A monumental scholarly survey of the classical philosophical schools, still one of the standard references decades after it was written.
I'm partway into this one, and it's a genuinely different reading experience from anything else on my shelf right now — dense, systematic, written by a scholar who was also a serious philosopher in his own right, not just a historian summarizing other people's arguments.
Having spent a good stretch of time writing tradition pages for Nyaya, Vaisheshika, and Samkhya from scattered secondary sources, I wanted a single, authoritative reference that treats all six classical schools with comparable rigor and puts them in serious philosophical conversation with each other rather than as isolated entries in an encyclopedia. This book, even decades after it was written, still seems to be exactly that reference.
Radhakrishnan doesn't just describe each school's positions; he engages them as live philosophical arguments, testing their internal consistency and comparing their handling of shared problems — how each treats causation, how each treats the reliability of the senses, how each responds to skeptical challenges. Reading his treatment of Nyaya's epistemology alongside my own much shorter archive page, I can feel how much depth a full scholarly treatment adds that a single web page, however carefully written, simply can't match.
This is not a book I can read quickly. The prose is dense, assumes real philosophical background, and rewards re-reading passages rather than moving through at a steady clip. I've been taking it in short sessions, cross-referencing against my own archive pages as I go, which has already caught a couple of places where my own summaries were thinner than they should have been.
Radhakrishnan was himself a serious modern philosopher with his own systematic commitments, broadly sympathetic to the non-dualist reading associated with Advaita. I'm trying to read his treatment of the rival schools with that in mind — not assuming he's unfair to them, but staying alert to whether his own philosophical sympathies shape which arguments get the most generous hearing.
A far more rigorous grounding in the classical schools than my own necessarily compressed archive pages can offer, and probably a fair number of corrections and additions to make once I've finished. I'll update this note properly once I'm through both volumes; for now, this is a reading-in-progress report rather than a settled verdict.
My own reading notes so far; no passages reproduced. See the citation to read Radhakrishnan directly.
The reading path reading the archive critically is a good companion for a scholarly source this substantial and this clearly the product of one philosopher's own considered views.
The technical name for non-dualism within Vedanta, asserting that self and ultimate reality are, at the deepest level, not two.
A school of formal logic and epistemology, concerned with what counts as a valid means of knowledge and how sound argument can be distinguished from sophistry.
A school of natural philosophy proposing that reality is composed of discrete atoms and can be exhaustively classified into a fixed set of basic categories.
A dualist philosophical system distinguishing pure consciousness from the material world it observes, offering a genuinely different metaphysics from Vedantic non-dualism.