The West’s love story with India (in actual fact, reciprocated in a rather tepid manner) is over two thousand years old, fascination with India having started well before the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Since then the West has always made much of Indian ‘wisdom’, but has taken great care not to grant it even the smallest space in its histories of philosophy. Although ‘most wise’, Indians have never been admitted to the great halls of western philosophy, not even as auditors. Wise, ascetic, impersonal, deniers of the world, despisers of passions and emotions, Indians have enjoyed undoubted prestige in the imagination of the West which, however, wholly preoccupied in utilising them as a foil to its own identity, seems to have set aside quite early on any desire for real investigation of the meanders of this grand and enormously complex civilisation.
The aim of this work is to help readers approach the thought of India from inside, seeking to outline, first and foremost, the cultural parameters within which it arose and developed and within which it should be read, with the final aim of answering the crucial question as to whether India is entitled to belong to the general history of philosophy (the answer is clearly affirmative). it is not a manual, even though it does its best to present the greatest possible quantity of data. It also contains a not negligible dose of arbitrariness, shown for example in granting certain schools less space than they have traditionally enjoyed (e.g. Vedanta) and more space to others, or even including for the first time schools wrongly deemed marginal, such as the Pratyabhijna. This, however, is not merely the personal V taste of the author, matured over decades of frontier work exploring the manuscript tradition and philological-philosophical interpretation of the texts, but also reflects the desire to present to the reader what he/she particularly and presumably knows least: for example, the naturalism of the Vaisesika system, or the linguistic and epistemological thought of Buddhism, rather than what is to be found in actual manuals (the Upanisads for example are barely mentioned, their relevance from any properly ‘philosophic’ perspective being fairly limited).
