This open access book
presents a comparative study of two classics of world literature,
offering the first sustained consideration of what unites and divides
the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita.
Focusing on the
nature of ethical action and how it relates to the highest good, Roopen
Majithia demonstrates how the Gita stresses the objectivity of
knowledge and freedom from being a subject, while the Ethics emphasizes
the knower, working out Aristotle’s central commitment to the idea of
substance as the primary building block of the world. Yet both the Gita
and the Ethics explain variety in human behaviour in terms of three
driving forces. Both agree moral agency is a construct that is a
function of background, education, and habit, presupposing a cultural,
political, and economic infrastructure, all of which shapes how each in
turn conceives the highest good.
What distinguishes the texts
is how the content of right action is generated. Reading them together,
alert to their individual accounts of how the practical relates to the
reflective dimensions of life, Majithia enriches our understanding of
two cornerstone texts in the Greek and Indian philosophical traditions.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence
on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Marjorie
Young Bell Faculty Fund, The Philosophy Department’s Baxter Fund and The
Hart Almerrin Massey Endowment.
