Debates
Thesis, objection, reply — who answered whom.
Being vs. Becoming
The first great quarrel in Western philosophy — is reality one and changeless (Parmenides) or everlasting flux (Heraclitus)?
Is There a Self? Nyāya vs. the Buddhists
The thousand-year Indian debate between Nyāya logicians, who argued that memory and recognition prove an enduring self, and Buddhist philosophers, who held that a person is a stream of momentary events.
Faith vs. Reason
Can God be reached by argument — or does faith begin exactly where reason fails? From Tertullian’s Athens and Jerusalem to Kierkegaard’s leap and Camus’s refusal.
Can God Be Proved? Udayana vs. the Mīmāṃsakas and Buddhists
The classical Indian debate on a creator God — Nyāya’s proofs from effects, atoms and the Veda, against the Mīmāṃsā and Buddhist arguments that no creator is needed or possible.
Śaṅkara vs. Rāmānuja
The great Vedāntic debate — is the self identical with Brahman, and the world an illusion? Or are souls and world real, the body of a personal God?
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
Gandhi vs. Ambedkar
The great argument of modern India — can caste be reformed from within Hinduism, as Gandhi believed, or must it be annihilated, with the scriptures that sanctify it, as Ambedkar argued?
Sartre vs. Camus
The most famous intellectual break of the twentieth century — two friends of the Resistance fall out in 1952 over revolution, violence, and The Rebel.