Intellectual setting
Radhakrishnan wrote and taught during the late colonial and early independence periods, holding professorships in Mysore and Calcutta before becoming the first Indian to hold the Spalding Professorship of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, a position from which he presented Indian philosophy to a Western academic audience amid ongoing debate over the nature and value of Indian civilization under British rule. He later served as free India's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Vice President, and second President.
Key ideas
Intuition as a valid mode of knowledge
In An Idealist View of Life (1932) and elsewhere, Radhakrishnan argued that mystical, intuitive experience provides direct, integral apprehension of reality that complements rather than contradicts discursive reason and scientific knowledge, defending this epistemology against both Western empiricist skepticism and dogmatic religious literalism.
Comparative philosophy and the religion of the spirit
Radhakrishnan systematically presented classical Indian philosophical schools to Western academic audiences and argued, in works such as Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939), that the world's religious traditions converge on a shared spiritual experience beneath their doctrinal differences, a universalist position that also defended Hinduism against colonial-era missionary criticism.
Legacy
Indian Philosophy remains a standard scholarly reference work, and Radhakrishnan's comparative, universalist presentation of Vedanta strongly shaped mid-twentieth-century Western academic and popular understanding of Hinduism. His political career, culminating in the presidency of India, made him a symbol of the connection between philosophical scholarship and public life in independent India, and his birthday, September 5, is observed in India as Teachers' Day in his honor.