Publication of Professor Isabelle Ratié’s opening lecture

Isabelle Ratié

The Clamour of the Scriptures: Thinking, Believing and Philosophising in Pre-modern India

Situated at the crossroads of history and philology, this book aims to challenge the notion that India lacks a philosophical tradition by highlighting the diversity and vitality of its systems of thought.

Philosophy, a Greek invention, is the preserve of the West – this once-dominant certainty has long since been shaken, and India is now recognised as having its own philosophical tradition. However, efforts are still being made, in both the West and India, to reduce this profoundly conceptual and polemical heritage to practical wisdom, mysticism or a set of dogmas.

To distinguish between Indian philosophy and religion without glossing over the close intertwining of these two fields, and to discern, amidst the clamour 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 facing philologists and historians of Indian systems of thought today.

Ratié I., *The Clamour of the Scriptures: Thinking, Believing and Philosophising in Pre-modern India* , Paris, Collège de France, ‘Opening Lectures ’ series, n^o. 341, 2026, 64 pp.

ISBN: 978-2-7226-0890-0
Price: €12
Publication date: 22 October 2026

Isabelle Ratié is a historian of Indian philosophy and a specialist in Sanskrit manuscripts. A research fellow at the University of Leipzig and subsequently at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she was appointed professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in 2014 and has been a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France since 2021; in 2025, she was appointed professor at the Collège de France, where she holds the Chair in the History of Indian Systems of Thought.