Consciousness and Śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism: A philosophical reconstruction of Jīva’s Bhedābheda Vedānta
Religious Studies May 14, 2026 Ricardo Sousa Silvestre
Jīva Gosvāmī's sixteenth-century Bhedābheda Vedānta can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, termed śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism. This metaphysical reconstruction uses contemporary philosophy of mind vocabulary to articulate key aspects of Jīva's thought. The paper examines implications for the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, reframed as the individuation problem, and addresses objections including a cosmopsychist formulation of the Vedāntic problem of imperfection.