Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975 ce ), a distinguished expositor and interpreter of Indian culture, was born in South India. From his childhood on he was nourished by India's Vedic tradition, which instilled in him unwavering faith in the reality of an unseen world behind the flux of phenomena, a world we apprehend not with the senses but with the mind. His academic record was outstanding, and in 1909 he started his teaching career by joining the department of philosophy in the Madras Presidency College. In 1918 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Mysore University. Three years later he moved to Calcutta University to become the George V Professor of Philosophy. It was as the holder of this most important philosophy chair in India that his fame began to spread far and wide. He was invited to write on Indian philosophy for Muirhead's “Library of Philosophy,” and a little later to contribute to the section on Indian Philosophy in the fourteenth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. He was also invited by Manchester College in 1926 to deliver the Upton Lectures on The Hindu View of Life. In 1936 he became Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford University, a position he held until 1952. As Spalding Professor, and also in his lectures and addresses at various centers of learning abroad, he became an interpreter of the East to the West. Eventually there ... log in or subscribe to read full text