HINDU PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (PHST-2100)
(02/04/2019-05/24/2019)
Course Memo
A Hermeneutical Approach. Philosophy of Religion in the West has focused on proving (or disproving) the existence and nature of God, and accounting for the persistence of evil or "sin" in the world. This tension arises from claims based on faith and scripture over the judgment of reason and science. However, negligible attention has been paid cross-culturally to other great civilizations and their theologies, doctrines, and symbolic patterns that might be seen to respond differently to the parallel ultimate concerns. The course attempts to redress this imbalance by engaging the Hindu tradition in a comparative inquiry on the "Big Questions." We approach classical Hindu texts with a hermeneutic lens to examine how they have resolved philosophical paradoxes, such as the conundrums of existence and non-existence, self and no-self, meaning of life over nothingness, the spiritual versus secular social arrangements, fate over liberation, as well as the labyrinths and best paths toward these ends. So there are (de)constructive reading of "atman (self) = Brahman" as the universal Self, dharma as duty, du?kha as suffering, karma as the principle of moral justice, and values or virtues such as compassion, moral care, non-injury, intellectual excellence, and the aesthetics of grief and joy, etc. The course ends with examining developments of the themes in modern times in the applied context of nationalism, Gandhi's philosophy of satyagraha and nonviolence, sustainable environmental movements, bioethics and biotechnology.