Nerds of Yoga: The Path of Knowledge through Philosophical Doxography

Dr Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette

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In this talk Dr Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette will examine early Indian philosophical doxographies from three competing religious sects and presents such texts as insightful windows into the ‘practice’ of philosophy in India from the 6th to the 12th century. He will argue that the systematic classifications of views found in these early doxographies is the product of a particular religious establishment, involving the student in a transformative dialectical study, designed to help him/her discriminate genuine truth from its numerous ersatz. He will then identify specific dialectical strategies in the different texts​ which trace back to famous sectarian founding figures and narratives. Following this line of inquiry, he will suggest that the dialectical study of competing views expressed in doxography does not amount to a mere historiographical interest in philosophical ideas, nor is it only a training for debate.

Rather, he reads these doxographies as dialectical trainings, indicative of a peculiar religious attitude to plurality. This dialectical exercise is further theorized as a ‘spiritual exercise’. Within the doxographies of the Buddhist Bhāviveka, of the Jaina Haribhadra, and of an Advaita Vedānta author identifying himself as Śaṅkara, he will explore how rhetoric and/or logic are harnessed as investigative tools to progress along the path of knowledge, and to secure the ‘ultimate view’ ( samyakdarśana ). Those who delight along this peculiar path, he calls the ‘nerds of yoga’.

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Speaker Biography

Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette is what he likes to call ‘French-Canadian’: a Québécois. However, his studies have turned him into quite a globetrotter. He obtained his PhD (2018) in Indian Philosophies from the Institute for Indology and Tibetology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, in Munich, Germany, where he was a member of the Distant Worlds: Munich Graduate School for Ancient Studies, in the division researching on 'coexistence'. He was then invited as a Fellow Researcher in Leiden, Holland, after receiving a Gonda Fellowship, following which he moved on to Ghent, in Belgium, where he was awarded a prestigious FWO Post-Doctoral Research Grant.

His current areas of research focus on early developments in Indian philosophical doxography and list-making. He is also theorizing the Indian intellectual dimensions of spiritual life, especially in the scholastic aspect of their expression. In brief, he has taken interest in what he describes as the ‘yoga of reason’, or the ‘path of knowledge’, pursued by the ‘nerds’ among yogins.