Fernando Tola
Carmen Dragonetti

Indian Philosophy

Original title:

Filosofía de la India. Del Veda al Vedanta. El sistema Samkhya

About the book:

Indian Philosophy

From the Veda to the Vedanta. The Samkhya system

This book proposes something surprisingly new, that Indian philosophy should be studied as philosophy not as religion.

Tola and Dragonetti develop the thesis in this book that there were, until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, great similarities both in terms of topic and methodologies between the philosophies of India, Greece and Europe – as well as many manifestations of irrationality, fantasy, a lack of freedom of thought, and an absence of the quest for knowledge for its own sake.

For that reason, and contra Hegel, the authors have it that Philosophy existed in India just as it did in the West with the same concerns and the same deficiencies. To support their thesis they present numerous original Indian and Western texts on subjects considered philosophical – from the Western point of view – in their original languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, German, French, Italian) and in Spanish translation.

Filosofía India [Indian Philosophy] thus constitutes an ambitious and rigorous work, which heralds a well-deserved recognition of the Indian philosophical tradition.

About the author:

Carmen Dragonetti is a doctor in Philosophy from the Universidad de San Marcos (Lima) senior research fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina and president of the Fundación Instituto de Estudios Budistas (Buenos Aires). She received the 2004 Guggenheim scholarship.

Fernando Tola is a doctor in literature from the same university and vice president of the above-mentioned Foundation. He has been senior research fellow at CONICET. He has received numerous marks of distinction from the Peruvian government. Both are authors of numerous books and articles on the culture of India, in Spanish and English.