Concepts of Time in Indian Philosophy and Their Relation to the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

This article is an overview of the main ideas about the category of time in the In­dian philosophy. It emphasizes the peculiarities of classical Indian philosophy, analyzes the way of thinking and building time concepts in Indian philosophical schools, and gives their various interpretations of the time concept. The author traces the evolution of the latter from the early Upanishads to the established philosophical schools up to the Middle Ages. Time as a philosophical category appears only in the late Upanishads and then develops as an abstract category, depending on the understanding of which two opposite directions are formed: substantialism and anti-substantialism. The article shows how these directions are implemented in various schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as which sources confirm this. The author touches upon the reception of Indian ideas about time in Western European philosophy and concludes that there is a need for interchange between various cultural and philosophical traditions to form a more complete picture of the essence of time. She analyzes the variety of approaches of Russian and Western philosophers and physicists to the prob­lem of including the Indian philosophical heritage in modern temporal discourse and argues for the need to expand this discourse through mutual reinforcement of independent traditions of thought