Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
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disappeared and their place has been taken by pragmatism and sophisticated technologies. It is possible that collapse of philosophy in general of academic sort and of Advaita Vedanta in particular has occurred because of these new interests and irresistible forces. It has therefore become a big challenge and that the intellectuals have nothing from the past to live with and nothing new to live by.
Hacker himself described his work as a 'field of rubble of unfinished projects' and expressed the hope that others might use these fragments for their own work, either in a positive way or through critique. Halbfass disagreed with this characterization by Hacker of his own work because he believed that there is more finished architecture in it than Hacker's own metaphor would seem to suggest. But there can be little doubt in thinking that Hacker has left us a rich supply of precious building material replete with some major stumbling blocks."
Halbfass visualized these Essays of Paul Hacker as important document in the history of Indology. I think that they are also important critique of Advaita Vedanta, quite impossible for its defenders and promoters. Halbfass further looked upon them as exemplary statements in the encounter between India and Europe because in more than one sense, he maintained, they continued to be a living challenge.
Reference
Halbfass, Wilhelm (Ed.): Philology and Confrontation - Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta, Albany (NY), 1995, State University of New York Press, pp. viii - 369 (referred to as PC below).
For the benefit of readers I give here a few biographical details of Paul Hacker (1930-1979), the German Indologist who studied Indology and various philological disciplines at the Universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Berlin since 1932. He also studied Indo-European Linguistics, theology and Philosophy as well. He received Ph.D. from Berlin University in 1940. But it was only after II World War was ever that he resumed his academic career at the University of Bonn, where he had the support of Willibald Kirfel, the well known Purana scholar. In 1950, Hacker started teaching at University of Munster. In 1954, he accepted Professorship in India at the Mithila Post Graduate Research Institute in Darbhanga, Assam, for a brief period of one year. In 1955, he was invited to take Chair in Indian Studies at Bonn- indeed a rare honour because that was the oldest
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