"Philosophical Disagreements and Plurality of Voices: Rethinking the Rules of Debates in Contemporary India"

null, Elise Coquereau-Saouma

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Dr. Elise Coquereau-Saouma, "Philosophical Disagreements and Plurality of Voices: Rethinking the Rules of Debates in Contemporary India".

In today’s academic world, we have become aware of the need to account for a plurality of existing worldviews and philosophical positions originating from several traditions (that is in terms of concepts - contents, as well as their expressions), and slowly also from the intermingling itself of several traditions. This has challenged our perspective on how to define which argument is ‘true’ and ‘false’ especially in philosophical debates, when we confront different philosophical systems with different assumptions, when the line between truth/false cannot be deductively drawn from within a system where the conditions are defined.

If we today acknowledge the need for plurality, without radical universalistic claims nor relativism, this ‘need’ does not tell us how to understand or react to positions that are influenced by different philosophical backgrounds and how to evaluate and respond to them. How to deal with epistemic plurality in a way that would be more than a polite acknowledgment of the arguments that we do not know - and respectfully want to avoid when we feel we cannot judge their adequacy - and how to react to philosophical disagreements that cannot be rationally dissolved, i.e. those disagreements that go beyond the problem of internal validity or consistency of an argument?

A salient endeavor of postcolonial Anglophone Indian philosophies has been to seek reconciliation of different viewpoints and worldviews that appear contradictory with each other. Philosophers like Kalidas Bhattacharyya, J. N. Chubb and Daya Krishna explore the constitutions of disagreements in philosophy or more in general, ways to cultivate a metaphilosophical standpoint from where a plurality of claims and voices can originate without seeming contradictory. With their analyzes, I suggest to understand philosophical disagreements beyond the strict analytic divide of truth and false or validity, and to look at other constitutive criteria of formation of one’s standpoints, to consider plurality in debates.

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