Daya Krishna

Daya Krishna was an Indian philosopher who taught at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur and edited the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research for many years. He set out to unsettle received pictures of Indian thought, both Western and Indian. In Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective (1991) he argued that classical Indian philosophy was not mainly concerned with spiritual liberation, and that the standard list of six 'orthodox' schools hides far more debate and change. He also organised dialogues between traditional Sanskrit pandits and modern philosophers.

Key ideas

• The common view that Indian philosophy is essentially spiritual and aimed at liberation (moksha) misdescribes its actual arguments.
• The neat division into six orthodox schools is a later construction that hides how much the traditions argued with and changed one another.
• Philosophy is an open-ended activity of questioning, not the preservation of fixed systems.
• Dialogue between traditional pandits and modern-trained philosophers can make classical Indian thought creative again.

Major works

• Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective (1991)
• The Art of the Conceptual (1989)
• Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of Cultures and Civilizations (1997)

In the Book corner

• Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective 1991; revised and enlarged 2006 · Advanced
  A collection of essays in which Daya Krishna sets out to dismantle the accepted picture of classical Indian philosophy. That picture, he…

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