A student asked me how to do a good Sanskrit philosophy article.

—Let us take for granted the rules for a good (generic) philosophy article, e.g. don’t start with ‘Since the beginning of time, humans doubted about x, and I just found a solution for it’.

—Some people use Sanskrit resources to solve a question being debated in contemporary debates (e.g., Kumārila in favour of epistemological externalism). (I tend to disagree with this approach, but it might have some limited use in making Analytic-philosophers interested).

—Others use Sanskrit texts to understand a debate that is relevant for Sanskrit authors only and do no additional effort to present it. (I tend to disagree, because it kills the general interest, but see the last point below).

—Still others use Sanskrit texts to understand a Sanskrit philosophical debate and (try to) show to the contemporary public that is rigorous and (possibly) exciting, perhaps exactly because no one in Euro-American philosophy ever thought about it (e.g., how to make sense of rebirth as a plant).

—Does this mean that there is no good use of Euro-American philosophical categories? Sure there is! We often are blind to possible hypotheses because they are not within our conceptual space. Thus, forcing ourselves to think about IIT or Spinoza is extremely valuable, as it may open our eyes with regard to unseen ways to understand Maṇḍana etc.

—A separate point: In the case of contemporary Euro-American philosophy, I would discourage writing articles that only describe an issue. I am less convinced that this should not be done in the case of history of philosophy, where it might make sense to present materials unknown to the public, even if one is not completely able to analyse them in full (a limit case is that of presenting a translation of a key text, though not analysing all its implications).

Thoughts welcome!