Books
(Total 3)
Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2022)
“Swami Medhananda’s Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism is an extraordinary achievement. A brilliant, deep and searching exploration of Swami Vivekananda, this may also be the best book in English on philosophical debates in modern Hinduism, and philosophy of religion more generally.”
- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Princeton University
“Ayon Maharaj’s Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality is a ground-breaking study of the Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna. This volume will become a central work in our understanding of Sri Ramakrishna….Maharaj deftly combines exegetical work on the Bengali source-texts with debates in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, indicating lines of conversation between Ramakrishna and various contemporary western thinkers….The arguments are erudite, and display extensive, careful, and sensitive readings of the philosophers whose views are discussed.”
– Ankur Barua, Cambridge University
“An original and meticulously crafted account of aesthetic agency in its conceptual evolution from Kant to Adorno….What sets this work apart from comparable works exploring the art-agency relation from Kant onward is that it deftly plays between antithetical attitudes toward the notion of aesthetic agency. One is the post-Enlightenment glorification of art as the secular redeemer of a disenchanted modernity, the other a skeptical rejection of aesthetic agency as the residual metaphysics of a bygone era. At this critical juncture, Maharaj argues, we are presented with a false dichotomy between modernism's uncritical optimism and the radical negativity of postmodern aesthetics. Between these extremes he develops a ‘dialectical’ defense of aesthetic agency that acknowledges both the capacities and limitations of art's role in human self-awareness….One has to commend this work as a powerful and timely defense of aesthetic agency. It is a welcome line of argument for those of us who can neither naively ascribe to art the power of spiritual redemption nor cynically reduce art to the purpose of entertainment, pleasure, or emotional catharsis.”
– Jason M. Miller, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews