Ježić Mislav: Hellada i Indija

Mislav Ježić: Hellada and India

Comparative Philosophical Discussions

The new book by academician Mislav Ježić "Hellada and India" is a collection of scientific discussions in which this prominent Indologist engages in comparative philosophical research, establishing parallels between Indian, Greek and Chinese mythic lore, which he reads as riddles that reveal the hidden divine order in the world.
"In our cultural climate there is no shortage of excellent philologists, Indologists, philosophers, linguists, culturologists and theorists of literature, but hardly anyone is all of these at the same time," said Hrvoje Jurić. "The book is unique, as is the author Mislav Ježić, a diligent and dedicated archaeologist of knowledge and culture," he said.

Mislav Ježić (1952) is a professor at the Department of Indology and Far Eastern Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb and a regular member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU). So far, he has published three authored books, and over 120 scientific and professional articles in the fields of Indology, philosophy, linguistics and Croatian studies in the country and abroad.
His main contributions are research on the genesis of the Vedic pantheon and parts of the Vedic corpus, historical-philological analysis of layers of Upanishadic texts, and sources and comparisons in ancient Indian and Hellenic philosophy. He is the recipient of several prominent awards and recognitions, including the Order of Danica Hrvatska with the figure of Ruđer Bošković for services to science.

Subtitled "Comparative Philosophical Discussions", Ježić's book "Hellada and India" divides the included works into three groups connected by a comparative philosophical approach.
The first and largest group includes five works that deal with comparisons between Hellenic and Indian philosophy: on myth, epic and philosophy; on the oldest testimonies of ontology in India and Hellada and on their kinship; about the ancient cosmological model of the universe as a living and intelligent being; on the metaphorical use of the images of dots and chariots in psychological and meditative terminology; and on the ethics of the categorical imperative in the Buddhist and Brahmanist traditions and in the West.
The second group contains two papers that deal with representatives of some less studied philosophical orientations in Croatia, phenomenological and existentialist, focused on world philosophy - Pavlo Vuk-Pavlović and Čedomil Veljačić, or political-ethical orientations, focused on European culture - Stjepan Radić and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi.
The third group contains two discussions that deal with some general comparative philosophical topics, one on the relationship between philosophical thought and language - on the examples of Greek, Latin, German, English and Croatian, and the other on the relationship between different cultural circles - Hellenic, Indian, Chinese and European, modern and contemporary, and the scientific paradigms that developed in them and created appropriate ideas of education and personal development. man.
Explaining how he began to establish parallels between Indian, Greek and Chinese mythical traditions, Ježić said that while studying Vedic poetry, he realized that nothing should be read as narratives but as riddles that are uttered to hide the divine order in the world.