Did Indian culture recognise an independent field of study called philosophy?

A recent encounter with a friend led to a chat about philosophy – philosophy being the subject that I taught and wrote about as a profession. As is so often the case, he had a glorified sense of everything Indian, including philosophy – though, from my conversation with him, I gathered that he had no idea of what Indian philosophy is beyond showering eulogies on what he considered to be a pure Indian philosophical tradition.

When I told him that my research was on the philosophy of science from the Western analytic tradition, his immediate response was whether I accept Western philosophy at the cost of rejecting Indian philosophy. This idea of acceptance and rejection, perhaps, presupposes Western philosophy and Indian philosophy as being mutually exclusive and conflicting thought patterns – where one has to be accepted and other rejected on the grounds of truth. It implies that if one carries forward her study in one, the other is automatically rejected.

This, to me, seemed a bit surprising. To think in terms of acceptance and rejection, in such a naïve manner, is untenable and inappropriate as far as philosophy is concerned. I was unable to convince him.

The general distorted understanding is that Indian philosophy is...

Read more