Dear Colleagues,

I am an analytically trained philosopher working in standard recent areas of analytic philosophy (metaethics, philosophy of language, moral theory) who has taken the study of the Indian tradition of philosophy as a test case for credible accounts of moral communication and theory.  I started this project twenty years ago as a graduate student when I became acquainted with the prevalent myth that Indian thinkers were uninterested in moral philosophy (because they are too busy being religious).  This struck me as bizarre: as a undergraduate philosophy student, what I knew about South Asian religions (disagreements between Jains, Buddhists, and “Hindus”) centered around basic questions of practical rationality and these disagreements are at home in standard analytic introductions to ethics and absolutely out of place in standard accounts of the philosophy of religion.  One of the outcomes of this project of mine is an edited volume that I have been working on for some time, and to which many of our colleagues have contributed:

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics.  It was released November 17, 2016. This edited volume is part of a series of volumes edited by our own Ram Prasad. The papers span Indian moral theory, applied ethics and papers on the overlap of politics and morality. The volume also contains an introductory section by yours truly. All contributions were peer reviewed.

While I have been working on this topic for nearly twenty years, I learned much from the scholarship of the other contributors: Jake Davis, Jayandra Soni, Kisor Chakrabarti, William Edelglass, Dagmar Wujastyk, Francis X. Clooney, Edeltraud Harzer, A. Raghuramaraju,  and Ashwani Peetush. As they depict it, Indian ethics is surprising and rich. I hope you find their contributions as useful and informative as I have.

Best wishes,

Shyam Ranganathan

Department of Philosophy

Center for South Asian Studies, Department of Social Sciences,

York University, Toronto