With the arrival of the colonial education in India, a nationalist urge swept across the Indian subcontinent. And Kolkata was not an exception. There was a conscious attempt on the part of the traditional scholars, to make the philosophical insights available in ancient India available to the modern intelligent readers who for several reasons lost touch with the original Sanskrit intellectual world. Many Sanskrit commentaries were translated with detail explanatory notes in Bengali. These works written in vernacular constitute a rich tradition of recent Indian philosophical repertoire. In this digital library attempts have been made to make these works accessible to the interested researchers.

The Philosophy of Word and Meaning

Gaurinath Sastri, the author of this book, reconstructs the whole philosophy of Bhartṛhari. Bhartṛhari is the first philosopher in Indian tradition to build an entire philosophical system on a theory of language. The present book contains the following chapters: 1. The Supreme Reality, 2. The Supreme Power, 3. Functioning of Powers, 4. Correspondence of Form and Matter, 5. The Empiric World of Realities, 6. Word: What It Is, 7. Import of Words, and 8. Import of Propositions. The author presents Bhartṛhari’s thesis on the metaphysics of word and its manifestation in the form of the empirical world. There is a detailed discussion on the nature of sub-sentential parts like varṇa, pada etc. An elaborate discussion on the nature of knowledge of the different parts of a sentence resulting in the knowledge of the whole sentence can be found in this book. A comparative estimate of the relevant views of other Grammarians and other schools of classical Indian philosophy has been attempted by the author.
With the arrival of the colonial education in India, a nationalist urge swept across the Indian subcontinent. And Kolkata was not an exception. There was a conscious attempt on the part of the traditional scholars, to make the philosophical insights available in ancient India available to the modern intelligent readers who for several reasons lost touch with the original Sanskrit intellectual world. Many Sanskrit commentaries were translated with detail explanatory notes in Bengali. These works written in vernacular constitute a rich tradition of recent Indian philosophical repertoire. In this digital library attempts have been made to make these works accessible to the interested researchers.