The use of the Internet and its applications as tools in formal, directed education is relatively new and, it can be argued, still in its infancy. This is especially true for uses that go beyond simple communication of content and grading/credentialing tools and attempts to explore the social and intellectual ramifications of the new types of relationships with knowledge and information and with other humans that the Internet (potentially) engenders. The fact that Internet-infused education is following so closely on the heels of (often failed; Cuban and Cuban 2009) attempts to introduce stored-program computer applications into the education infrastructure makes integration of the new technology even more complex and emotion laden. This is complicated by emerging multiple frameworks for understanding the role and the meaning of the Internet in education in particular and human life in general. Is the Internet meant to make educational experiences simpler or more difficult? Is the Internet meant to deliver information to the student or provide means for a student to move out into the world to find new information sources? Or is the Internet primarily for not only building new types of knowledge but also new types of knowledge building? Does the Internet separate us so that we are working individually devoid of traditional human relationships, or does it bring us together into virtual learning communities that stimulate new types of productive relationships? Is the Internet a tutor or a junior partner, or is it actually an extension of ourselves out into the world, creating unanticipated feedback loops? All of these, sometimes contradictory, questions are central as we look for effective strategies in Internet-infused education – strategies that fit institutionally determined educational goals or perhaps (creatively) destroy them. To understand why these questions are so important and often so implacable, it helps to put them in the context of the complex motivations and thinking that led to the creation of the modern Internet: from its first science fiction–like rumblings in the middle of the twentieth century to what seems like the minute-to-minute development of new Web applications as we move toward the middle of the twenty-first century and the information age.

The Internet today is pervasive in everyday life – at least among some populations: Internet access gives new and multiple meanings to the phrase digital divide.

The original purpose of writing this book was to discuss an Internet-infused education approach I have been working on for the last decade with my students and coauthors that we originally referred to as Open Source Education: I have recently (in this chapter) retermed the approach Open Source Educative Processes. We did not start to explore this approach based on any readings in educational technology or any previous work in the field. I first became interested in practical implications of the Internet in education when Min Ju Kang (at the time a student) introduced me to the Korean social media platform CyWorld during an independent study on exploring cognition, leading to long conversations about merging the two. As we developed some publications we kept running into the same reference to a seminal piece on the Internet and collaborative program development: Eric Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (1999). We began to believe application of Raymond's discussion of the Linux development community to education and classrooms practices was, if not obvious, potentially revolutionary. The reason we began to refer to our approach as Open Source Education is because Open Source is the term Raymond and his colleagues adopted (after initial publication of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”) to describe many of the ideas expressed in his piece. The descriptor Open Source Education is already in use, but it is to this point an amorphous phrase generally referring to the teaching of Free (Libre) and Open Source Software principles developed by the Open Source Initiative, including Open Source licensing. One of the goals of this book is to limit ambiguity, so I have decided to rename our educational approach Open Source Educative Processes.

At the end of a presentation/video explaining the principles of Open Source Software (http://flosscc.opensource.org/spread-the-word) the presenters make two critical points, at least for Open Source Education, that are central to the ideas discussed in these chapters: (1) Open Source is a great way to teach and to learn and (2) there is a difference between the Open Source license and the Open Source movement as a whole – pointing out that the movement is not primarily about licensing (although it is a critical component) but about creating great developers through community/collaborative processes.

The Internet as a tool with the potential to dramatically change our conceptions of teaching and learning has not emerged in a vacuum. The Internet from its earliest rumblings was meant to adapt understandings and activities of the human mind and its relationships to information to the extraordinary changes and technological developments of the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century. The idea of extending human thinking beyond the individual, beyond the local community, beyond even historically driven cultures into new spaces provided by interconnected computers was key for early pioneers such as Bush, Engelbart, and Licklider. At the same time while the tools the human mind is using are changing quickly and in dramatic fashion, it is far less clear how this is affecting the cognitive, social, or even physical architectures that help determine processes of teaching and learning, including the brain. (There is actually some argument about the malleability of the human brain in response to input; Maguire et al. 2000.) How qualitative are the changes the Internet is causing in our relationships to information, to each other, to the world – and how much of this (perhaps seeming) information revolution is simply a variation on a theme? Are we still in the end the same humans learning in the same ways?

At this point it makes little sense to throw out all or even some of the dominant educational theories as they have evolved over the last century while we try to sort out approaches to Internet-infused education. And, indeed, many of today's theorists and researchers trying to make sense and give meaning to the Internet in educational contexts have leaned on some of the most important educational theories and concepts of the twentieth century as underpinnings for new, Internet (or at least hypertext) explorations into teaching and learning. The publications of John Dewey, L. S. Vygotsky, and Albert Bandura as well as more recent information-processing theorists have already played important roles in Internet-focused education research. There is a paradox, however, in current Internet-infused education research: Most current educational researchers cut their teeth working within frameworks that predate the Internet, and in some cases the computer, sometimes by decades. To what degree are the current generation of education researchers attempting – sometimes clumsily – to pour old wine into the new, very differently shaped bottles provided by the Internet?

The successful bulletin board/computer conferencing systems virtual communities, in particular the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and the later evolving Open Source communities suggest two critical aspects of well-functioning, sustainable discussion forums: agency (based on interests) and a sense of social connectedness. This is no surprise for educators: As will be discussed in the next chapter, theorists such as Dewey and Vygotsky suggest that the critical components of well-functioning, sustainable social communities in general include shared goals and a willingness to recognize other members of the group as participants in a common project. Those looking to create dynamic, goal-oriented education-based online communities are often in a position of trying to create workable combinations of the two. Some researchers focus more on agency, using the interest and motivation fostered through Internet connectivity to try to create and establish social bonds that engender trusting and supportive relationships between members. Other researchers focus more on creating environments where students cultivate a strong sense of social engagement thinking, believing that an increase in quantity or quality of interactions will lead to the development of shared community purpose. Many times we do not really find a bright line between the two (such as in the Community of Inquiry model). This chapter will examine models that are more agency oriented, and the next chapter will focus on social engagement.

Developing user agency

The success of Internet-infused education is based to a great extent on users’ abilities and willingness to be agents in their own knowledge-building activities – from the most basic acts of logging on and typing key words into a search engine to the much more complex actions of joining and participating in online communities. This can be different from some traditional educational models, especially direct instruction approaches where students are treated more as passive consumers of information. Creating a sense of agency, including a willingness and the unique literary skills of the Internet to pursue new ideas through active inquiry, motivation to engage in complex online activities, and self-efficacy in Internet-based activities are important for online education in an augmentation/community technological frame. Gilly Salmon (2004) suggests a five-step process in the development of (individual) agency in an online educational ecology – a proactive process driven by well-trained e-moderators using what she refers to as e-tivities (2013) to help guide (or push) users through the five increasingly complex stages.

The Internet, at least when being used within an augmentation/community technological frame, is about human thinking – what it means, how we use it in our lives, the ways in which active, engaged thinking can confound expectations and wreak havoc on belief systems. The Internet is an inherently social tool (there need to be at least two interconnected nodes involved in any activity), creating possibilities for human connectivity that have never existed before – a connectivity that has little need of historical or physical contiguity, transcending traditional boundaries of time and place. But opportunities for social connectivity, even fulfilled opportunities, do not necessarily lead to productive engagement, let alone what Dewey (1916) referred to as vital learning activities. Potential participants in a community enterprise have to be able and willing to reach out into the unknown in a search not just for contact with other minds/nodes but for solutions to the problems that plague them – to put exploration in the quest for discovery ahead of practices and belief systems that have evolved over decades, even millennia, as part of place-based cultures. Users as potential learners need to open themselves up to new, unexpected trajectories of thought and action, and their place-based communities have to not only allow them this freedom but support them in it. Connectivity needs to be tempered with intelligence to be meaningful to the human condition, with a developing dialectical relationship between the two. The augmentation/community trajectory of the Internet from the beginning (i.e., the work of Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson) has been about this relationship.

One of the greatest challenges facing educators in using the Internet as an educational tool is reconfiguring our understanding of human intelligence to take advantage of new possibilities for learning. As ideas of education and human intelligence have merged over the last century, we have examined and assessed them primarily at the individual level. The Internet pushes ideas such as distributed intelligence and collective intelligence to the forefront, suggesting the new technology is more than a potential source of knowledge, but a generator and sustaining force in human thinking.

The hybrid classroom, also known as the blended classroom (the two terms are often used interchangeably), combines, or attempts to combine, the immediate, synchronous interactions of placed-based education with the online asynchronous, transactional relationships made possible through Internet applications. The basic assumption is that traditional place-based learning and the information flows of cyberspace can generate feedback loops that complement and/or enhance each other in teaching/learning processes. Place-based educational practices can serve as structured, centripetal forces on student thinking while the second-order cyberspace attempts to open students up to new information sources, experiences, and approaches to problem solving – the web of trails. But sometimes it is (first-order), teacher-generated or-sponsored cyberspace that creates structured learning feedback loops, giving time for more active, experiential educational practices in the classroom (e.g., the flipped classroom). And sometimes the Internet is used primarily to reinforce the structure of the classroom (e.g., the way many instructors use course management systems). The difficulties in understanding the face-to-face/online distinction can be compounded by different uses of technologies. The distinction is based primarily on differences in nonverbal cues, but in the current Internet-infused education ecology applications involving video conferencing and podcasting help ameliorate these differences, while digital storytelling can accentuate the use of nonverbal cues in ways direct classroom communications cannot or do not.

It might be better at this point not to think of the traditional classroom and the hybrid/blended classroom as two completely separate learning environments but as being on a continuum of physical, logical, and conventional constraints. The traditional classroom generally involves more physical, logical, and conventional constraints to the learning processes. Physically classrooms are highly constrained by time and space considerations. Logically they are constrained because only so much can be accomplished within a restricted place-based learning ecology: A teacher cannot ask a student in the middle of a discussion to have a conversation with a relative or friend or to experience something that might take hours and then return to add their newly gained knowledge to the class. Attempts at establishing nonhierarchical relationships can devolve into chaos – a cacophony of voices competing to be heard within a limited time frame. There are conventional constraints, whether turn taking, deference to the teacher, or even the way the student needs to dress.

The difficulty in discussing Open Educational Resources (OER) is the same bifurcation of technological frames (this book argues) that plagues many Internet-based initiatives: Whether you are looking at the Internet as an advanced tool for communication or as a means for new types of cooperation/collaboration goes a long way toward defining practices and outcomes. In few places are the differences more consequential while at the same time less overtly recognized than with OER. The OER movement (and it is often referred to as a movement by its proponents) has multiple definitions, multiples forebears, multiple lines of contributing research and activity, and multiple trajectories. One of the commonly raised issues in discussions of OER is that too many competing platforms/repositories are creating competition for the human and material capital necessary for sustainability. This is complicated by many self- and other identified OER platforms having different perspectives on the meaning of open, the meaning of resources, and the best models for sharing them. At the same time many of the OER platforms/repositories are more advanced in grappling with the complex questions inherent in a technology-based approach to teaching and learning than most other Internet-infused initiatives. Part of the reason for this is that a few highly committed organizations are pushing OER concepts forward with little interest in monetizing the concept: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, UNESCO (United National Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) to name a few.

The OER concept is complex and at times confusing, because it combines (very different) initiatives of OpenCourseware (OCW) (free, easily accessible course syllabi and support material), freely available, granular learning materials that can be appropriated by educators in a variety of circumstances and reassembled to meet local needs, and to a lesser (but growing) extent user collaboration in the creation, use, reuse, and remixing of learning materials in everyday education. Different branches of OER have (often multiple) theoretical and pragmatic roots in Open Education, Distance Learning, the Free Software/Open Source movement, cognitive psychology/science, object-oriented programming, and cultural historical approaches to education. Many OER platforms for OER have been developed around the world, with most in North America. One of the most pressing and discussed issues in the OER movement is both sustainability of repositories/platforms and the willingness of participants to contribute to and become engaged with repositories/platforms at an advanced level.

The relative importance of well-developed, well-defined social relationships in problem-solving communities has a long and complex history in education and human development in general. The famed Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (1987) suggested that integrated community relationships are one of the primary driving forces in human teaching/learning processes. Humans learn because they naturally yearn to be participants in (well)-functioning social groups and to maintain their place of membership in those groups. John Dewey (1916) based much of his educational philosophy on the idea that learning is a community/social–oriented process – with the quality of that learning based very much on the value and relevance of the connections problem-solving group members have and use with each other and the world around them. More recent ideas such as Lave and Wenger's (1991) limited peripheral participation outline the ways in which neophytes are slowly integrated into community processes by observing relevant activities. Paolo Freire (1970) makes the argument that social systems control what we know and how we know for their own purposes, and the only ways to understand and change these (sometimes individually destructive) knowledge systems is by recognizing this.

The role of social relationships in online learning seems like a natural focus of study, especially considering the role communication and connectivity play in everyday Internet activity. It is almost axiomatic that the Internet can be used as a tool for developing communities where users support and complement each other in their efforts to gain new understandings and insights. Yet the development of socially cohesive learning communities where members feel a commitment to both the group and its goals has been one of the most difficult issues in Internet-infused education. Many Internet-based education initiatives pay little if any attention to student (or teacher) online social relationships, prioritizing communication, putting emphasis on transmission of information, many times through direct instruction or individual tutoring. A smaller group recognizes the role that social relationships play in successful learning environments but relegate development of these relationships to secondary status. Also, some initiatives make the argument that social connection is a natural human want – we are all wandering nodes looking to tie into some larger network of activity if given the opportunity: The Internet (or a well-designed intranet) provides those opportunities.

The idea that there is educational gold (metaphorical or material) in expansive, highly distributed online courses has been developing momentum over the last few years, primarily through the popularization of the acronym MOOC – massive open online courses. It is difficult to know exactly why a sudden fixation with this particular type of online education has emerged. But as this book argues, the idea of “massive” education (if you define “massive” as many people being involved in an asynchronous, shared educational process) is one of the earliest ideas in development of an online/cyberspace information universe – going all the way back to Bush's vision of his Memex machine. Nelson was promoting massive educational ecologies decades ago, writing,

Licklider and Taylor had similar realizations:

One of the best technologies for these types of networked, large-scale education initiatives, the Programmed Logic for Teaching Operations (Plato IV), reached its height in the 1970s, capable of having up to four thousand students in a single course through intranet technologies, using innovative applications to help keep students engaged. (It is somewhat mystifying that current attempts at developing massive online courses not only don't seem to be using much of the discoveries and/or findings that could culled from Plato IV, but rarely seem to mention the project.)

Various possible reasons can be suggested why the idea of interconnecting large populations of learners into targeted online courses is suddenly receiving so much attention from so many quarters (educators, journalists, businesspeople): (1) Some of the reasons are probably philosophical – the Internet has created new interests in the potentials for human connectivity (Siemens 2005), process-based learning (Akyol and Garrison 2014), […]

The relationship between the new information/knowledge–building spaces created through the Internet and traditional, place-based learning environments may be one of the most understudied topics in Internet-infused education. It is a relationship with important implications for the topics of each of the chapters that follow this one: hybrid/blended learning environments – especially the idea of augmented reality; open educational resources – especially the relationships between universal learning objects and local use; massive open online courses/scaled online learning environments – especially their meaning and impact in bringing large, distributed populations of learners into a single, online learning environment; and the development of open educational infrastructures. How we deal with the evolving relationship of this emerging cyberspace/place-based dynamic may be one of the defining issues for education and perhaps community and society in the twenty-first century. This chapter will necessarily be more abstract and speculative than the other chapters because so little research or even theorizing on this relationship in educational contexts has taken place.

An obvious question is if the relationship between augmentative/community space created and maintained through Internet activity and traditional educational places is so important, why has so little research/theorizing been done on the idea? One reason might be that it is extremely difficult to conceptualize let alone study the relationship between Internet spaces and the places occupied by Internet users in any systematic way. The actual concept of individuals creating integrated space/place systems by criss-crossing easily recognizable boundaries (e.g., Qwerty keyboard, LCD screen) between the two has a history that predates the web and popularization of the Internet. The science fiction writer William Gibson was one of the earliest to define the coming information age relationship between everyday place and virtual space. He coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, describing it as a “consensual hallucination” where individuals are able to leave their physical, mundane, restricted (by geography, time, cultural rule systems) lives and engage in new types of online activities with trajectories that expand out beyond our imaginations – a virtual world reachable through electronic technologies, creating new tensions in human existence as place and cyberspace challenge each other in veracity and importance. Gibson's ideas foreshadowed the difficult transactional relationships that needed to be explored together and apart – an idea that does not fit easily into many views in philosophy, psychology, and/or education.

Preliminaries

As its title suggests, this book is an introduction to Indian philosophy (or more specifically, classical Indian philosophy) – one of the world's great philosophical traditions. But while it aims to be an introduction to classical Indian philosophy suitable for the philosophically curious, it does not aim to be an introduction to philosophy. Instead the expected typical audience will include undergraduates who have taken at least a first course in philosophy, graduate students in philosophy seeking to broaden their philosophical horizons, and interested general readers with some prior background in philosophy.

In philosophy there are two common ways of structuring an introductory work. One approach is to structure the exposition chronologically; the other approach is to structure it thematically. This book strongly favours the thematic approach: each of the seven succeeding chapters is devoted to a particular philosophical topic discussed extensively by the classical Indian philosophers.

Chapter 1 ‘Value’ deals with Indian views about ethics, about which there were both major commonalities and some significant differences. Chapter 2 ‘Knowledge’ deals with some of the epistemological concerns central to classical Indian philosophy. Chapter 3 ‘Reasoning’ focuses on Indian ‘logic’, broadly conceived. Chapter 4 ‘Word’ deals with Indian philosophy of language. Chapter 5 ‘World’ focuses on metaphysics: specifically, the matter of which fundamental entities make up the world and how causation holds them together. Chapter 6 ‘Self’ deals with Indian theories of the self. Chapter 7 ‘Ultimates’ deals with philosophy of religion, especially the variety of differing conceptions of a maximally great being to be found in the Indian tradition.

This thematic organization permits the book to be used in at least two different ways. A reader wanting a moderately comprehensive overview of Indian philosophy should definitely read it straight through. But a reader wanting instead only a sense of Indian contributions to a particular philosophical theme – say, the nature of knowledge, or the metaphysics of the self – can just turn to the relevant chapter (and then follow this up with the suggested readings at the end of it).

Similarly, this whole book – appropriately supplemented with translations from the Sanskrit primary sources – could be used as the text for an introductory survey course on Indian philosophy; or particular chapters (plus readings) could be used either for more advanced courses on selected topics in Indian philosophy, …

Introduction

Epistemological concerns were explicitly central to classical Indian philosophy. This followed naturally from the fact that the avowed goal of most Indian philosophers was liberation (mokṣa), conceived of as the highest good. Such liberation was deemed worth pursuing because worldly life was widely accepted to be inevitably characterized by suffering (duḥkha). The usual philosophical strategy for finding a route to liberation from suffering involved isolating a crucial causal condition for our entanglement in such suffering and seeking to overturn it. The most popular candidate for such a condition was ignorance (avidyā): we are caught in the cycle of suffering due to our ignorance. Accordingly, eliminating our ignorance through the acquisition of knowledge is the way to liberation.

The beginning of the Nyāyasūtra, for example, provides a characteristic statement of the leading idea here:

This soteriological premise, with its implied epistemological optimism about the instrumental relations between knowledge and the attainment of the highest good, then naturally generates a number of more technical epistemological questions. Questions like: What is knowledge? What are its sources? What are its objects? How do we fall into error? These sorts of questions deeply engaged Indian philosophers and the competing theories they developed to answer them gave rise to pramāṇavāda, that is, that part of Indian philosophy concerned with the nature and sources of knowledge.

It is worth remarking, however, that although Indian epistemology has an explicit soteriological motivation, much of the detailed technical literature frequently proceeds in a fashion largely independent of this commitment. This is unsurprising since the instrumental view of knowledge can easily be generalized, and indeed explicitly was so generalized. Thus the Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti (ninth century), although personally firmly committed to the soteriological premise, clearly indicates that it is but a special case of a more general feature about knowledge which should motivate the study of epistemology: ‘The attainment of all human ends is preceded by right knowledge and therefore it is here expounded’ (Nyāyabindu 1.1).

The structure of knowledge according to pramāṇa theory

Classical Indian theory of knowledge is centred around pramāṇa theory.

Introduction

The classical Indian philosophers developed highly articulated theories of the self, often claiming a correct understanding of the nature of the self to be a necessary, or sometimes even a sufficient, condition for liberation. Indian theories of the self traditionally divide into two broad classes: those who explain our diachronic and synchronic identity by reference to an enduring substantial self (ātmavādins) and those who deny the existence of such a self, taking instead a ‘modal’ view of reality (anātmavādins). The orthodox Hindu philosophers and the Jainas all take the former view. Hence, though they disagree on the nature and number of such selves, they are all non-reductionists of some sort about our identity. Most Indian Buddhist philosophers (including the Theravādins, the Vaibhāṣikas, the Sautrāntikas, the Yogācārins and the Svātantrika-Mādhyamikas) take the latter view and hence are all plausibly classifiable as reductionists about our identity.

This chapter begins by introducing how the problem of the self arises in accounting for the nature and felt unity of our experiences, both at a time and over time. It then goes on to focus in particular on the dualistic theories of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya-Yoga, the non-dualism of Advaita Vedānta, and the Buddhist ‘no-self’ theory. Finally, it addresses the issue of the supposed normative implications of these rival Indian theories of the self.

The problem of the self

The problem of the self arose for the ancient Indian philosophers much as it did for Western philosophers. In both traditions one way into the problem is to take the self (ātman) to be whatever it is that is the referent of the term ‘I’ in sentences like ‘I am now conscious’, ‘I cooked this rice’, ‘I remember attending my daughter's wedding’, and so on. Minimally characterized in this way, the existence of the self seems indubitable. Hence the great Advaitin philosopher Śaṃkara (eighth century) claims that denial of the self is just straightforwardly self-refuting, appealing to a sort of cogito argument:

I would like to thank especially the following persons who have – both through their writings and through conversation or correspondence over the years – significantly shaped the way I think about Indian philosophy: in alphabetical order, they are Arindam Chakrabarti, Eli Franco, Jonardon Ganeri, Jay Garfield, Jitendra Mohanty, Stephen Phillips, Karl Potter, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Jay Shaw, Mark Siderits, John Taber, and Tom Tillemans. Naturally, it should not be inferred that any of them would agree with all of what I have written here.

A very special debt of gratitude is also due to Hilary Gaskin, my editor at Cambridge University Press, who commissioned this book and continued to believe in it – patiently combining the right mix of editorial acumen, encouragement and reproof – over the inordinately lengthy time I took to deliver the final manuscript. Without her efforts this book would certainly not have come into being. Many thanks!

Two other persons’ efforts were also essential in transforming the submitted manuscript into the final book: those of the anonymous clearance reader for Cambridge University Press, who offered a number of valuable suggestions for improvement, and of Rosemary Crawley, Assistant Editor, who skilfully shepherded me through the production process.

In writing this book I have made use of some of my own previously published articles (in varying degrees of revision). Thus the Introduction and Chapter 2 incorporate material from my ‘Truth, Relativism and Western Conceptions of Indian Philosophy’, Asian Philosophy 8, 1998. Chapter 1 includes material from my article ‘Hindu Ethics’ in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Blackwell, 2013). Chapter 3 includes material originally published in ‘The Problem of Induction in Indian Philosophy’, Philosophy East and West 34, 1984. Chapter 4 reuses some material from my ‘Musical Unity and Sentential Unity’, British Journal of Aesthetics 39, 1999. Chapter 5 includes material from ‘The Momentariness of Simples’, Philosophy 79, 2004, and ‘Causation, Indian Theories of’ in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge, 1998). Chapter 6 draws on ‘Computationality, Mind and Value: The Case of Sāṃkhya-Yoga’, Asian Philosophy 11, 2001, and ‘Personal Identity, Minimalism, and Madhyamaka’, Philosophy East and West 52, 2002. I am grateful to the editors and publishers involved for permission to reprint these materials here. Finally, the book's epigraph is reprinted (with the permission of Wiley) from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Blackwell, 1980).

Introduction

While classical Indian philosophy is incredibly rich in rigorous discussions of topics in epistemology, logic and metaphysics, comparable discussions in the areas of ethics, politics and aesthetics were not as extensive as might have been expected. Certainly, ethics was not a distinct field within Indian philosophy in the manner of pramāṇavāda (the part of Indian philosophy that corresponds roughly to epistemology and logic). Instead, Indian ethical discussions are to be found scattered acoss many works and genres. However, although classical Indian ethics is thus underdeveloped relative to other branches of Indian philosophy, the Indian philosophers did have a good deal to say about the theory of value insofar as they vigorously discussed topics like the ends of life and the relation of virtuous action to those ends. Moreover, there are major commonalities between both the orthodox Hindu and heterodox Buddhist and Jaina philosophers – though there are also some significant differences.

In this chapter we begin by outlining the structure of classical Hindu ethics and its theories of the good and the right. We then consider some arguments for the primacy of the value of liberation, a claim common to both orthodox and heterodox Indian value theorists, before focusing on some of the distinctive features of Buddhist and Jaina ethics. It seems appropriate to begin our introduction to Indian philosophy here because these crucial normative presuppositions underpin so many of the more fully articulated and technical debates in classical Indian epistemology and metaphysics.

The structure of value: the puruṣārthas

The Hindu ethical tradition is complex and by no means monolithic, but arguably the most developed parts of classical Hindu ethics are its theory of the good and its theory of the right. The former is articulated in terms of the puruṣārthas or ends of human life.

A traditional Hindu classification recognizes four classes of values: the puruṣārthas or ends of human life. The most common traditional ordering of these is: dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa. The first three are sometimes grouped together as the trivarga (‘group of three’); the addition of mokṣa constructs the caturvarga (‘group of four’). Artha is wealth and political power; kāma is sensual pleasure, particularly as associated with sexual and aesthetic experience; dharma is the system of obligations and prohibitions enshrined in the legal and religious texts.