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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Owen Ware, "Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany" (Routledge, 2023)
Description: Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von GĂŒnderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and MĂŒller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad GÄ«tÄ and YogÄ SĆ«tras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Ware shows how their responses to Indian thought illuminates our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza. He concludes...