of Philosophical Dialogue across Cultural Traditions1 Denys P. Leighton Many humanities and social science scholars today are committed to, or at any rate, pay lip service to ideals of interdisciplinarity and methodological crossfertilization . In light of this fact, it is remarkable that there should be so little dialogue between historians of philosophy (including those who study political and religious philosophy) and intellectual historians, particularly with respect to study of ‘non-Western’ thought systems or world views. A common tendency among intellectual historians today is to reduce history of philosophy to a minor province of philosophical hermeneutics. The increasingly ahistorical philosophical hermeneuticists, in turn, usually prioritize exposition and internal analysis of ideas and concepts, as expressed in written texts. Staying close to the text or the textual(ized) tradition, they leave to intellectual historians much of the work of studying philosophical texts as social production, and of examining articulation of ideas and the generation of their meanings in various social contexts. The origin and persistence of this division of labour can be traced to analytic philosophers , logical positivists and philosophers of ‘ordinary language’, who occupied the commanding heights of at least Anglo-American academic philosophy for much of the 20th century, and who were openly hostile to historicizing their own 1 This paper is based upon a talk delivered to the seminar “History and Philosophy” held at Aligarh Muslim University, 12–14 June 2006, sponsored by the Aligarh Historians’ Society and the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. I am grateful for the hearing I received there and particularly the feedback of Sudhir Chandra and Rajat Kanta Ray. For conversations about the subjects of this essay , I also wish to thank Gautam Chakravarty, Basudev Chatterji, Javed Majeed, Dilip M. Menon, Prabhu Mohapatra, Peter Nicholson and Will Sweet. This essay was submitted for editorial review before the publication of C. A. Bayly’s article “India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World” in Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 275–295, in a special issue on the “Bhagavad Gita and Modern Thought”, edited by Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji. Christopher Bayly’s illuminating piece considers Radhakrishnan in relation to liberalism and transnationalism. Rather than engage here directly with Bayly’s article, I intend to respond to it in another venue. 268 Leighton and other philosophical practices.2 At any rate, ‘comparative philosophers’—who necessarily notice similarities between ideas and concepts across thought systems, if only to dismiss them—and ‘philosophers’ appear today as divergent communities; their intellectual assumptions diverge as markedly as those of the philosophers belonging to the various schools, traditions or speech communities they study. ‘History of philosophy’ enjoys a dubious reputation because many of its practitioners have made unempirical and implausible assertions about the relations of philosophical ideas to society and social practice. Gerald Larson traces this unfortunate pattern back to Hegel and Schopenhauer, the great early philosophers of secular modernity.3 Historians of philosophy have clearly been less adept than practitioners of intellectual history and literary history in coming to grips with questions of motivation, causation and social impacts of ideas, and they have rather belatedly turned to exploring the cultural embeddedness of philosophical practice. In contrast, history of religion (and of ‘myth and religion’), has been fundamentally comparative—even if in functional relation to apologetics—and is marked by its practitioners’ deep engagements with anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology. For example, Max Weber employed the concepts ‘motivational situation’ and ‘subjective meaning-complex of action’ in assessing causal relationships between ideas and historical actors as well as in analyzing the meanings that emerge from discussion of ideas by actors of the same milieu as well as across time.4 What kinds of ‘historical data’ are necessary for historians to engage in Weberian (or other) analysis of socio-cultural meaning? Sheldon Pollock observes that whereas interpretive strategies of deep contextualism have proved quite fruitful for study of Western intellectual history of many periods and eras, they appear to be less useful for study of Indian (and some other nonWestern ) intellectual history. Pollock’s own area of special interest, “Sanskrit intellectual history” of the “early modern period”, is, he confesses, characterized 2 The claim about the ahistoricism of recent (Western) philosophy is an important one and has been made effectively by Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1990). 3 Gerald James Larson, “Introduction: The ‘Age-Old Distinction Between the Same and the Other,’” in Interpreting Across Boundaries: New...

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