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.     

Tapti Maitra: Advaita Metaphysics: A Contemporary Perspective—No. 18 of Contemporary Researches in Hindu Philosophy & Religion

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research -     

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.     

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.