ABSTRACT
The philosophical encounter between India and Europe betrays hermeneutic impatience. Indian and European intellectuals alike were often too eager to applaud enthusiastically or dismiss chauvinistically their other. Today, there is some recognition that hermeneutic patience is preferable: there is some agreement that the other-as-other has a dramatic, and possibly deconstructive, impact on the self’s assurances. Postcolonial philosophers recognize in this way that the other affords the self the opportunity to revisit and rectify its prejudices, not those of the other. Philosophical others are thus mutually liberating.
