Elisa Freschi – författare

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a CC BY- NC- ND 4.0 licence.Why do individuals obey commands? The Mīmāṃsā school of Sanskrit philosophy has debated this question for millennia, oscillating among three central positions held by philosophers such as Kuṃārila, Maṇḍana, Bhartṛhari, and Prabhākara. Maṇḍana interpreted commands as descriptive statements, suggesting a correlation between enjoined action and expected output. He argued that knowledge of this means-end relationship accounts for command adherence. Conversely, Prabhākara posited that one obeys a command because one feels enjoined, and only later does one analyze what is being asked and why. Bhartṛhari introduced an 'intuition' theory, or a unified account for both commands and descriptive sentences which asserts that the listener's innate inclinations explain command adherence. In A Philosophy of Commands: On Maṇḍana Miśra's Vidhiviveka, contributors discuss these competing models through the lens of Maṇḍana's Discernment about Commands. The book offers the first English translation of a key chapter detailing Maṇḍana's position in the Discernment about Commands, in addition to the original edition of the same text.

One God, One System charts a history of Sanskrit philosophy in the absence of an agreed-upon canon, timeline, principal thinkers, or core philosophical questions. Contrary to previous ahistorical approaches centered on unchanging 'schools', Elisa Freschi focuses on andreconstructs the intellectual figure of Veṅkaṭanātha and his philosophical and theological contribution to what we now call 'Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta'.This volume explores how Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as we know it now is largely a product of Veṅkaṭanātha's unique philosophical and theological contributions. He connected various texts and theories so that readers and practitioners looking at the time before Veṅkaṭanātha now recognize them as parts of a unitary whole. Once Veṅkaṭanātha's contribution is in place it is in fact easy to look back at authors before him and recognize them as pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. Freschi presents a novel reading of Veṅkaṭanātha through focused chapters on his epistemology, ontology, soteriology, and theology, examining both the range and theoretical basis of his synthesis and methodology.

This study focuses on the devices implemented in Classical Indian texts on ritual and language in order to develop a structure of rules in an economic and systematic way. These devices presuppose a spatial approach to ritual and language, one which deals for instance with absences as substitutions within a pre-existing grid, and not as temporal disappearances. In this way, the study reveals a key feature of some among the most influential schools of Indian thought.The sources are Kalpasūtra, Vyākaraṇa and Mīmāṃsā, three textual traditions which developed alongside each other, sharing – as the volume shows – common presuppositions and methodologies. The book will be of interest for Sanskritists, scholars of ritual exegesis and of the history of linguistics.