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CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY, CONTINUED
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Knowing (P. R. Scholarship thesis enlarged for Ph. D. thesis, 1932) is a technical work on Vedanta epistemology. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (in collaboration with S. C. Chatterjee, 1939) is the standard textbook used by Indian undergraduates. Chief Currents of Contemporary Philosophy (1950), while devoted mostly to Western philosophy, also included the first systematic account to be published of K. C. Bhattacharya's doctrine. The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi (American lectures, 1953) is, in the vast Gandhi literature, the only competent account of the Mahatma's philosophy as such. Of his many articles in various journals," the most important for his own philosophy is "Philosophy of the Body." 12 He was also a principal editor of the cooperative History of Philosophy Eastern and Western (1952), the first attempt since Deussen's to produce a general history of philosophy. : Datta is particularly interested in semantics, considering semantic analysis a necessary prerequisite to philosophical agreement, and the discovery of categories the most important philosophical activity. He points out that Vinoba Bhave, for example, can appeal successfully to the Hindu people because he can take for granted certain categories inherent in Hindu culture. He compares the terms found in Vinoba's speeches (sacrifice, equality, love, charity, self-control) with those found in Eisenhower's (democracy, freedom, free enterprise, standard of living). He is making a special study of the meanings of sat (being), and suggests that Sankara's philosophy is simply deduced from his definition of sat."
Datta's own philosophy, a sort of panpsychism, he calls dehatmavada (“body-soul-ism"). This term, he points out, is used by materialists to mean that soul is only body, but by him to mean that body is only soul. We come in contact with the
31 Datta, like Das, also claims to have first made K. C. Bhattacharya well known, by his paper at the India Philosophical Congress in 1934.
32 Radhakrishnan: Comparative Studies in Philosophy Presented in Honour of his Sixtieth Birthday, 1953, pp. 315-31.
33 When Gandhi said, "God is Truth, or rather Truth is God," he may have meant "reality," for sat (reality) and satya (truth) are pronounced the same in Gujerati.
