Obituary: Jitendranath Mohanty (1928–2023) – Specialist in Navya-Nyāya, Husserl and Frege

Jitendranath Mohanty, one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time, chose the hard path of thinking without closure as his life’s mission, profession, source of enjoyment and liberation. Like a master draftsman, he has left for posterity several blueprints for making bridges across seemingly unbridgeable standpoints, say, between tradition and modernity, East and West, theory and practice, realism and idealism, historicism and anti-historicism, Anglo-American analytical philosophy and continental philosophy, the secular and the sacred, and so on. No wonder, Anthony Quinton once quipped that he had constructed a definite description which Mohanty alone satisfied in the wide world and that is, ‘The one and only one x who is a specialist in Navya-Nyāya, Husserl and Frege’. An account of Mohanty’s philosophical pursuits provides us with ample insights regarding how to do philosophy in the twenty-first century.