In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: snip, written by Birgit Kellner 328 days ago.
Keywords: Indian logic

Well, it had to happen eventually. Claus Oetke, known for his rigorous analytical approach to ancient Indian philosophy (with Indian logic being his speciality), finally took one of my publications as a target of his usually very strongly voiced criticism.

Oetke has a habit of writing extensive papers or even monographs that use specific topics in Indian philosophy as a gateway to deal with wide-ranging methodological issues in the interpretation and understanding of Indian philosophy which he feels are neglected in the field of South Asian or Buddhist Studies. Typically, these publications are occasioned by him taking issue with something that other scholars wrote, and these others become the target of quite heavy criticism.

This time it happened to me. Oetke’s 83-page paper “Some Issues of Scholarly Exegesis (In Indian Philosophy)” (Journal of Indian Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/s10781-009-9072-1, available here if your library has a subscription for the journal’s online content) takes issue with a review of his monograph “Vier Studien zum Altindischen Syllogismus” (Reinbek 1994) that I wrote more than twelve years ago. The review was published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60/2 (1997), pp. 382-383. (Lest you should think that Oetke takes 83 pages to attack my meagre two – John Taber is also a target of Oetke’s criticism in these pages, though he doesn’t come off nearly as ignorant as myself.)

I haven’t had the time to read Oetke’s paper thoroughly, so I won’t comment on the quality of his arguments. Since I changed my views on many things over the past twelve years, I would probably now agree with him at least on some of the points he raises.

I feel honoured to be regarded as worthy of such fervent criticism by someone as intelligent as Oetke, one of the few real philosophers in Indological studies (where philosophers are unfortunately a rare breed), if I may add. I just wish he had taken up one of my more substantial recent articles, and not a twelve-year old two-page book review that I wrote while working on my PhD in Hiroshima, and that exhibits an over-confidence not entirely unknown among PhD candidates.