Evaluation or Dialogue? A Brief Reflection on the Understanding of the Indian Tradition of Debate

Summary

Introduction

Those who have been investigating Indian traditions in recent years will be perfectly familiar with the fact that Wilhelm Halbfass in his brief yet famous text laden with implications, entitled Preliminary Postscript and published in the volume India and Europe (Halbfass 1988: 160-170), suggested that Indological praxis should acquire a theoretical framework constituted by hermeneutic philosophy, understood especially as philosophy that developed along the Heidegger-Gadamer axis. Here, in re-examining Halbfass's suggestion and comparing it with other possible approaches, we intend to advance the possibility of reinstating the study of the Indian tradition of debate programmatically—and when referring to the past, where possible, descriptively—within a framework that comprises, as well as the above-mentioned philosophers, also Richard Rorty, who follows along the Heidegger-Gadamer axis, reviving its obsolete aspects, though he is at the same time the heir to the developments of that opposite current of neopositivistic and analytic speculation (see Marconi, Vattimo 1986: viii-ix).

One of the most salient features of Indian traditions is precisely the presence among them of a transversal tradition of systematic reflection and theoretical debate. Within the ambit of this tradition “in principle there were no distinctions made between ‘human’ sciences and ‘natural’ sciences” (Staal 2001: 611), hence it consists of a vast and variegated accumulation of scientific and philosophical knowledge and methodologies. One of the preliminary issues to examine closely when seeking to understand the Indian world is how this prominent tradition is to be understood.