Indian and Cross-Cultural Philosophy in the Works of Ramakrishna Puligandla

Abstract

The breadth of the works of Ramakrishna Puligandla in Indian, Western, and crosscultural philosophy over the past four decades has been truly remarkable. Puligandla shifted from teaching physics to philosophy at the University of Toledo in the mid1960s, and he has published writings on topics ranging from B. F. Skinner, Albert Camus, and quantum theory to Vedanta and Madhyamika from the mid-1970s until today, more than twelve years after his retirement. Given the unwavering focus of his philosophical convictions, however, this great range exhibits a diversity that is only apparent, for the thread of Puligandla's thought is woven out of the fundamental Advaita thesis that pure consciousness is the nondual and thus all-encompassing ground of existence. This thesis of the transcendental unity of being informed the basis of his critique of Skinnerian behaviorism, his rejection of the Copenhagen Interpretation, his explication of how mind-body dualism is resolved by seeing into the mechanics of adhydsa, and his attempts at rapprochement between Sanikara and Nagarjuna. In his most recent writing, Puligandla has attempted both to make Advaita Vedanta accessible to the general reader and, in yet another step in his philosophical journey, to uncover how classical Madhyamika, Daoist, Zen, and modern German phenomenological thinkers have pointed the way to showing how enlightenment may be approached through the nonconceptual engagement of language. In Breaking Barriers: Essays on Asian and Comparative Philosophy in Honor of Ramakrishna Puligandla, a Festschrift celebrating his achievements, Frank J. Hoffman and Godabarisha Mishra have collected twenty-four essays under four major themes: Advaita, Buddhism, the intersection between Indian philosophy and contemporary physics and Asian-Western comparative thought. Hoffman and Mishra have gone a long way in this volume toward gauging the reception of Puligandla's work by scholars in all these areas by including both positive and critical appraisals. In Mishra's own submission, a defense is given of the phenomenological similarities between two methods of inquiry into consciousness, namely Husserlian eidetic