The primary goal of the Chair of the History of Indian Systems of Thought is to help dispel the persistent prejudice—fundamentally Eurocentric but now entrenched even in South Asia—that philosophy proper has remained the exclusive domain of the West, India having been too absorbed by its spiritual, religious, or mystical aspirations to seek to produce and organize truly philosophical concepts into systems. Powerful religious currents have certainly developed on the Indian subcontinent, with their dogmas, rites, images, scriptures, and hermeneutics. Nevertheless, philosophy—understood primarily as discourse concerning the totality of existence and grounded in common experience and inferential reasoning rather than in faith or scriptural authority—constituted for at least fifteen hundred years an essential component of the intellectual life of South Asia, as well as a remarkably fertile ground for struggle and encounter among these rival religious movements.
The course examines the major controversies around which these rivalries crystallized, primarily 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 conceived of the complex relationships between philosophical inquiry and religiosity. It also takes into account the scholarly traditions that, to varying degrees, informed philosophical discourse (and were sometimes influenced by it in turn), yet nonetheless claimed a form of independence from it: grammar, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and 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 not yet been the subject of a critical edition or a reliable translation into a modern language.
As the heir to the Collège de France’s long and rich tradition of Indology (which in 1814 became the first European institution to establish a chair dedicated to Sanskrit), the current chair is affiliated, within the Institute of Civilizations, with the Center for Indian and Central Asian Studies, which houses a major specialized library and publishes a collection of monographs.
