Mikel Burley

Last updated

Mikel Burley is a scholar of religion and philosophy, known for his work on the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Contents

Biography

Burley gained his B.A. in 1993 from the University of Essex, his M.A. from the University of Nottingham in 1997, and Ph.D.s from the University of Bristol in 2005 and the University of Leeds in 2009. He researches South Asian religions, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism, and their philosophies. [1]

Works

Burley has written over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles. [1] He has written and edited several books, of which the most often cited is Classical Samkhya and Yoga (Samkhya being the dualistic Indian philosophy behind Patanjali's Yoga Sutras ), which has been cited over 130 times, followed by his book on Hatha yoga which has been cited over 60 times. [2]

As author
As editor

Reception

Finlay Malcolm, reviewing A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion, states that the book "unifies and extends" Burley's "valuable work on diversification in philosophy of religion". Malcolm welcomes Burley's work to diversify "the questions, methods, and phenomena under investigation" in the field. All the same, Malcolm writes, the philosophy of religion is culturally located, and there was good reason for it to start by focussing on Abrahamic religions, before rightly diversifying. [3]

Lloyd Strickland, reviewing Rebirth and the Stream of Life, writes that Burley "succeeds admirably" in analysing and elucidating the subject of rebirth, giving an overview of rebirth theories and showing how they "might be intelligible" despite philosophers' objections on grounds of individual identity and memory. [4]

Simon Hewitt, welcoming Burley's edited collection Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics, notes that Wittgenstein, while "a towering figure" in the domain, has been a persona non grata , possibly because of his "meditative" and seemingly obscure style, while post-Quinean metaphysics in the United States has been opposed to him. [5]

Related Research Articles

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes studies of the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, consciousness, space and time, necessity, actuality, and possibility. It can also include questions about the existence of God, as well as relationships between foundational philosophical ideas such as between mind and matter, cause and effect, substance and attribute, or potentiality and actuality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yoga</span> Spiritual practices from ancient India

Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India and aim to control (yoke) and still the mind, recognizing a detached witness-consciousness untouched by the mind (Chitta) and mundane suffering (Duḥkha). There is a wide variety of schools of yoga, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and traditional and modern yoga is practiced worldwide.

Moksha, also called vimoksha, vimukti, and mukti, is a term in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism for various forms of emancipation, liberation, nirvana, or release. In its soteriological and eschatological senses, it refers to freedom from saṃsāra, the cycle of death and rebirth. In its epistemological and psychological senses, moksha is freedom from ignorance: self-realization, self-actualization and self-knowledge.

Hindu philosophy or Vedic philosophy is the set of Indian philosophical systems that developed in tandem with the religion of Hinduism during the iron and classical ages of India. In Indian tradition, the word used for philosophy is Darshana, from the Sanskrit root drish.

Samkhya or Sankhya is a dualistic orthodox school of Hindu philosophy. It views reality as composed of two independent principles, Puruṣa and Prakṛti.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indian philosophy</span>

Indian philosophy consists of philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. A traditional Hindu classification divides āstika and nāstika schools of philosophy, depending on one of three alternate criteria: whether it believes the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge; whether the school believes in the premises of Brahman and Atman; and whether the school believes in afterlife and Devas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hatha yoga</span> Branch of yoga focusing on physical techniques

Hatha yoga is a branch of yoga that uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel vital force or energy. The Sanskrit word हठ haṭha literally means "force", alluding to a system of physical techniques. Some hatha yoga style techniques can be traced back at least to the 1st-century CE, in texts such as the Hindu Sanskrit epics and Buddhism's Pali canon. The oldest dated text so far found to describe hatha yoga, the 11th-century Amṛtasiddhi, comes from a tantric Buddhist milieu. The oldest texts to use the terminology of hatha are also Vajrayana Buddhist. Hindu hatha yoga texts appear from the 11th century onward.

Rajas is one of the three guṇas, a philosophical and psychological concept developed by the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy. The other two qualities are sattva and tamas. Rajas is innate tendency or quality that drives motion, energy and activity.

The Niyamas are positive duties or observances. In Dharma, particularly Yoga, niyamas and their complement, Yamas, are recommended activities and habits for healthy living, spiritual enlightenment, and a liberated state of existence. It has multiple meanings depending on context in Hinduism. In Buddhism, the term extends to the determinations of nature, as in the Buddhist niyama dhammas.

<i>Yoga Sutras of Patanjali</i> Early Yoga text in Sanskrit from ancient India by Patanjali

The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali is a collection of Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga – 195 sutras and 196 sutras. The Yoga Sutras was compiled in the early centuries CE, by the sage Patanjali in India who synthesized and organized knowledge about yoga from much older traditions.

In Sanskrit texts, Rāja yoga was both the goal of yoga and a method to attain it. The term also became a modern name for the practice of yoga in the 19th-century when Swami Vivekananda gave his interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in his book Raja Yoga. Since then, Rāja yoga has variously been called aṣṭāṅga yoga, royal yoga, royal union, sahaja marg, and classical yoga.

Vijñānabhikṣu was a Hindu philosopher from Bihar, variously dated to the 15th or 16th century, known for his commentary on various schools of Hindu philosophy, particularly the Yoga text of Patanjali. His scholarship stated that there is a unity between Vedānta, Yoga, and Samkhya philosophies, and he is considered a significant influence on Neo-Vedanta movement of the modern era.

Sattva is one of the three guṇas or "modes of existence", a philosophical and psychological concept understood by the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy. The other two qualities are rajas and tamas. Sattva is the quality of goodness, purity, positivity, truth, serenity, balance, peacefulness, and virtuousness that is drawn towards Dharma and jñāna (knowledge).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rush Rhees</span> American philosopher (1905–1989)

Rush Rhees was an American philosopher. He is principally known as a student, friend, and literary executor of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. With G. E. M. Anscombe he was co-editor of Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), and, with Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, he co-edited Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). He was solely responsible for the editing of Philosophical Grammar (1974) and Philosophical Remarks (1975). Rhees taught philosophy at Swansea University from 1940 until 1966, when he took early retirement to devote more time to editing Wittgenstein's works.

<i>Nadabindu Upanishad</i> Sanskrit text, Yoga Upanishad

The Nadabindu Upanishad is an ancient Sanskrit text and one of the minor Upanishads of Hinduism. It is one of twenty Yoga Upanishads in the four Vedas. It also known as Amrita Nada Bindu Upanishad.(Sanskrit: अमृतनादबिन्दु उपनिषद)

Karl Harrington Potter was an American-born writer, academic, and Indologist, from the University of Washington. He studied at the University of California, as well as Harvard University and is known for his writings on Indian philosophy.

Yoga philosophy is one of the six major orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, though it is only at the end of the first millennium CE that Yoga is mentioned as a separate school of thought in Indian texts, distinct from Samkhya. Ancient, medieval and most modern literature often refers to Yoga-philosophy simply as Yoga. A systematic collection of ideas of Yoga is found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a key text of Yoga which has influenced all other schools of Indian philosophy.

Modern yoga is a wide range of yoga practices with differing purposes, encompassing in its various forms yoga philosophy derived from the Vedas, physical postures derived from Hatha yoga, devotional and tantra-based practices, and Hindu nation-building approaches.

Mark Singleton is a scholar and practitioner of yoga. He studied yoga intensively in India, and became a qualified yoga teacher, until returning to England to study divinity and research the origins of modern postural yoga. His doctoral dissertation, which argued that posture-based forms of yoga represent a radical break from haṭha yoga tradition, with different goals, and an unprecedented emphasis on āsanas, was later published in book form as the widely-read Yoga Body.

References

  1. 1 2 "Dr Mikel Burley". University of Leeds. Retrieved 12 August 2022. Also CV on Academia.
  2. "Mikel Burley". Google Scholar. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  3. Malcolm, Finlay (2022). "A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion, Mikel Burley [Review]". Religious Studies. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  4. Strickland, Lloyd (2018). "Review of "Rebirth and the Stream of Life" by Mikel Burley" (PDF). Numen. 65 (5–6): 617–619. doi:10.1163/15685276-12341521.
  5. Hewitt, Simon (2020). "Book reviews: Mikel Burley (ed.) Wittgenstein, Religion, and Ethics" . Religious Studies. 56 (2): 297–302. doi:10.1017/S0034412519000180. S2CID   171645851.