Lawrence McCrea

Professor of Asian Studies and Classics, Cornell University

“Reading and Rationality in Late First Millennium Indian Philosophy”

Wednesday, April 10th, 4:30 PM, Swift Common Room

Lawrence McCrea is professor of Asian Studies and Classics at Cornell University. His research concerns the history of Indian philosophy, philosophy of language, and poetics, and has appeared in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of Hindu Studies, and Journal of the American Oriental Society. Professor McCrea is the author of The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir (2008), Buddhist Philosophy of Language in India: Jñānaśrīmitra on Exclusion (with Parimal Patil, 2010), as well as the co-editor of New Directions in South Asian Studies: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock (2011).

This paper will consider the history of the theory of the preconditions of textual study (abhidheya-prayojana-sambandha), tracing their development from Mīmāmsā to Dharmakīrtian Buddhists to Nyāya, where they are imported into Jayantabhatta’s model of everyday practical rationality.

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