Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:48 — 10.0MB)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here.
Continuing from part one on God and the World’s Arrangement: Readings from Vedanta and Nyaya Philosophy of Religion after the departure of our guest, Stephen Phillips.
In this preview, Wes grills Seth and Mark on what's really new here philosophically: We're all familiar with the design argument, so why wade through all these unfamiliar schools and archaic formulations? So we talk more about these readings in the Indian context of liberation.
In the full episode, we relate this to our previous discussion of the Bhagavad-Gita and its fundamental distinction between perusha (unchanging mind, just a witness to existence) vs. prakriti (nature, including our bodies and those parts of our minds that change) which seems reflected in the Sāṃkhya position. The latter of these seems to be nearly the same thing as Vācaspati Miśra our our text calls pradhana. The difference is that while we're all aware of prakriti (it's everything you experience except yourself), pradhna is a theoretical entity: prarkiti before it's unfolded into all its various visible forms.
We also reflect on reason vs. revelation in this milieu and the degree to which we might want to read anything else like this any time soon and under what conditions.
Leave a Reply