Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism

Description

Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India's most influential philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of Sankara's Advaita Vedanta or as a "Neo-Vedantin" influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation of Vivekananda's philosophy, highlighting its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, the book argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers.

Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedanta as a nonsectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with numerous philosophers past and present, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda's views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness.

About the author:

Swami Medhananda (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education in Mysore, India. He is the author of Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta (2020). He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and studied at Oxford University and Humboldt University in Berlin.

Reviews

"Swami Med­hananda’s Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press) is an extraordinary achievement. A brilliant, deep and searching ex­ploration of Swami Vivekananda, this may also be the best book in English on philosophical debates in modern Hinduism, and philos­ophy of religion more generally."

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Professor at Princeton University

Table of contents

Introduction: Swami Vivekananda as an Immersive Cosmopolitan Philosopher

PART ONE: Integral Advaita
Chapter 1
The Making of an Integral Advaitin: Vivekananda's Intellectual and Spiritual Tutelage under Sri Ramakrishna
Chapter 2
"The Deification of the World": The Metaphysics and Ethics of Oneness in Vivekananda's Integral Advaita
Chapter 3
Grounding Religious Cosmopolitanism: Three Phases in the Evolution of Vivekananda's Doctrine of the Harmony of Religions

PART TWO: The Experiential Basis of Religion
Chapter 4
"The Science of Religion": Vivekananda's Critique of Scientism and His Defense of the Scientific Credentials of Religion
Chapter 5
Perceiving God: A Vivekanandan Argument for the Epistemic Value of Supersensuous Perception
Chapter 6
Addressing Philosophical Challenges to Supersensuous Perception

PART THREE: Faith and Reason
Chapter 7
From Agnosticism to “Metagnosticism”: Vivekananda's Kantian-Vedantic Critique of Theological Reason
Critique of Theological Reason
Chapter 8
The Will to Realize: Vivekananda's Doxastic Involuntarism and His Three-Rung Ladder of Religious Faith

PART FOUR: Consciousness
Chapter 9
Panentheistic Cosmopsychism: Vivekananda's Sakhya-Vedantic Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Chapter 10
Vivekananda's Justification of Panentheistic Cosmopsychism: Involution, Mystical Experience, and Grounding by Self-Limitation

Epilogue