Abstract
Philosophy, a Greek invention, is the exclusive domain of the West—this once-dominant certainty has long been shaken, and India is now recognized as having its own philosophical tradition. Yet efforts continue, in both the West and India, to reduce this deeply conceptual and polemical heritage to practical wisdom, mysticism, or a set of dogmas. Distinguishing between Indian philosophy and religion without glossing over the close intertwining of these two fields, and discerning—amid the clamor of the scriptures and even in the margins of Sanskrit manuscripts—the unique voice of the subcontinent’s philosophers: these are some of the major challenges that philologists and historians of Indian systems of thought must address today.
