We find similar ideas of a transcendent ego in both Kant and the Upanishads. We find a rejection of free will in Schopenhauer and Ramana Maharshi. What should we make of this overlap between Western and Indian philosophy? Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad argues both became gripped by the same question.

Ricky Williamson: What do you think are the key differences and similarities between Western and Indian philosophy?

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad: I don’t think that there is actually a global answer to the question of differences between what are, broadly speaking, historically constructed traditions. While we might intuitively think we recognise what Western philosophy is or what Indian philosophy is, in practice it’s more complicated.

A particularly potent example of the difficulty is the question of whether Arabic philosophy counts as Western philosophy. We know that the whole Aristotelian tradition was lost to the Latin-writing European philosophical tradition and was preserved by the Arabs and in Arabic. It only returned to the European tradition in the Renaissance, which launched a whole series of rediscoveries of Greek materials. Some people have therefore argued that Arabic philosophy is part of Western philosophy. But others would point out that within Islamic thought, as it was articulated in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, there was such a thing as Falsafah, which was a particular branch of philosophy and which was integrated into questions that were doctrinally based on Islamic revelation. So, they would conclude, of course what we might call Arabic philosophy is nothing like Western philosophy.