Legal rulings on suicide in India and implications for the right to die

In this paper I am concerned to address the question of voluntary or self‐willed death from two distinct positions—a particular community's socio‐religious practice (viz. Jaina sallekhanā) and as the matter stands in law (penal code, constitution, judicial wisdom, etc.) in India—in the light of the recent move by a bench of its apex court striking down the penal code section proscribing suicide. I also wish to draw out some implications of these deliberations for the beneficence of medical practice and related bio‐ethical ramifications in the Indian context.     

Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’

Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha.

Is Adhikāra good enough for ‘rights'?

The paper considers the question of whether ‘rights’ as we have it in modern Western thinking has an equivalence within the Indian framework of Dharma. Under Part I we look at purusārthas to see if the desired human goals imply rights by examining the tension between aspired ‘values’ and the ‘ought’ of duty. Next, a potential cognate in the term ’adhikāra’ is investigated via the derivation of a refined signification of ‘entitlements’, especially in the exegetical hermeneutics of the Mimāmsā. Finally, adhikāra's re‐emergence in the Bhagavadgitā is considered. We suggest that while the boundary is significantly extended, the Gitā too appears to be circumspect in opening up the discourse in the more abstract and absolute sense which the term ‘rights’ nowadays enjoys.     

Why Is There Nothing Rather Than Something?

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (?ūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism.