The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason

Western philosophy has long regarded Indian philosophy as its other. Philosophy of religion, as we know it today, emerged in the West and has been shaped by Western philosophical and theological trends, while the philosophical tradition of India flowed along its own course until the late nineteenth century, when active, if tentative, contact was established between the West and the East. This book provides a definite focus to this interactive by investigating issues raised in Western philosophy of religion from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta, the influential school of Indian thought. In promoting the emergence of a cross-cultural philosophy of religion. Arvind Sharma focuses on John H. Hick and his well-known work The Philosophy of Religion as representative of modern Western philosophy of religion and on Sankara, along with his modern successors such as M. Hiriyanna and S. Radhakrishnan, as representative of Advaitic Vedanta. His argument is developed in a series of chapters devoted to central issues in the philosophy of religion (God, Belief, Evil, Revelation, Faith, Religious Language, Verification, Existence, Reality, Human Destiny) and concludes with a study of conflicting truth claims of different religions.

About the Author:

Arvind Sharma is Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. His books include Religious Ferment in Modern India (with H.W. French, St. Martin's, 1981), The Gitarthasangraha of Abhinavagupta (Brill, 1982), The Hindu Gita (Duckworth, 1986), A Hindu Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion (St. Martin's, 1991), and A Buddhist Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming).

Excerpts from Reviews:

A cross-cultural examination of the well-known Hindu school of philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, in light of modern Western philosophy of religion.

"This study constitutes a significant contribution to the field as the first and only attempt so far to relate John H. Hick with Sankara. It also offers a much broader discussion of the key concerns of philosophy of religion than any other work and brings into the discussion also some other major Western authors such as Paul Tillich and W.C. Smith. Sharma's familiarity with modern Western analytic philosophy and its concerns adds a new element to the philosophy of religion discussion." - Klaus K. Klostermaier, University of Manitoba