The primary aim of the History of Indian Systems of Thought Chair is to help dispel the tenacious prejudice (fundamentally Eurocentric, but now rooted as far away as South Asia) that philosophy proper remains the prerogative of the West, India having been too absorbed by its spiritual, religious or mystical aspirations to seek to produce and organize into systems truly philosophical concepts. Powerful religious currents have certainly developed on the Indian subcontinent, with their dogmas, rites, images, scriptures and hermeneutics. Nevertheless, philosophy - understood first and foremost as a discourse on the totality of existence, based on common experience and inferential reasoning rather than on faith or scriptural authority - was an essential component of intellectual life in South Asia for at least one thousand five cent years, as well as a remarkably fertile arena for struggle and encounters between rival religious movements.

The lecture examines the major controversies around which these rivalries crystallized, mainly during the first millennium CE, to understand how this shared conceptual universe developed, how refined and original systems emerged from it, and how Indian authors themselves thought through the complex relationships between philosophical inquiry and religiosity. It also takes into account the scholarly traditions that, to varying degrees, informed philosophical discourse (and sometimes received their influence in return), but nonetheless claimed a form of independence from them : grammar, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, treatises on poetics, painting or architecture. Finally, it examines the material and social conditions of philosophical practice in premodern India.

The seminar is devoted to the philological research essential to this exploration, as many Sanskrit texts have yet to be critically edited or reliably translated into a modern language.

Heir to the long and rich Indianist tradition of the Collège de France (which, in 1814, was the first European institution to create a chair devoted to Sanskrit), the current chair is associated, within the Institute of Civilizations, with the Centre d'études indiennes et centrasiatiques, which houses a large specialized library and publishes a collection of monographs.