In this conversation Swami Medhananda joins the host Saad Ismail to discuss his brilliant recent book ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic Cosmopolitanism’. We discuss Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy of ‘Integral Advaita’ and what makes it different from other forms of Advaita, how are we to approach Swami Vivekananda’s views on religious pluralism in the context of the evolution or maturation of his thought, and where does he stand ultimately in terms of religious exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism? Where does Islam fit in Swami Vivekananda’s ‘universalism’? What are some common misreadings of his ideas (here we discuss the writing of Jyotirmaya Sharma)? Finally, we look in some detail at how Swami Vivekananda offers us a robust philosophy of mind and consciousness for our times.
About the Book: Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India’s most influential philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta or as a “Neo-Vedantin” influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation of Vivekananda’s philosophy, highlighting its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, the book argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers. Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedanta as a nonsectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with numerous philosophers past and present, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda’s views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness.
You can purchase the book from Amazon here.
Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and an academic philosopher, currently serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. His current research focuses on global philosophy of religion, cosmopsychism, the epistemology of mystical experience, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedāntic philosophical traditions, especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.
You can watch our previous discussion with Swami Medhananda on his book on Sri Ramakrishna here.
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