Jessica Frazier is Lecturer in Theology and Religion at Trinity College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies. [1] [2] Her work explores key philosophical themes across cultures, from Indian concepts of Being to 20th century phenomenology. She is particularly interested in questions about ontology, value, selfhood and human flourishing. Frazier is the founding editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies and a frequent contributor to BBC radio.
Academic Interests
The Unity of Being
Indian philosophy contains a large array of arguments for the unity of all existence. Frazier's work explores the overall vision of reality they express, the forms the arguments take, and the different kinds of unity they imply. These arguments built up from sources in the Upanisads and Samkhya philosophy, through the arguments of Indian scholastic philosopher. Some build on (what 2000 years later became known in the West as) 'Bradley's Regress', effectively showing that all reality is at base unified by a single medium that allows things to connect. Others develop an alternative to the Cosmological Argument in Abrahamic theism, using modal explanation rather than causal sequence to argue that there must be a unified foundation of reality. Still others point to the way that the causality of the world seems to be essentially entangled in the diverse powers, particularly in cases of emergence. Idealist versions look at the unity of experience and the way ideas themselves are entangled. Some of these arguments are novel and others are found in some version among Western thinkers like Spinoza. A number of Frazier's recent articles and an upcoming book explore this philosophical worldview.
Global Philosophy
Having helped to build the undergraduate teaching of Indian philosophy at Oxford, Frazier explores ideas in Indic cultures that have philosophical value as useful contributions to contemporary debates. She has described 'global' or 'comparative' philosophy as something that helps us develop a 'view from above' of the ways that ideas can be rationally and meaningfully unpacked. This leads us to understand the ideas better, to see alternative possible views, and to assess their respective virtues - ultimately leading to progress in philosophy itself. She holds that philosophical insights should not be limited within specific cultural traditions, arguing that if we can discuss matters in the shared world we live in with people from other cultures, resolving practical problems, the same should go for philosophical and existential problems as well.
Phenomenology and Being
Having spent many years studying post-Heideggerian approaches to Being, Frazier also explores the culmination of certain strands of phenomenology in Hans Georg-Gadamer's 'hermeneutic ontology' which builds on the idea that Being which can be understood is language. She argues that Gadamer weaves insights from the late Plato and Hegel into his Heideggerian roots, and creates a distinctive picture of Being as pure form. This picture is meant to continue the project of appreciating and participating in existence, whilst avoiding the reifying and objectifying tendencies of which Nietzsche warned. She also explores the ways that Gadamer's later essays bring out the implications of this view for ethics, arts, globalism, and socio-political theory.
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method.
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real". Because there are different types of idealism, it is difficult to define the term uniformly.
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". Philosophical discussions on such topics date from ancient times, and appear in the earliest known texts concerning philosophy. The field involves many other branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. As necessary, hermeneutics may include the art of understanding and communication.
The Upanishads are late Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit texts that "document the transition from the archaic ritualism of the Veda into new religious ideas and institutions" and the emergence of the central religious concepts of Hinduism. They are the most recent addition to the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, and deal with meditation, philosophy, consciousness, and ontological knowledge. Earlier parts of the Vedas dealt with mantras, benedictions, rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices.
Eastern philosophy includes the various philosophies that originated in East and South Asia, including Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Korean philosophy, and Vietnamese philosophy; which are dominant in East Asia, and Indian philosophy, which are dominant in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia.
Indian philosophy consists of philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. The philosophies are often called darśana meaning, "to see" or "looking at." Ānvīkṣikī means “critical inquiry” or “investigation." Unlike darśana, ānvīkṣikī was used to refer to Indian philosophies by classical Indian philosophers, such as Chanakya in the Arthaśāstra.
Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.
Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by being critical and generally systematic and by its reliance on rational argument. It involves logical analysis of language and clarification of the meaning of words and concepts.
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Feminist philosophy is an approach to philosophy from a feminist perspective and also the employment of philosophical methods to feminist topics and questions. Feminist philosophy involves both reinterpreting philosophical texts and methods in order to supplement the feminist movement and attempts to criticise or re-evaluate the ideas of traditional philosophy from within a feminist framework.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy.
In Hinduism, Brahman connotes the highest universal principle, the Ultimate Reality of the universe. In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the non-physical, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists. It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth, consciousness and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes. Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists.
In the philosophy of religion, an ontological argument is a deductive philosophical argument, made from an ontological basis, that is advanced in support of the existence of God. Such arguments tend to refer to the state of being or existing. More specifically, ontological arguments are commonly conceived a priori in regard to the organization of the universe, whereby, if such organizational structure is true, God must exist.
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. This is in contrast to post-Kantian philosophy's tendency to refuse "speak[ing] of the world without humans or humans without the world". Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.
Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.
Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism share significant similarities. Those similarities have attracted Indian and Western scholars attention, and have also been criticised by concurring schools. The similarities have been interpreted as Buddhist influences on Advaita Vedanta, though some deny such influences, or see them as expressions of the same eternal truth.