Talk:James Bissett Pratt

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• "For most Westerners “histories of philosophy” begin with the Greeks and end with the Americans, and convey not the least suggestion that anyone outside of the West ever had a philosophical idea. A glance at the curricula of most our colleges and universities would seem to indicate that the one principle on which they are planned might be phrased: nothing east of Suez ! To one who has had a taste of the riches which Indian thought and Indian literature can contribute to our intellectual life and our spiritual experience, this deprivation which we Westerners inflict upon ourselves and upon our young people seems pitiful in the extreme. Indian philosophical literature, taking its rise several centuries before the time of Thales, has swept down through the ages, retaining always a characteristic point of view of its own, but developing in a great variety of fresh forms. Indian thought constitutes today the one type of living philosophy independent of our Western tradition. Neither China nor Japan possesses a living philosophical movement of its own. The tendency of nearly all the schools of Western philosophy is more and more steadily setting in the direction of naturalism, and often of a rather crude naturalism. The victories of natural science have hypnotized most of our philosophers. From such a world as Western naturalism usually offers, the thoughtful mind which craves something more than a scientific pattern of space-time evens may be glad to take refuge in the eternal insights into a spiritual realm, spread out before us in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Vedantic philosophy."
  • (source: Vedanta for Modern Man - Edited by Christopher Isherwood p. 41 - 43)