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SUMMARY:So Be It: Ontology and Commandment in Medieval Brahmanism - Dr Hug
 o David (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20140129T193000Z
DTEND:20140129T210000Z
UID:TALK48183@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Charles Li
DESCRIPTION:The linguistic phenomenon of injunction (_vidhi_) was the subj
 ect of an intense reflection in early medieval India\, first and foremost 
 among grammarians\, logicians and exegetes of the Veda (the main corpus of
  Brahmanical religious Scriptures). Starting from an attempt to explain ac
 tion as it takes place in the ritual (“Why do people obey injunctions tr
 ansmitted in the Veda?”)\, Indian theoreticians soon engaged in a wider 
 philosophical\ninterrogation on the causes and justifications of human act
 ions\, both in a linguistic framework (“Why do we obey other people’s 
 commands?”) and independently (“Why\, in\ngeneral\, do people act?”)
 . From the 7th century onwards\, for reasons that still need to be clarifi
 ed\, this debate came to have decisive implications for the development of
  Brahmanical ontology\, and indeed became one of the privileged contexts f
 or a discussion of being (_sattā_) as a general concept\, possibly encomp
 assing the whole diversity of beings (_sant)_ under a single notion. In th
 is talk\, basing my argumentation on the work of some of\nthe early exeget
 es (Kumārila\, Prabhākara\, Maṇḍana Miśra)\, I will investigate the
  tight relationship existing between ontology and the analysis of commandm
 ent in medieval Indian thought\, and try to understand how a reflection pr
 incipally dealing with what _should be_ eventually developed into a questi
 oning of what there _is_.
LOCATION:Erasmus room\, Queens' College
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