Monthly Archives: November 2022

Posted on

Growing ambitions: Philosophy of ritual/deontics and philosophy of religion

What I today call philosophy of ritual comprises a complex set of philosophical approaches seeking to solve questions and problems arising in connection with ritual. Different philosophers of ritual aim at reconstructing rituals in a highly structured, rigorous manner, curbing religious metaphors to the strict discipline of their linguistic analysis. As a result, they examine religious texts according to exegetical rules to extract all meaning and intelligibility from them. Another set of philosophical questions connected with rituals concerns duty. How are duties conveyed? How can one avoid contradictions within texts prescribing duties? I started using deontic logic, as initially developed by G.H. von Wright, to formalise contrary-to-duty situations and think about commands, especially thanks to the collaboration with the amazing Agata Ciabattoni and her brave team at the Theory and Logic Group of the TU in Vienna. Ciabattoni had not heard of logic apart from the Euro-American mathematical logic. Before meeting her, I had not heard, let alone worked on intuitionistic logic nor on fuzzy logic. By joining forces, we could explore new formalisations to make sense of seemingly puzzling texts (see mimamsa.logic.at).

Working with people outside one’s comfort zone is demanding, since one cannot assume any shared research background and needs to explain each element of one’s research. However, exactly this deconstructive operation means that one needs to rethink each step analytically, often being able to identify for the first time problems and resources one had overlooked.

For instance, our ongoing work on permissions in ritual is going to highlight the advantages of the Mīmāṃsā approach in denying the interdefinability of the operators of permission, prescription and prohibition and thus avoiding the ambiguity of the former (which in common linguistic use as well as in much Euro-American deontic logic can mean “permitted, but discouraged”, “permitted and encouraged” as well as “permitted and neutral” and in Euro-American deontic logic even “permitted and prescribed”). By contrast, permissions in Mīmāṃsā are always “rather-not” permissions, whereas what is encouraged though not prescribed is rather covered by different operators.

Within the next weeks, I plan to put the finishing touches and submit to a publisher a first book dedicated to deontics and philosophy of ritual not in the Euro-American or Chinese worlds. The book, entitled Maṇḍana on Commands, aims at providing both scholars of philosophy and of deontics in general a comprehensive access to the thought and work of a key (but unacknowledged) deontic thinker and his attempt to reduce commands to statements about the instrumental value of actions against the background of its philosophical alternatives. I plan to continue working on deontics and philosophy of ritual with an intercultural perspective and with cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Within Philosophy of Religion, I aim primarily at using an intercultural perspective to rethink the categories of “god” and the connected category ofatheism”. Scholars who have not thought critically about the topic, might think that there is only one concept of “god” that is discussed within philosophy, and that this is the omnipotent and omniscient Lord of rational theology, whose existence is necessary and independent of anything They created. But this is not the case in European philosophy (especially in the parts of it which have been more influenced by Jewish philosophy) and it is certainly not so outside of European philosophy. For instance, Tamil and Bengali philosophers of religion will think about and worship a personal and relational God, one for whom existence is not intrinsically necessary, but dependent on His (Her) relation to His (Her) devotees. Similarly, looking at Buddhist authors allows one to see how atheism can be constructed in a religious context, namely as the negation of one (or multiple) concept(s) ofgod”, typically focusing on the negation of mythological deities and the contradictions they entail. I plan to submit a project on new ways to conceptualise atheism from an intercultural perspective and to continue working on the concept of a relational God, deriving my inspiration especially from Medieval Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta theologians like Veṅkaṭanātha.

Posted on

Growing ambitions…

More than a decade ago, I wrote that I aspired at “making Indian philosophy part of mainstream philosophy”. I still do, but with more far-reaching goals and an evolved methodology. Let me explain: In the past, I focused on recognized areas of philosophy to which Sanskrit philosophy has contributed in a significant manner. Philosophy of language, one of the main realms of philosophy in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, comes to mind, as does epistemology of testimony. I aimed at showing how both fields would benefit from philosophical contributions coming from outside the Euro-American worlds by expanding philosophers’ understanding and interpretations.

Today, however, my scholarly ambitions go further. Rather than simply broaden extant concepts, I work to help readers rethink the core of what makes “philosophy” by looking at what different traditions consider “philosophical”. For instance, ritual is not generally considered worthy of philosophical investigation, even during a time in which philosophy constantly expands to, e.g. “philosophy of biology” and “philosophy of sex”. However, many Sanskrit, Jewish and Chinese authors have spent thousands of years and of pages to think about rituals as complex systems requiring internal consistency and principled justification.
Accordingly, I strive to convince philosophers and readers of the philosophical value of speculations on ritual and on duty as found in the Mīmāṃsā school of Sanskrit philosophy, in the Talmud hermeneutics or around the concept of li in Confucian philosophy, and to therefore establish “philosophy of ritual”. Similarly, within philosophy of religion, I see my work on various sources as contributing especially to the rethinking of central categories that are taken for granted by the field, such as that of the notion of God as an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being and the notion of “atheism” as equivalent to non-religiosity.

Methodologically speaking, I work on primary texts, predominantly in Sanskrit, but also in Maṇipravāḷam, Tamil and Tibetan, and I believe in looking at their history as key to a philosophical engagement with such texts. Without their historical context, texts risk being misunderstood and “domesticated” into something their readers consider more plausible because they are familiar with it. Examining their history, by contrast, helps me preserving their philosophical originality, even when it may be disruptive. One might object that linguistic and cultural competence cannot be a requirement for philosophical work, since otherwise one would need to master “all languages”, which is impossible. My answer to that is my insistence on collaborations. It is unlikely that my knowledge of Japanese or Bantu will ever be enough to read Japanese or Bantu philosophy, but I will remain open to collaborations working on it. I don’t work on 17th c. Mexican culture, but I can collaborate with scholars working on Juana Inés de la Cruz’ epistemology and we can mutually profit from each other’s work.

The last twenty-six months within the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto have made me better aware of the obstacles that prevent many colleagues from using philosophical sources that are not yet “mainstream”, such as the fact that not enough philosophically-informed translations are available, and that not enough work has been done to enucleate the contribution of single philosophers (many colleagues are still under the impression that there were just “schools” of Sanskrit and Chinese philosophy, and that there is a single pre-contemporary Africana philosophy, without individual contributions). I have consequently doubled my efforts as an interpreter of philosophy in both directions.