Research Focus Group Talk: Reason/Rationality Versus Wisdom/Mysticism in Jainism and Indian Thought

On November 14, as part of the inaugural celebration of the Bhagvan Vimalnath Endowed Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions at UC Santa Barbara, we will welcome our new colleague, Anil Mundra, as the inaugural holder of the Endowed Chair. The celebration will feature a lecture by distinguished Visiting Professor Jayendra Soni at 4:00 pm and will be followed by a reception.

Jayandra Soni retired in May 2012 from the Department of Indology and Tibetology at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he taught Indian languages (Sanskrit, Hindi, and Gujarati) and Indian philosophy from 1991 to 2012. He received his PhD from Banaras Hindu University in India and his second PhD from McMaster University in Canada. He now lives in Innsbruck, Austria, where he teaches at the University of Innsbruck.

Anil Mundra serves as the inaugural holder of the Bhagvan Vimalnath Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He obtained his PhD in the Philosophy of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on how South Asian philosophers navigate religious diversity, especially in Sanskrit texts on the classical Jain theory of non-one-sidedness (anekānta-vāda).

Cosponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group and the Department of Religious Studies