Category Archives: books/articles

Posted on

Linguistic Communication as an Instrument of Knowledge: A panel

I came back last week from Athens, were I had organised together with Malcolm Keating a panel on Linguistic Communication as an instrument of knowledge. I ended up framing the problem according to four basic questions, namely 1) What do we know? , 2) How (through which instrument of knowledge) do we know it?, 3) What is the role of language as a medium?, 4) What is the role of the social context?
Posted on

Graham Priest on why study Asian philosophy

Graham Priest explains in a blog post why one should study “Eastern” philosophy (his label, probably because standard philosophy is in fact “Western” philosophy).
His post points to two reasons:

  1. One better understands one’s own culture if one is confronted with another one
  2. There is progress in philosophy and new ideas can contribute to it, since progress does not arise ex nihilo.

It is difficult not to agree. I had discussed Priest’s first point here and his second point here, while referring to an interview with Jay Garfield, and the posts have raised interesting discussions in the comments.

Since, however, the first post is dated to 2010 and the second one to 2013, it may be time to ask you, dear readers, again: What should be the reasons for engaging with Asian philosophies?

Posted on

Philosophy’s crudity and Narrative’s epistemological value

A recent post by Elisabeth Barnes raised a discussion in several blogs about philosophy’s “casual cruelty”. Philosophers, it is said, argue about basic human rights in an abstract way, with thought experiments daring to ask whether it would be ethical to let die disabled children/abort disabled foetuses/prohibit disabled people to have children/… . Philosophers do not even stop speculating about the suppression of disabled people, Barnes continues, when they have a real disabled person in front of them.

Posted on

Is there “African Philosophy”? Or just Greek, German…and Indian Philosophy?

Don Howard recently uploaded an interesting paper on cross-cultural philosophy on academia.edu.
The paper discusses stimulating topics, such as why we* react ackwardly when we hear of “African philosophy” or “Native American philosophy” and why these labels sound like a contradictio in objecto.

Posted on

Puṣpikā 3

I just received my copy of Puṣpikā 3. Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions. Contributions to Current Research in Indology, edited by Robert Leach and Jessie Pons. The volume is the third in a series of volumes publishing the proceedings of the various IIGRS conferences and it is innovative in so far as it drops the alphabetic order adopted in the first two volumes. Here, the sequence of articles is rather organised thematically, with two papers on philosophical topics:

  1. Marie-Hélẻne Gorisse (Is Inference a cognitive or a linguistic process? A line of divergence between Jain and Buddhist classifications)
  2. Elisa Freschi (Between Theism and Atheism: A journey through Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā)

Next come five articles ordered according to the chronology of their topics, from the Veda to contemporary Bengali Bauls:

  1. Moreno Dore (The pre-eminence of men in the vrātya-ideology)
  2. Paul F. Schwerda (“Tear down my Sādhana- and Havirdhāna-huts, stow away my Soma-vessels!” —Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa 2,269ff: A typical case of cursing in the Veda?)
  3. Aleix Ruiz-Falqués (A New Reading Of the Meghadūta)
  4. Jerôme Petit (Banārasīdās climbing the Jain Stages of Perfection)
  5. Carola Erika Lorea (If people get to know me, I’ll become cow-dung: Bhaba Pagla and the songs of the Bauls of Bengal)

The last paper follows the chronological sequence, since it discusses the application of modern teaching methods to Sanskrit:

  1. Sven Wortmann and Ann-Kathrin Wolf (Revisiting Sanskrit Teaching in the Light of Modern Language Pedagogy)

I had discussed the presentations on which the last paper was based in my previous blog, here. Aleix Ruiz-Falqués’ paper at the IIGRS had been discussed here.

I have not read the printed version of my article yet, but I already have one regret: I did not explicitly thank Robert (Leach) for his careful editing and for the many efforts invested in making my article understandable (my only excuse for that is that the editors of the first Puṣpikā had asked us to avoid such notes).

Posted on

Some common prejudices about Indian Philosophy: It is time to give them up

Is Indian Philosophy “caste-ish”? Yes and no, in the sense that each philosophy is also the result of its sociological milieu, but it is not only that.
Is Indian Philosophy only focused on “the Self”? Surely not.

Posted on

Arthāpatti (postulation? cogent evidence? derivation?) in Kumārila

Kumārila dedicated to arthāpatti eighty-eight verses in his Ślokavārttika (which is a commentary on the epistemological section of the Śābarabhāṣya). One would expect that also his Bṛhaṭṭīkā, which comments on the same text, contained a portion on arthāpatti and this is indirectly confirmed by further evidences:

  1. The verse said to be extracted from the Bṛhaṭṭīkā in the Mānameyoda‘s section on arthāpatti (discussed here)
  2. Four verses on arthāpatti attributed by Śālikanātha* to the Vārttikakāra (i.e., Kumārila) but not found in his Ślokavārttika

All these texts agree, among other things, on a major distinction between inference and arthāpatti, namely the fact that the vyāpti, the ‘invariable concomitance’ between what will be known and its logical reason, is already at the epistemic disposal of the knower before the anumāna, whereas in the case of the arthāpatti the knower, so to say, discovers it “on the go”, at the time of reaching the result of the arthāpatti. In other words, one would not have been able to say beforehand that there is an invariable concomitance between the set of people who, being alive, are not at home, and the set of people who are out of their home, until one had reached the conclusion that Devadatta must be outside.

For further details, see Yoshimizu 2007 (in Preisendanz (ed.) Expanding and Merging Horizons).

*I am obliged to Kiyotaka Yoshimizu who kindly alerted me to these verses.

The 173rd Philosophers’ Carnival

No, there is nothing vaguely related with anything else but Western philosophy. But, I guess, we have been spoilt by various mentions of other philosophical traditions in the previous months… and it would all be too easy if this could become the rule!
If you want to recommend posts for the next edition of the Carnival, please do so here.

Posted on

“Is there Philosophy in India?” and what this question tells us, an essay by Ankur Barua

After many years, I am sort of fed up with having to answer the question above, and this is also why I had not read the essay by Barua (bearing the title Is there ‘Philosophy’ in India? An Exercise in Meta-Philosophy and available here) until he recommended it to me. In fact, the article tells more about what it means to ask the question, than about the answer (which is a straightforward “yes”).