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Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2014

Jonardon Ganeri
Jonardon Ganeri*
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University of [email protected]
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Abstract

The much-welcomed recent acknowledgement that there is a plurality of philosophical traditions has an important consequence: that we must acknowledge too that there are many philosophical modernities. Modernity, I will claim, is a polycentric notion, and I will substantiate my claim by examining in some detail one particular non-western philosophical modernity, a remarkable period in 16th to 17th century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label ‘modern’.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 74: Philosophical Traditions , July 2014 , pp. 75 - 94
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 

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References

1 The following quotation is representative: ‘Historically, modernization is the process of change towards those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth’ (Eisenstadt ‘Multiple Modernities’: 1). For similarly Eurocentric definitions of modernity, see also Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Hall, and Gieben, Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), 1–16Google Scholar

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32 Gode, P. K. ‘Bernier and Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī at the Moghal Court’, 376

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39 Freidman, Susan (2006). ‘Periodizing modernism: postcolonial modernities and the space/time borders of modernist studies’, 433

40 Ibid.

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