Isabelle Ratié is a specialist in Indian philosophy. She edits Sanskrit texts based on manuscripts and translates them. In doing so, she traces the history of various schools of thought that are still relatively unknown and analyzes the complexity of their interrelationships.
In 2025, she was appointed to the Chair of the History of Indian Systems of Thought at the Collège de France.
Your research today focuses on Indian philosophy, but you began your career studying Western philosophy. How do you explain this change of direction, when your path seemed all mapped out?
Isabelle Ratié: Indeed, I initially pursued a very traditional course of study! Passionate in particular about Greek philosophy, I earned a DEA and was about to begin a PhD in that field. Freshly certified as a teacher, I began a career as a high school philosophy teacher… However, one day, I came across a book by Guy Bugault, Does India Think? . Reading it was a revelation for me. I realized the existence of a rich and fascinating Indian philosophy. Yet I had been told repeatedly since my senior year of high school that philosophy was the exclusive domain of the West: it had originated in Greece around the 5th century BCE and had developed in Europe; its boundaries were wonderfully defined! I felt a kind of rage against myself: how could I have refused to question this cliché, when philosophy is precisely a critical exercise of reason?
So I decided to explore this world. Very quickly, I discovered that good overviews were rare, and that there were few translations of Indian philosophical texts into modern languages. This forced me to immerse myself in learning Sanskrit and to radically change the direction of my studies.
Why is Indian philosophy so little known in the West?
Indian thought is, in fact, often abstracted to the silence of meditation and mystical experience… This can be explained by the small number of available works and translations, but not solely so. There is a genuine denial of philosophical India. When Europe discovered Indian thought, it was first fascinated, then recoiled in horror. During the late 19th century and much of the 20th century, Indian thought was viewed—often with contempt—as being solely religious in nature and in no way a matter of philosophy—that reflection based exclusively on reason and experience. In reality, Indian thought has developed into systems that do not resemble those of Europe, and some of which are undoubtedly philosophical. However, encountering this thought challenged the way Westerners had drawn the boundaries between philosophy and religion. When they discovered Buddhism, for example, they struggled to accept that concepts as fundamental to them as the soul or the existence of a creator god could be called into question within a religion itself…
How do the religious and philosophical realms interrelate in Indian thought?
These two realms are distinct yet function together. At the core of the religious sphere lies the recognition of a body of scriptures—words that are authoritative by definition. It is through the recognition of the sacred nature of certain texts that religious identities take shape. In the first millennium CE, orthodox Brahmins, for example, recognized the authority of the Vedas; however, the so-called Śaiva traditions accepted, alongside or in place of Vedic authority, that of texts said to emanate from the god Śiva or an associated deity… In medieval India, there was a great diversity of religious movements: orthodox Brahmanism, Śaiva, Buddhist, Jain, and Vaishnavite movements… Herein lies, however, the great paradox of India, for this religious proliferation led to fierce competition within the royal courts. Religious movements clashed there to win the favor of kings or dignitaries. To take part in these verbal contests and demonstrate the superiority of their dogmas, each representative had to set aside their own scriptures. Indeed, no one recognized their opponent’s! Indian philosophy is thus this neutral space in which the argument from authority was set aside and where discussion began based on shared perception and inferential reasoning—for these are the only universally recognized tools. Philosophers also wrote a vast number of treatises, which, in their structure, are imbued with this rhetoric of debate. While some religious texts are very ancient (certain parts of the Veda must have been composed around 1200 BCE), philosophy as such developed in India later, throughout the first and second millennia CE, with a particular vitality around the middle of the first millennium.
Your work has the distinctiveness and merit of not focusing on a single philosophical school. You study several of them, which allows you to analyze their connections…
There is a certain degree of compartmentalization in Indian studies. In our studies, we generally specialize in a particular religious or philosophical tradition and stick to it… Specialization is a natural and indispensable tendency in any field of study, but when seeking to understand India’s systems of thought, one must transcend these boundaries, as these schools have continually transformed through their interaction with one another. I understood this from the very beginning of my dissertation work, thanks to the Śaiva authors Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, whose works I was studying. In order to demonstrate the superiority of their ideas, they had to engage with those of others… And found themselves changed by the process. For example, they frequently mention their Buddhist rival Dharmakīrti: they constantly explain his thought in order to criticize it, even though they are fascinated by it. They adopt entire sections of his logic and epistemology (his way of defining the different types of inferential reasoning, for example) and borrow his arguments to prove that the world does not exist outside of consciousness. Nevertheless, they also transform these arguments profoundly: what produces the varied phenomena of which we are conscious is no longer, for the Śaivas—as it is for Dharmakīrti—a sort of unconscious mechanism within an impersonal series of instantaneous cognitive events, but rather the creative freedom that is the very essence of all consciousness.
Rather than describing each school of thought separately, in a static and compartmentalized manner, it is therefore worthwhile to study the themes on which different thinkers clashed. In this way, we discover Indian philosophy in the making through the discussions that developed around a controversy—on the nature of the self, of others, of language… I intend to continue this approach at the Collège de France, one already adopted with Vincent Eltschinger in our book What Is Indian Philosophy?.
You mentioned the scarcity of reliable translations of Sanskrit texts. What are the challenges of your work as a philologist on these manuscript sources?
India has long had a significant manuscript tradition: over the centuries, scribes—who were often scholars as well—have constantly copied and even annotated texts belonging to various genres, including philosophical ones. These scholarly annotations are a wonderful (and still largely unexplored) source for the study of India’s intellectual history. However, manuscript transmission, even when carried out by great scholars, inevitably leads over time to an accumulation of errors—what is known as manuscript corruption. We therefore compare all the sources that are still accessible today in an attempt to reconstruct the original text—or rather, since this is only an ideal, to get as close to it as possible. Many manuscripts have survived to the present day, although many have been lost, particularly due to the climate. They may also have been miscataloged, or be difficult to access for various reasons. Sometimes all that remains is a few fragments of a text, a quotation in another manuscript, by another thinker, in a margin… It also happens that the Sanskrit text is untraceable, but an ancient translation has been preserved, in Tibetan, for example. The advent of digital photography has been a major advance and has made it possible to save many extraordinary manuscripts! There is still much to discover, and above all, a huge amount of editorial work still needs to be done.
What does this appointment to the Collège de France mean to you?
I still have a hard time believing it. I had never even considered it, primarily because there had never been a woman in that chair. I’ve always wanted a career in research, yet it never occurred to me to apply for this position… Whereas, for some of the men at this institution, it was a boyhood dream, a possible destiny from childhood onward. I also feel very privileged, to the point of feeling guilty toward my colleagues at the university. I know how difficult their conditions are: faculty members today are overwhelmed by administrative tasks that rob them of the time they should be able to devote to research.
In 1814, the Collège de France established the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe. Its title has changed over time (to include other Indian languages, or to focus more on history than on languages), and it has been held by extraordinary scholars such as Eugène Burnouf, Sylvain Lévi, and Jean Filliozat. It is very intimidating to succeed all these great scholars. I will spend the rest of my career trying to live up to this daunting honor bestowed upon me! I am also very happy for my discipline, which is seeing this chair in Indian studies revived: its last holder, Gérard Fussman, had left it in 2011. I see it as a way to bring together scholars of Indian studies. I hope to create opportunities for people working on India to meet and engage in dialogue, regardless of their field or where they come from. This promises to be a very fruitful exchange.
Interview by Salomé Tissolong, journalist
