Samvada: A Dialogue Between Two Philosophical Traditions.

This is a very unusual book--perhaps a genuine example of "comparative philosophy" (rather than another jejune debate as to its possibility). It too proceeds from a seminar, held in Poona in 1983, but instead of an international cast, its participants were all Indians (Daya Krishna, it might be noted, attended also the above conference). And instead of bandying about the latest international buzzwords in the international language, this conference sought to confront specific problems of recent English and German philosophy, through their ablest Indian exponents, and their analogues or contrasts in the Indian tradition itself, expressed, as often as not, in Sanskrit. The book is half in English, half in Sanskrit--the pundits attending are allowed to respond in their proper idiom! The aim, as M. P. Rege makes clear in the introduction, is both to engage the pundit in the process of (Western) academic debate, and to unburden this latter of its hauteur (largely self-assumed) in taking the former as a mere object of curiosity and comment.

The entire seminar was devoted to various theses of Bertrand Russell on the nature of the proposition and signification generally ("words denote individuals," "the meaning of a sentence is a proposition,"...