Any discussion of the motivation of gambling usually starts with the natural comparison to life. Life is a gamble. Everyday, people are faced with situations which involve risk and chance. Professor Rangachar looks at the religious antecedents of gaming and the reaction to its development.
The general view amongst scholars, and western scholars in particular, is that there is not sufficient attention paid to ethics in Hinduism. While no one holds that view seriously these days it does surface in discussions on Hinduism even today. This presentation tries to tackle that issue from the point of view of the early Upanishads. The main argument I develop is that moral theory and ethical behaviour is culture specific and there cannot be a uniform standard moral theory for all cultures.
Subhasitas are Sanskrit sayings that generally make a moral point. This lecture will examine the role of ‘eloquent speech’ in the formation of social and political relationships in medieval India, showing the role of subhasita in the formation of ethics.
Daud Ali is Senior Lecturer in Early Indian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is author of Courtly Culture and PoliticalLife in Early Medieval India, and, with Ronald Inden and Jonathan Walters, of Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practice in South Asia
Purushottama Bilimoria, PhD is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Studies at Deakin University in Australia and Senior Research Fellow, University of Melbourne. Visiting Professor and Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley and Dominican University, San Anselmo, and Shivadasani Fellow of Oxford University. His areas of specialist research and publications cover classical Indian philosophy and comparative ethics; Continental thought; cross-cultural philosophy of religion, diaspora studies; bioethics, and personal law in India.
