This chapter will illustrate the triple weave of epistemology, metaphysics, and soteriology in Advaita Vedanta, focusing on that advanced by the master exponent of Advaita, Shankara (c. 800 CE). Drawing from the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Alston, the paper will show that Shankara’s soteriological and metaphysical reflection is supported by internalist and externalist epistemologies, with the most important being internalist, owing to Shankara’s metaphysical presuppositions. These epistemological heuristics are deployed to gain insight into Shankara’s religious epistemology and then to stimulate an extended discussion of – and argument for – the epistemic merit of religious testimony and religious experience. Successfully doing all this will illuminate the epistemic value of those two mechanisms but also illustrate the triple weave of philosophical reflection in India, a single intellectual rope, as it were, now constituted by the strands of metaphysics, epistemology, and soteriology. While the focus of the chapter is Shankara’s thought, it will point to other Indian thinkers and systems that similarly – and, arguably, invariably – employ this threefold strand of reasoned reflection to establish and advance their own fundamental philosophical positions.

The common-sense tradition holds that among the things we know are various facts about the external world and some epistemic facts – for example, that we know there are other people, that people know their names, and that we know that they know their names. This chapter makes two claims. First, that the common-sense tradition should include among the things known various common-sense moral claims as well as various particular moral claims that are no less evident. Second, that these moral claims are more reasonable to believe than any philosophical view that implies either that they are false or that we do not know them. In short, it suggests that the common-sense philosopher should treat some moral claims as having the same weight as some epistemic claims and claims about the external world. The last three sections consider some philosophical objections to this view. These include the objections that no evaluative claims are true or false, that we cannot know particular moral claims without knowing some general moral criterion, and that the appeal to our moral intuitions is illegitimate in philosophical inquiry.