Indian Philosophy

A two-volume history of Indian thought from the Vedic hymns to the classical schools, written for English readers and published in 1923 and 1927. Volume one covers the hymns of the Ṛg Veda, the Upaniṣads, the materialists, Jainism, early Buddhism and its later Mahāyāna schools, and the Bhagavad Gītā. Volume two treats the six orthodox systems, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, with long chapters on Shankara and Rāmānuja, and closes with later theistic schools. Radhakrishnan argues that Indian philosophy is a single, developing tradition, at once speculative and practical, whose central concern is spiritual freedom, and he often compares its ideas with those of Plato, Kant, Hegel and Bradley. The work did much to make Indian philosophy known to English-speaking readers. Critics have argued that Radhakrishnan reads the whole tradition through Advaita Vedānta and idealism, and gives less weight to its logicians and to dissenting schools.

It remains a wide survey of classical Indian thought, and shows how Indian philosophy was first presented to the wider world in the twentieth century by one of its leading interpreters.