Papers by Ana Laura Funes Maderey
Symposium Diversifying Indic Philosophical Thinking , 2025
This two-part essay is a reflection on the project of diversifying Indic philosophies as proposed... more This two-part essay is a reflection on the project of diversifying Indic philosophies as proposed by Sthaneshwar Timalsina. I situate Timalsina’s project within broader conversations of comparative philosophy and cross-cultural dialogue. Specifically, I consider the perspectives of various gazes situated within different Latin American intellectual contexts (including my personal narrative on how I encountered “Indian philosophy”) to complicate the categories of “gaze from without” and “gaze from within” that Timalsina uses to distinguish between the terms “Indian Philosophies” and “Indic Philosophies”. Drawing on Latin American thought, I contrast his project with “border intellectuals”, highlighting both its transformative promise and critical challenges.
Applications of Anekantavada: Jain Pluralism, 2025
Understanding the reasons that motivate people to refuse vaccines has become urgent, especially i... more Understanding the reasons that motivate people to refuse vaccines has become urgent, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In trying to make sense of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy some studies have focused on its rationality classifying vaccine refusers either as irrational, partly irrational, or rational but misguided. In this essay, I use the method of anekāntavāda to show that these accounts leave out an important group of vaccine-hesitant individuals, one which could be considered as rational and not prima facie misguided in their beliefs about the vaccine. I focus on the rationality for refusing the vaccine that has to do specifically with beliefs about health and alternative ways of coping with disease. I will argue that without taking these beliefs seriously and the embodied aspects that generate them, public health compulsory policies will continue to be experienced as "one-sided", creating further opposition and rejection. I also show how the application of a non-one-sided perspective on this issue can create the conditions for authentic dialogue and help us find better ways to address the concerns that everyone has to keep themselves and their communities safe during emergencies such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
SOPHIA , 2024
Conceptualizing the image of a dancing Supreme Goddess in the Hindu tradition presents a philosop... more Conceptualizing the image of a dancing Supreme Goddess in the Hindu tradition presents a philosophical challenge because it demands a coherent rational reconciliation between her nature as continuously changing into multiple forms and the realm of pure, absolute, never-changing, formless being. Different strategies have been proposed in the history of philosophy in India. This paper analyzes the image of the dancing Goddess as it appears in the Devī Māhātmya and in the Tantric iconography of the Goddess Kālī. An argument is developed to show that Śākta philosophy resolves this tension through a radical non-dualist understanding of the role that a mental image (vikalpa) plays in accessing supreme reality.
Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2022
Este ensayo ofrece una lectura
filosófica sobre la noción de prāṇa, mostrando
su dimensión ética ... more Este ensayo ofrece una lectura
filosófica sobre la noción de prāṇa, mostrando
su dimensión ética en la filosofía sāṃkhya,
especialmente como aparece en el comentario
llamado Yuktidīpikā (siglo 8 d.n.e.). Se concluye
con una reflexión sobre las implicaciones que
dicha noción tiene para una ética post-pandémica.
Classical Sāṁ khya has usually been interpreted as an intellectualist school. Its presumed method... more Classical Sāṁ khya has usually been interpreted as an intellectualist school. Its presumed method for the attainment of liberation is essentially characterized by rational inquiry into reality, which involves the intellectual understanding of the distinction between two principles: the conscious and the material. Some have argued that this liberating process is not only theoretical, but that it entails yogic practice, or that it is the natural outcome of existential forces that tend toward freedom. However, recent studies in Sāṁ khya involving detailed analysis of an anonymous commentary of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā, suggest a more complex picture. The external functions of the five vital winds (prāṇas) in relation to the sources of action (karmayonis) and dispositions of being (bhāvas) seem to play an important role in the liberating path. In this paper, I review the relation between bhāvas, karmayonis, and the five prāṇas by considering the social, moral, and interpersonal aspects of the five vital winds as described in the Yuktidīpikā. It will be shown how the external functions of prāṇa are related to the moral cultivation of vitality, leading to the enactment and manifestation of dispositions of being (bhāvas) that bring about the realization of oneself as a knower in the ethical engagement with others. It is this unique way of understanding prāṇa in the Yuk-tidīpikā that makes the Sāṁ khya path for liberation something more than a theoretical cognitive method or a spontaneous and predetermined realization of one's self.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Classical Indian Emotions, edited by Maria Heim, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, and Roy Tzohar, 2021
Both Descartes and the author of the Yogavāsiṣtha support the idea that most diseases have an emo... more Both Descartes and the author of the Yogavāsiṣtha support the idea that most diseases have an emotional source and that we have certain control over it according to their respective psychosomatic theories. They both suggest that joy-as an intellectual movement of the soul (joie) for Descartes or as the blissful tranquility of the mind (ānanda) that results from emotional purification for Vasiṣtha-is necessary to heal from disease. I present both medical models and assess their claims by addressing queen Elisabeth's objection to Descartes and by reading Vasiṣṭha's metaphors of disease from the "sick woman theory" perspective proposed by Johanna Hedva. I argue that any claim to joy as therapeutic must not forget the social and interdependent aspects of our emotional lives.
Asian Philosophy, 2020
Like many other discussions regarding the nature of self-awareness in Classical Indian philosophi... more Like many other discussions regarding the nature of self-awareness in Classical Indian philosophical traditions, the commentators of Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra deployed the metaphor of light or luminosity to defend the position that consciousness is self-reflexive. In this paper I discuss the way the commentarial tradition of Classical Yoga misinterpreted Patañjali’s notion of self-reflexivity and articulate his account of self-awareness based on Vyāsa’s preferred metaphor of space (ākāśa). I also show how Patañjali´s notion of self-awareness could be understood in terms of “spaciousness” by using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Dan Zahavi’s studies on the first-person perspective.
Journal of Dharma Studies , 2020
Each action, each thought is accompanied by one’s own breathing. To breathe is always thought of ... more Each action, each thought is accompanied by one’s own breathing. To breathe is always thought of as an individual act. It is one’s own breathing that keeps us alive and it is one’s own breathing that leaves at the moment of death. Up until recently, it was uncommon to talk about breathing as a shared act, as a relational moment that is created with someone else. Yet, Luce Irigaray’s work calls for the cultivation of breathing to enable our ethical coexistence with the other, and the eighth c. commentary on the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā, relates the vital breath of samāna to the function of sharing. This paper searches for a philosophy of breath, such as the one that Irigaray calls for, that can emerge from a close reading of Indian philosophical sources. I explore the relational aspect of breathing throughout the development of the notion of prāṇa in the Upaniṣads and elucidate the meaning given to the term samāna within the classical Sāṃkhya tradition, unique in the Indian theory of the bodily winds.
Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender, 2019
In her chapter, Ana Laura Funes Maderey uses feminist theory to reconstitute the subject/object r... more In her chapter, Ana Laura Funes Maderey uses feminist theory to reconstitute the subject/object relationship in the male gaze, arguing that in Sāṃkhya philosophy, the seen is not merely an object presented for the enjoyment of the seer. Using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of "flesh" and Luce Irigaray's notion of the "maternal feminine," her analysis recovers the notion of body in Sāṃkhya philosophy and highlights the interrelation between puruṣa (consciousness) and prakṛti (materiality) as it is played out in the realm of the body.
Thinking with the Yogasūtra: Translation and Interpretation, 2018
Religions, 2017
Various Śaiva Tantric elements have been identified in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, but little has been writ... more Various Śaiva Tantric elements have been identified in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, but little has been written about the role of kuṇḍalinī rising in relation to this text’s notion of living liberation (jīvanmukti). The story of Cūḍālā and Śikhidhvaja is relevant to examine in Tantric studies not only because it includes one of the few descriptions within Sanskrit literature of a kuṇḍalinī experience as explicitly pertaining to a woman, but also because it offers key elements of comparison between experiences of enlightenment: one including kuṇḍalinī rising (Cūḍālā) and another one without it (Śikhidhvaja). This paper compares Cūḍālā’s experience of enlightenment with that of Śikhidhvaja’s in order to understand what role kuṇḍalinī rising plays in the pursuit for liberation.
Comparative Philosophy, 2017
Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies... more Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies to refute the skeptic argument that denies the real and independent existence of physical objects. This essay examines both strategies through the reconstruction of Kant's and Patañjali's twofold refutation of idealism: one based on the perceptual distinction between the real and the illusory, and the other one based on the ontological necessity of a permanent external object to understand change. I argue that the second strategy is philosophically stronger due to its phenomenological recognition of the body as a grounding point, and that this is possible only on account of an anti-realist conception of time. Both Kant and Patañjali utilize a similar line of realist argumentation while diverging in the type of realism that they each hold.
A common element in many classical Indian philosophies is the acceptance of a "yogic perception" ... more A common element in many classical Indian philosophies is the acceptance of a "yogic perception" as a direct and immediate means of knowledge. While the debate on this type of perception is relevant for the history of Indian epistemology, the purpose of this chapter is to show that there is a non-reductionist conception of embodiment and a multilayered process of self-awareness implicit in the possibility of a "yogic perception", especially as those two elements were expressed during the initial stages of orthodox Yoga philosophy up to its classical formulation in Patañjali's Yogas ū tra .
Books by Ana Laura Funes Maderey
Syllabi by Ana Laura Funes Maderey
It is common to think of breathing as an essential biological function involving gaseous exchange... more It is common to think of breathing as an essential biological function involving gaseous exchange that goes on continuously for as long as an organism is alive. However, breathing is much more than a physiological function. It has also cultural and historical associations that link it with life, individuality, energy, creativity, inspiration, and spirituality. Breathing brings matter and meaning together and seldom do we stop to think about the forms this entanglement takes, and whether they bring well-being or not to our lives. Fortunately, this is changing, and many disciplines are now bringing their attention to the multiple dimensions of breath to think about ways in which becoming more conscious of breathing can improve the quality of our lives.
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Papers by Ana Laura Funes Maderey
filosófica sobre la noción de prāṇa, mostrando
su dimensión ética en la filosofía sāṃkhya,
especialmente como aparece en el comentario
llamado Yuktidīpikā (siglo 8 d.n.e.). Se concluye
con una reflexión sobre las implicaciones que
dicha noción tiene para una ética post-pandémica.
Books by Ana Laura Funes Maderey
Syllabi by Ana Laura Funes Maderey