Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan 1888 – 1975

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian philosopher and statesman, the second President of independent India and one of the foremost twentieth-century interpreters of Indian philosophy to the West. He held chairs at Calcutta and at Oxford, where he was Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. His Indian Philosophy in two volumes and An Idealist View of Life articulated a modern restatement of Advaita Vedanta and a philosophical anthropology rooted in spiritual experience. His birthday is celebrated in India as Teachers' Day.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born in 1888 at Tirutani in the Madras Presidency, into a Telugu Brahmin family of modest means. He took his master's degree at Madras Christian College with a thesis defending the ethics of Vedanta against Christian missionary criticism, and he taught philosophy at Madras Presidency College, the Mysore University, and from 1921 at Calcutta. From 1936 to 1952 he was the first holder of the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, occupying it on a part-time basis.

His major works include Indian Philosophy (two volumes, 1923-1927), An Idealist View of Life (1932), Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939), the Hindu View of Life, and the magisterial editions and translations of the principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra, and the Bhagavad Gita. After Indian independence he held a series of high public offices: ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1949, first Vice-President of India from 1952, and second President of India from 1962 to 1967.

Radhakrishnan's lifelong project was the philosophical presentation of Vedanta as a perennial spiritual idealism compatible with the modern scientific world picture and as the basis of a global ethics. His birthday, 5 September, is observed in India as Teachers' Day. He retired to Madras after his presidency and died there in 1975.