ABSTRACT
Indian philosophy has its own genealogy and its own rich repertoire of intramural debates. Philosophy may well be emblematic of the human quest to "understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Practitioners of the genre 'comparative philosophy' are no strangers to expressing misgivings about comparisons that merely tag theories bearing certain resemblances. Academic philosophy in the global West is a cosmopolitan phenomenon that mirrors the progress of the sciences in its open-ended practice of asking questions and pursuing knowledge. Indian philosophy is host to conceptual, argumentative, and experiential strategies that do not map neatly onto Western categories and practices. If the study of Indian philosophy is to resist retreat into the familiar terrain of tradition and its scholastic proclivities, perhaps a confluence of perspectives rather than their comparison is more methodologically apt.
