Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism

Cover
Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Texts
A Note on Sanskrit and Bengali Transliteration
Introduction: Swami Vivekananda as an Immersive Cosmopolitan Philosopher
1. The Making of an Integral Advaitin: Vivekananda’s Intellectual and Spiritual Tutelage under Sri Ramakrishna
	1. 1878 to 1884: From Brāhmo Theism to Advaita Vedānta
	2. 1884 to 1886: From Acosmic Advaita to Integral Advaita
	3. Ramakrishna’s Scriptural Support for Integral Advaita
	4. Ramakrishna’s Legacy: From Narendranāth Datta to Swami Vivekananda
2. “The Deification of the World”: The Metaphysics and Ethics of Oneness in Vivekananda’s Integral Advaita
	1. Vivekananda’s Two-​Pronged Hermeneutic Method
	2. The Impersonal-​Personal God
	3. The World as a Real Manifestation of God
	4. The Divinity of the Soul
	5. Practical Vedānta: The Ethics of Oneness
	6. The Four Yogas as Direct Paths to Liberation
	7. Harmonizing the Vedāntic Schools of Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Advaita
3. Grounding Religious Cosmopolitanism: Three Phases in the Evolution of Vivekananda’s Doctrine of the Harmony of Religions
	1. Doctrinal Truth and Salvific Efficacy: Two Ways of Conceptualizing the Threefold Typology
	2. The Early Phase (September 1893 to March 1894): Salvific and Doctrinal Pluralism and the Ideal of a “Universal Religion”
	3. The Middle Phase (September 1894 to May 1895): A Vedāntic Universal Religion Based on the Three Stages of Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Advaita
	4. The Final Phase (Late 1895 to 1901): A Vedāntic Universal Religion Based on the Four Yogas
	5. Vivekananda on the Definition of Religion, Degrees of Salvific Efficacy, and the Problem of Conflicting Religious Truth-​Claims
	6. The Problem of Non-​Substantialist Buddhism: Addressing Ninian Smart’s Objection
	7. The Contemporary Relevance of Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Universal Religion
4. “The Science of Religion”: Vivekananda’s Critique of Scientism and His Defense of the Scientific Credentials of Religion
	1. Vivekananda’s Appeal to Spiritual Experience as a Response to the Global Crisis of Religious Belief
	2. Vivekananda’s Critique of Scientism
	3. Vivekananda’s Defense of a Wide Empiricism
5. Perceiving God: A Vivekanandan Argument for the Epistemic Value of Supersensuous Perception
	1. Perception and Testimony in Traditional Indian Pramāṇa Epistemology
	2. Reconstructing and Refining Vivekananda’s Argument
	3. Premises 1 and 2: Perceiving Ultimate Reality
	4. Premise 3: Perception as Epistemic Justification
	5. Premise 6: Perceptual Testimony as Epistemic Justification
	6. Premises 4 and 7: Absence of Rebutting and Undercutting Defeaters
6. Addressing Philosophical Challenges to Supersensuous Perception
	1. The Crosscheckability Objection to Premise 2
	2. The Speckled Hen Objection to Premise 3
	3. The Gullibility Objection to Premise 6
	4. Objections to Premises 4 and 7: The Conflicting Claims Objection and Kumārila’s Criticisms of Yogic Perception and Testimony
	5. Anantanand Rambachan’s Criticisms of Vivekananda’s Views on Spiritual Experience
7. From Agnosticism to “Metagnosticism”: Vivekananda’s  Kantian-​Vedāntic Critique of Theological Reason
	1. The Indian Background: Nyāya, Śaṅkara, and Ramakrishna
	2. Can We Have Faith in an Unknowable God? Kant, Hamilton, Spencer, and Mill
	3. Vivekananda’s Cosmopolitan Views on the Powers and Limits of Reason
	4. Vivekananda on Arguments for God’s Existence
	5. Vivekananda’s Rational Response to the Problem of Evil
8. The Will to Realize: Vivekananda’s Doxastic Involuntarism and His Three-​Rung Ladder of Religious Faith
	1. Evidentialism versus the Will to Believe: Clifford, Huxley, and James
	2. Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Intervention in Late Nineteenth-​Century Debates about Faith
	3. Stage 1: Faith as Sub-​Doxastic Intellectual Assent
	4. Stage 2: Faith as Belief
	5. Stage 3: Faith as Self-​Authenticating Realization
	6. Vivekananda’s Relevance to Contemporary Debates about Faith
9. Panentheistic Cosmopsychism: Vivekananda’s Sāṃkhya-​Vedāntic Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness
	1. Contemporary Analytic Responses to the Hard Problem of Consciousness
	2. Late Nineteenth-​Century Western Views on Consciousness
	3. Ramakrishna’s Mystically Grounded Panentheistic  Cosmopsychism
	4. Vivekananda’s Provisional Sāṃkhyan Mind-​Consciousness Dualism
	5. Vivekananda’s Sāṃkhya-​Vedāntic Metaphysics of Panentheistic Cosmopsychism
10. Vivekananda’s Justification of Panentheistic Cosmopsychism: Involution, Mystical Experience, and  Grounding by Self-​Limitation
	1. Reconstructing Vivekananda’s Argument for Panentheistic Cosmopsychism
	2. Refining and Developing Vivekananda’s Argument
	3. Grounding by Self-​Limitation and the Individuation Problem
	4. Addressing Objections to Vivekananda’s Panentheistic Cosmopsychism
	5. Which Advaita? Bringing Vivekananda into Dialogue  with Miri Albahari
Epilogue: From “Neo-​Vedānta” to Cosmopolitan Vedānta
Bibliography
Index