Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice brings together the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture. Its aim is not only to showcase the range of pioneering work that is currently being done in these areas, but also to provide a model for closer interaction amongst the disciplines constituting this burgeoning field of study. Furthermore, the book provides the rare opportunity to bridge the gap on an institutional level by bringing the academic and curatorial spheres into dialogue. Contributors include: Charles Burnett, Jean-Charles Coulon, Maryam Ekhtiar, Noah Gardiner, Christiane Gruber, Bink Hallum, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Michael Noble, Rachel Parikh, Liana Saif, Maria Subtelny, Farouk Yahya, and Travis Zadeh.

Understanding Chinese philosophy requires knowledge of the referential framework prevailing in Chinese intellectual traditions. But Chinese philosophical texts are frequently approached through the lens of Western paradigms. Analysing the most common misconceptions surrounding Western Sinology, Jana Rosker alerts us to unseen dangers and introduces us to a new more effective way of reading Chinese philosophy. Acknowledging that different cultures produce different reference points, Rosker explains what happens when we use rational analysis, a major feature of the European intellectual tradition, to read Chinese philosophy. We rely on impossible comparisons, arrive at prejudiced assumptions and fail to arrive at the truth, the consequence of applying a different methodology to the process of perceiving, understanding and interpreting reality. Instead of transferring concepts and categories from Western sinology onto socio-cultural Chinese contexts, Rosker constructs a new methodology of reading, understanding and interpreting Chinese philosophy. She opens our eyes to the basic problems of Western paradigms, encourages intercultural approaches and allows us to master a more autochthonous understanding of Chinese philosophy.

A major figure in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Ernest Sosa is a pioneer of contemporary virtue epistemology. Engaging with his important work for the first time, a team of renowned scholars of Chinese philosophy bring Western analytic epistemology into dialogue with themes and issues in the history of the Chinese tradition in order to reveal multiple points of connection. Drawing on thinkers and texts from Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism, chapters explore issues central to virtue epistemology, such as the reliabilist and responsibilist divide, the distinction between virtues constitutive of knowledge and virtues auxiliary to knowledge, epistemic competence, and the role of testimony. Including Sosa’s constructive and systematic responses to each scholar’s interpretation of his work, this volume demonstrates the value of cross-cultural dialogue, advancing the field of virtue epistemology, and paving the way for further engagement between philosophical traditions.

The Holy Science is a book of theology written by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri in 1894. The text provides a close comparison of parts of the Christian Bible to the Hindu Upanishads, meant "to show as clearly as possible that there is an essential unity in all religions...and that there is but one Goal admitted by all scriptures."

Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri was born Priya Nath Karar in 1855 to a wealthy family. As a young man, he was a brilliant student of math and science, astrology and astronomy. He joined a Christian missionary school where he studied the Bible and later spent two years in medical school.

After completing his formal education, Priya Nath married and had a daughter. But he continued his intellectual and spiritual pursuits, depending on the income from his property to support himself and his family.

After the death of his wife, he entered the monastic Swami order and became Sri Yuktesvar Giri, before becoming a disciple of famed guru Lahiri Mahasaya, known for his revitalization of Kriya Yoga. Then in 1894, Sri Yuktesvar Giri met Mahavatar Babaji, an ageless wise man who is said to have lived for untold hundreds of years. At this meeting, Mahavatar Babaji gave Sri Yuktesvar the title of Swami, and asked him to write this book comparing Hindu scriptures and the Christian Bible. Swami Sri Yuktesvar obeyed.

He also founded two ashrams, including one in his ancestral home. He lived simply as a swami and yogi, devoted to disciplining his body and mind, and thus to liberating his soul. Among his disciples was Paramahansa Yogananda, credited with bringing yoga and meditation to millions of Westerners.

The Holy Science consists of four chapters. The first is titled "The Gospel," and is intended to "establish the fundamental truth of creation." Next is "The Goal," which discusses the three things all creatures are seeking: "Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss."

Chapter three, "The Procedure," is the most practical of the sections. It describes the natural way to live for purity and health of body and mind. The final chapter is called "The Revelation," and discusses the end of the path for those who are near the "three ideals of life."

Swami Sri Yukteswar also displays his impressive knowledge and understanding of astrology by proposing his theory of the Yuga Cycle.

Each yuga is an age of the world that tracks the movement of the sun, Earth, and planets. Each age represents a different state of humanity. There are four yugas:

- Satya Yuga is the highest and most enlightened age of truth and perfection.

- Treta Yuga is the age of thought and is more spiritually advanced than Dwapara Yuga and Kali Yuga.

- Dwapara Yuga is an energetic age, although not a wise one. During this yuga, people are often self-serving and greedy. The age is marked by war and disease.

- Kali Yuga is the age of darkness, ignorance, and materialism. This is the least evolved age.

Today, The Holy Science is highly respected among those seeking to understand the relationships between world religions and cultures. While some still believe that we are in Kali Yuga, many others believe that Swami Sri Yukteswar was accurate, and that his calculations correct previous errors that artificially inflated the length of the Yuga Cycle.

Informed by Gloria Anzaldua's and Jose Carlos Mariategui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeing aesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of Maria Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways.

Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness brings Buddhist voices to the study of consciousness. This book explores a variety of different Buddhist approaches to consciousness that developed out of the Buddhist theory of non-self. Topics taken up in these investigations include: how we are able to cognize our own cognitions; whether all conscious states involve conceptualization; whether distinct forms of cognition can operate simultaneously in a single mental stream; whether non-existent entities can serve as intentional objects; and does consciousness have an intrinsic nature, or can it only be characterized functionally? These questions have all featured in recent debates in consciousness studies. The answers that Buddhist philosophers developed to such questions are worth examining just because they may represent novel approaches to questions about consciousness.

The Zhou Changes, better known in the West as I Ching, is one of the masterpieces of world literature. This book, the climax of more than forty years of research in Chinese archaeology, explores the text's origins in the oracle-bone and milfoil divinations of Bronze Age China and how it transformed over the course of the Zhou dynasty into the first of the Chinese classics. The book provides an in-depth survey of the theory and practice of divination to demonstrate how the hexagram and line statements of the text were produced and how they were understood at the time.