I would like to thank especially the following persons who have – both through their writings and through conversation or correspondence over the years – significantly shaped the way I think about Indian philosophy: in alphabetical order, they are Arindam Chakrabarti, Eli Franco, Jonardon Ganeri, Jay Garfield, Jitendra Mohanty, Stephen Phillips, Karl Potter, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Jay Shaw, Mark Siderits, John Taber, and Tom Tillemans. Naturally, it should not be inferred that any of them would agree with all of what I have written here.

A very special debt of gratitude is also due to Hilary Gaskin, my editor at Cambridge University Press, who commissioned this book and continued to believe in it – patiently combining the right mix of editorial acumen, encouragement and reproof – over the inordinately lengthy time I took to deliver the final manuscript. Without her efforts this book would certainly not have come into being. Many thanks!

Two other persons’ efforts were also essential in transforming the submitted manuscript into the final book: those of the anonymous clearance reader for Cambridge University Press, who offered a number of valuable suggestions for improvement, and of Rosemary Crawley, Assistant Editor, who skilfully shepherded me through the production process.

In writing this book I have made use of some of my own previously published articles (in varying degrees of revision). Thus the Introduction and Chapter 2 incorporate material from my ‘Truth, Relativism and Western Conceptions of Indian Philosophy’, Asian Philosophy 8, 1998. Chapter 1 includes material from my article ‘Hindu Ethics’ in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Blackwell, 2013). Chapter 3 includes material originally published in ‘The Problem of Induction in Indian Philosophy’, Philosophy East and West 34, 1984. Chapter 4 reuses some material from my ‘Musical Unity and Sentential Unity’, British Journal of Aesthetics 39, 1999. Chapter 5 includes material from ‘The Momentariness of Simples’, Philosophy 79, 2004, and ‘Causation, Indian Theories of’ in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge, 1998). Chapter 6 draws on ‘Computationality, Mind and Value: The Case of Sāṃkhya-Yoga’, Asian Philosophy 11, 2001, and ‘Personal Identity, Minimalism, and Madhyamaka’, Philosophy East and West 52, 2002. I am grateful to the editors and publishers involved for permission to reprint these materials here. Finally, the book's epigraph is reprinted (with the permission of Wiley) from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Blackwell, 1980).