INDIAN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA IN GERMANY. By OwenWare. New York and London: Routledge. 2024. Pp. xx + 178. Hardback, $190.00; Paperback, $54.99; E‐Book, open‐access.

Ware, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, presents a meticulous and compelling study of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century encounters between German post-Kantian thought and classical Indian philosophy. His purpose is to demonstrate how Yoga philosophies—particularly as mediated through the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads—became more entangled with post-Kantian legacies than any other intellectual current of the era, while also exploring how early twentieth-century Indian philosophers responded to, and often refuted, European misreadings. The first half reconstructs the German reception history, situating Schlegel, Humboldt, Schelling, Hegel, and others within the twin debates over pantheism and nihilism. Schlegel’s early Romantic fascination with India gave way to a view of it as an example of revelation’s corruption, yielding “self-annihilation” and blurred distinctions between creator and creation. Humboldt and Schelling offered more sympathetic readings, seeing pantheism as compatible with freedom and individuality, while Hegel critiqued both its metaphysics and social implications, such as caste. Ware enriches this narrative with figures like Günderrode, who engaged Indian thought outside institutional norms. The second half turns to Bengali philosophers Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharya, highlighting their rejection of European charges of nihilism. Radhakrishnan, for instance, insisted that the Yogasūtra forms a discipline where the true philosopher is a “physician for the soul,” while Bhattacharya underscored its vision of “absolute freedom” and warned against treating it as a mere historical curiosity. Ware’s strengths lie in his erudite synthesis of intellectual history, close textual readings, and ability to interlace European and Indian voices into a coherent dialogue. His framing of Romantic engagements with Indian pantheism as part of a search for a “new religion” is particularly insightful. However, the book’s two halves are somewhat asymmetrical: the second part largely leaves behind the pantheism–nihilism framework, and the title underplays its substantial focus on modern Indian thinkers. Moreover, some intercultural connections in the latter chapters remain more suggestive than demonstrated. Still, the study makes a notable contribution to globalizing philosophical historiography and to repositioning Yoga philosophy within it. This volume will appeal especially to scholars and advanced students of intellectual history, comparative philosophy, and cross-cultural religious studies, as well as informed readers interested in how philosophical traditions reinterpret one another across time and cultures.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.