In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India. He turns to a rich and varied collection of primary sources: the Rg Veda, the Upanishads, and texts by the Buddhist philosophers Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, among others. In studying the West, Biderman considers the Bible and its commentaries, the writings of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Derrida, and the literature of Kafka, Melville, and Orwell. Additional sources are Mozart's Don Giovanni and seminal films like Ingmar...

At the end of the millennium, the dominant philosophical mood is relativistic. Ideals, opinions, and values are rarely judged in absolute or universal terms. Instead, subjective views are juxtaposed and assessed in relation to one another and none is accepted finally in and for itself but characterized in relation to its whole environment.
In this collection of essays, philosophers of widely divergent views and emphases try to assess the tension between relativism and absolutism in the general domains of philosophy and religion. In the closing section of the book, an extensive article...