160 Philosophers’ Carnival

This is a very interesting Carnival, which lists posts I either knew and liked or discovered through it and liked even more. I am very grateful for being mentioned (not because of this blog, though, but because of this post on Free Will in heaven) although I did not even submit my post. Even more interesting is the mention of Matthew Dasti’s post on “Indian Philosophy in One Paragraph”. Thanks Kenny Pearce!

The Indian Philosophy Blog launched!

Remember the time when I was complaining about the absence of a platform for discussions among scholars philosophically interested in India? Now we (meaning: myself, Amod Lele and a group of interesting friends and colleagues, based throughout Europe and in the US) launched one! Ideally, this should work as a forum where ideas can be discussed and shared. We also hope that it will increase the chances for Indian philosophy to become part of the intellectual discours of philosophy throughout the (academic) world.

Hope you will join the discussion!

Let us organise more Saṃvādas! An Interview with Mrinal Kaul

I met Mrinal Kaul for the first time in December 2012, when he attended the Coffee Break Meeting on textual reuse in Indian Philosophical texts. Since then, I tried to have him collaborate to many of my projects, but always failed, since he is already very  busy with incredibly many others. You can read his blog here and find out something more about him on his Academia page. Once you have done this, add much more Sanskrit than you would believe, imagine a smiling, funny face and you will still have only a vague idea of him.

Is peer-review the best way to get crap published?

If you are interested in the debate, read this post.

The post discusses the key topic of whether peer-review is really the best solution for controlling the quality of research. It seems that reviewers tend to express more often negative judgements in the case of broad theories they have objections to, rather than in the case of minor assessments. The result is the “triviality that many continental philosophers associate with analytic philosophy”. Are you among them? And how do you review articles?