{"product_id":"first-words-last-words","title":"First Words, Last Words","description":"\u003cp\u003eFirst Words, Last Words charts an intense \"pamphlet war\" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea explore this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or M=im=a.ms=a, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Ved=anta, and its proponents among\n\u003cbr\u003ethe leading intellectuals and public figures of the period.  Bronner and McCrea examine the nature of theoretical innovation in scholastic traditions by focusing on a specific controversy\n\u003cbr\u003eregarding scriptural interpretation and the role of sequence-what comes first and what follows later-in determining our interpretation of a scriptural passage.  Vy=asat=irtha and his grand-pupil Vijay=indrat=irtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Ved=anta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of M=im=a.ms=a interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation\n\u003cbr\u003eof its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya D=ik.sita ostensibly defended his tradition's preference for the opening. But, as this volume shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel\n\u003cbr\u003ehermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any.  First Words, Last Words traces both the issue of sequence and the question of innovation through an in-depth study of this debate and through a comparative survey of similar problems in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revealing that the disputants in this controversy often pretended to uphold traditional views, when they were in fact radically innovative.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44156428583150,"sku":"9780197583470","price":159.72,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/9612\/7726\/files\/9780197583470.jpg?v=1706219962","url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/first-words-last-words","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}