Category Archives: methodology

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So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?

So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?

I have a non-polemical question: What did you read within what you call “non-Western thought”? If the list is extremely short compared to what you know of Euro-American philosophy (say, less than 100 titles), or if it focuses on a special field (say, Confucian ethics) then it’s easy to have a less diverse impression. The problem is that scholars or students who speak of “non-Western thought” as being “less diverse” have at most taken a single class on anything other than Euro-American philosophy.
Do you think you would have an idea of Euro-American philosophy as very diverse and interesting if you had studied, say, Sanskrit philosophy for decades, and had taken a single class on French existentialism and German phenomenology?

More in general, many Philosophy departments think that diversifying means adding a single class on anything that is not Euro-American mainstream philosophy (it can be Maori political thought, ubuntu ethics, Confucianism, Sanskrit epistemology…).
The result is often implicitly suggesting that there is a single world of “non-Western” thought and that everyone can teach it, because it does not go very deep.
For instance, I am routinely asked to answer questions about, e.g., the Zhaungzi, as if my expertise should extent to the whole of “non-Western thought”, because it is implicitly assumed to be very limited.

I ask students on the first class on Sanskrit philosophy how many texts do they think were composed in Sanskrit philosophy if compared to Greek philosophy and they are ridiculously wrong, guessing anything between 30 and 300 texts.

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A word of caution on philosophical methodology

Sanskrit philosophy is extremely sophisticated and I am convinced that we don’t need to borrow categories from Euro-American philosophy to better understand it.
Parallels to Euro-American theories are welcome because they can help us focus on overlooked aspects, but they are not more important than parallels that go in the opposite directions, namely looking at Euro-American philosophy from the lens of Sanskrit philosophy.
In other words, it is good to ask, for instance, whether Mīmāṃsā epistemology is a form of internalism or of externalism, but one should

  • a) never forget that the binary opposition between internalism and externalism is not a fact about the world, but rather a philosophical choice and that the epistemological landscape could be described otherwise;
  • b) be also ready to wonder whether, e.g., Timothy Williamson embraces intrinsic validity (svataḥ prāmāṇya).

Point a) enables one to see that a the conceptual space is not constrained by any given binary etc. and that one of the main contributions of Global philosophy is to question one’s frame of reference for the questions one asks, not just for the answers one receives. Point b) helps one in highlighting possibly overlooked aspects within, e.g., T.Williamson’s theory.
In summary, I am convinced that we should not force Sanskrit theories into the straitjacket of extant Euro-American terminology. By doing so, we would be missing the main benefits of starting a broad conversation.

UPDATE: Don’t miss the interesting conversation on the same post here: https://indianphilosophyblog.org/2025/12/08/a-word-of-caution-on-philosophical-methodology/#comment-393184

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On LLMs, publishing houses and our volunteer work for them

I will not be able to take part in any new project hosted by publishing houses that are ready to send my work to LLMs (I have a few ongoing and will conclude them). Allow me to explain why.

I am deeply concerned by the LLMs being a big risk for the environment, our students’ mental health and deskilling as well as their being based on intellectual theft. Thus, I will not volunteer my time and energy to help publishers that will then give my work to feed LLMs.

I asked various publishing houses about their politics with regard to LLMs and received (disappointing) answers on how “LLMs are the future”, “LLMs are inevitable” etc., all leading to the same conclusion, namely that I cannot opt out from my work being used to feed them. Such being the case, I am sorry to say that I prefer to pass.

I apologise for not being able to help the various editors who asked me to contribute or peer review for their volumes, but time is limited and I prefer to volunteer my time to help publishers who have higher standards. If a publisher wants to just focus only on profit, they should start paying their contributors, editors, peer reviewers… I know that my decision will not change anything (alternative peer-reviewers or contributors will be found etc.), but perhaps if enough people were to refuse working for free for publishers that comply to LLMs’ demands, then some change could be achieved.

UPDATE:
—Journals and publishing houses that have answered that LLMs are unavoidable etc.: CUP (author can opt out, but not in the case of open-access publications), OUP (basically, LLMs are the future, like google search is the present), Springer Nature (“peer review reports and unpublished manuscripts are not used for training LLMs, while accepted articles are”), Taylor and Francis (“In terms of licensing we do permit some trusted partners to use specific content for the purposes of training AI. We feel this is important as Publishers need to engage with these companies and control the use of content – for instance making sure it is used appropriately, within licence terms, with authors being fully attributed for their work, and to be paid for this use where contracts specify royalties. If we do not do this there is a real risk that these firms will simply access our content without permission and try to establish this as a form of fair use. In fact this has already happened with one major firm doing precisely this.”).
—Journals and publishing houses that have answered that they offer authors the option to opt out of LLMs, but cannot guarantee that it will be respected: Brill
—Journal and publishing houses that have answered that they don’t feed our work to LLMs: University of Hawai’i press (Philosophy East and West)

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Thinking about Johannes Bronkhorst (UPDATED)

On May 15, Harry Falk announced on the Indology mailing list that Johannes Bronkhorst had “left this world”. In the following weeks the mailing list (and, I am sure, other online forums) has been virtually monopolised by people remembering the man and his endless contributions to Sanskrit studies and connected fields. In fact, Johannes has been extremely prolific (Greater Magadha was written in just one semester!) and his contributions have been impactful with almost no comparison.

He had studied first mathematics and physics and then moved to studying Sanskrit in India, Pune. In a recent interview with Vincent Eltschinger (on April 21 2025) he commented the choice to travel to India as due to his desire not to serve as a soldier —a choice which was deeply important to him. But, whatever the initial motivation, his years-long stay in India was meaningful and influential for his life and he never grew out of his fascination for Indian thought.

The fact that he started studying Sanskrit while in India is key to understand the role of Vyākaraṇa in his first many decades of work, given that Vyākaraṇa (or Sanskrit linguistics) is still studied and lively engaged with in contemporary India in general and in Pune in particular. Vyākaraṇa demands deep and almost complete dedication because of its technical character. One needs to know by heart or at least to be able to navigate all the 4000 aphorisms of Pāṇini’s seminal work for the school, together with their punctual glosses by Kātyāyana and the commentary by Patañjali, and this before even being able to open one’s mouth in a symposium of Vaiyākaraṇas. Bronkhorst has been able to contribute to this very technical field, especially to its perhaps most original thinker, Bhartṛhari, but without being swallowed up by the labyrinth of Vyākaraṇa. In contrast, he learnt from its method and contents, but retained his untameable intellectual curiosity.

For scholars of Bhartṛhari, Bronkhorst’s articles are indispensable. But even the ones among of us who never specialised on Bhartṛhari have probably been influenced by Bronkhorst and by his unique blend of thought-provoking ideas and thorough knowledge of the sources. In fact, Bronkhorst was an avid and fast reader, who read hundreds of pages of both Sanskrit scholarship and contemporary, mainly scientific, papers. His ideas looked at first sight almost too thought-provoking, almost like balons d’essay (trial balloons). However, when one tried to refute them, one was forced to see that Bronkhorst knew the Sanskrit sources of the relevant period thoroughly and that his bold ideas were in fact also well-grounded. (Apologies for not discussing here whether they were also ultimately right and completely so. I want to focus more on what we can learn from him than on correcting the occasional typos or on disagreeing with specific points.)

For instance, in May 2021 Dominik Wujastyk organised a (virtual) conference on the topic of Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha (2007), which possibly remains his most influential book. Bronkhorst himself had been invited as a respondent for talks which all engaged with his hypothesis. I was only in the audience, but was astonished to see how, almost twenty years after the book’s composition, Bronkhorst was still able to discuss each of its aspects and to respond (again, I will let to others to assess whether successfully) to each criticism raised by the speakers, through precise references to the epics and/or to Vedic texts.

Let me know enter into some details about a few of Johannes Bronkhorst’s contributions. Again, let me emphasise that there are too many to discuss even a significant percentage of them and that therefore the choice will be partly whimsical. I will focus on

  • a) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the development of Sanskrit philosophy: The Greater Magadha hypothesis, the “discovery of dialogue” and its significance for the history of Sanskrit philosophy
  • b) The sceptical Johannes Bronkhorst looking at the role of authors in Sanskrit philosophy: his hypothesis about a unitary Yogaśāstra and dis-unitary Mīmāṃsāsūtra and its importance for how we assess Sanskrit aphoristic texts
  • c) His hypothesis about a radical difference between Sanskrit thought and European thought
  • d) His general sceptical-scientific methodology
  • a) Greater Magadha is one of those books about which we remember a moment before and a moment after. Before the book, scholars and lay people alike took it for granted that there was a single line of development within Indian though and that since the Buddha and his thought postdated early Vedic texts by centuries, these needed to contain the seeds which would have later led to the development of Buddhist thought. The texts which were conceptually closer to ancient Buddhism, namely the Upaniṣads were therefore dated to before the Buddha.

    The Greater Magadha takes the opposite point of view and looks at the evidence available with fresh eyes and notices that they are less uniform than we might think. They thus point to a different line of development, one in which there were different roots for Indian culture, which developed in parallel and not just a single line. On the West, the brāhmaṇic culture produced the Vedic texts. On the East of the Indian subcontinent, around Magadha, the culture he provisionally called “śramaṇic” produced Jainism and Buddhism, as well as key ideas that were later absorbed in the Brahmanic fold, such as karman and rebirth. By the way, the presence of an Eastern border for the Brahmanical culture is also attested by Patañjali’s definition of Āryavarta, which has an Eastern boundary (unlike Manu’s description of the same, only a few centuries later).

    The Greater Magadha can explain why karman and rebirth make a sudden entry in the Upaniṣads although they are virtually absent from the preceding Vedic texts. They enter the Brahmanical culture so well-developed and all at once because they had been elaborated for centuries outside of the Brahmanical culture. If Bronkhorst is right, one can stop looking for faint traces of possible forerunners of karman and rebirth in the Vedic Saṃhitās and start focusing on how the theory was already developed in Buddhist texts and then imported into the Upaniṣads. One can also invert the chronology of the Upaniṣads, which post-date the encounter with śramaṇic culture (this does not mean that they need to postdate the life of Siddhartha Gautama, since he was only one exponent of that culture, as is clear through the parallel of Jainism). The same applies to the claim that “Yoga” was practiced by the Buddha. In contrast, the similarities between the PYŚ and the Buddha’s teachings should be. according to Bronkhorst, interpreted as an influence of Buddhism into Yoga.

    Although I am here mainly focusing on philosophical issues, let me emphasise again that Bronkhorst’s reconstruction is extremely detailed and covers also aspects like the different funerary practices (round stūpas in the East vs. quadrilateral moulds in the West), the approach to medicine and the conception of a cyclical time, as well as the opposition between a urban (Magadha) and rural (brahmanical) culture. Last, it has the advantage of providing a methodology to identify what is original in the teaching of the Buddha and to explain why asceticism is both endorsed in the Pāli canon and criticised by the Buddha (it was part of his cultural milieu).

  • a2) Distinguishing communities and not looking for historical links when they are virtually absent was at the basis of another of Bronkhorst’s contributions, namely the idea that the roots of Indian dialectics should be placed in the Buddhist communities in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent (which might have been influenced by the Greek tradition of public debate in the Indo-Bactrian kingdoms) and that it was useless to consider Upaniṣadic dialogues as the forerunners of the dialectical engagements which became standard in Sanskrit philosophy. Upaniṣadic dialogues are just something different (closer to the instruction by a wise person).
  • b) Bronkhorst was (to my knowledge, as always) the first one to propose the idea of a unitary composition for what is known as the Yogasūtra and the Yogabhāṣya He spoke accordingly of a unitary Yogaśāstra. Like in the previous case, the idea is mind-blowing. Up to that point, many scholars had tried to reconstruct the worldview of the Yogasūtra as divided from the Yogabhāṣya and the Sāṅkhya intervention of the latter. If Bronkhorst’s hypothesis is correct, by contrast, the division into sūtra ‘aphorism’ and bhāṣya ‘commentary’ is only a polarity within a single text. This explains what could have otherwise been considered an anomaly, like the complete absence of an autonomous transmission of the Yogasūtra. Like in the Greater Magadha case, one could find alternative explanations, but Bronkhorst’s hypothesis has the advantage of showing a possibility for streamlining explanations and avoiding unnecessary additional steps (in Sanskrit, one would call that kalpanāgaurava). I should add in this connection that Bronkhorst’s hypothesis was presented in just an article (1985), but has thereafter been embraced by Philipp Maas (see especially Maas 2006 and Maas 2013) who found many evidences corroborating it, from manuscripts to the syntax of the sūtra-bhāṣya connecting links.
  • b2) A similar case is that of the relation between the so-called Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, also known as Mīmāṃsā Sūtra and Brahma Sūtra. Authors before Bronkhorst had discussed their relation and chronology, Bronkhorst (2007) suggested that the latter imitates the style of the former, though not emerging from the same exegetical milieu.
  • c) In the occasion of Ernst Steinkellner’s retirement, a symposium on the topic “Denkt Asien anders?” (Does Asia think differently?) was organised. Bronkhorst’s intervention led to a later book chapter and finally a book on the topic of what is different in Sanskrit thought. Bronkhorst proposed, as usual, a thought-provoking thesis, namely that there is indeed a radical difference, namely the reliance on language by Sanskrit philosophers.
    He explained how the various causation theories within Sanskrit philosophy (from Vaiśeṣika to Vedānta etc.) and the puzzled they involved (such as how could it be possible to bring into existence something that previously did not exist) are all due to thinking about the problem in linguistic terms. Their answers, in other words, were oriented by the Sanskrit form of basic sentences such as “the potter makes a pot”. In fact, how can the pot figure as the object of a sentence, given that it does not exist yet? Bronkhorst thought that this was a linguistic problem, namely one occasioned by the structure of language and not an ontological one. Westerners, according to Bronkhorst, would have immediately labeled the pot as non-existing until it is realised by the potter and would not have paused on its ontological status, whereas Indians never distinguished between linguistic and external reality.

    This is an interesting insight, and in fact there are several elements suggesting (as Karl Potter maintained) that the “linguistic turn” occurred in India much earlier than in Europe (note that I am saying the same thing Bronkhorst said, but looking at it from a more favourable perspective), such as the insistence on the analysis of linguistic data in order to solve epistemological or ontological issues (cf. the insistence on the linguistic use śabdaṃ kṛ- within the debate about the ontological status of śabda).
  • d) Bronkhorst was a convinced asserter of the scientific approach. This does not mean that he was an a-priori believer in natural sciences. Rather, he thought that the scientific method is based on a healthy form of scepticism and thus can never lead to fanatical beliefs nor to any form of “scientific traditionalism” (if correctly applied). For this very reason, he also thought that the scientific method was not “Western”, it had proven to work because of its ability to ask questions and thus to be universal. He took seriously Yoga and meditation techniques and thought that they could be analysed with the scientific method and possibly lead to new discoveries.
  • d2) Similarly, Bronkhorst clearly looked down on blind believers and thus praised Sanskrit philosophers for their ability to distinguish myths from arguments. In “What did Indian philosophers believe?” (2010) he noted that Sanskrit philosophers did not attack each other based on myths (although, one may add, some Buddhist philosophers did have fun at criticising some passages of the Veda and Kumārila made fun of the walls-speaking argument), but rather their arguments (“These philosophers, while criticising each others’ views, never attacked each others’ myths. Yet these myths would have been easy targets, if they had been seriously believed in”). In short, the reliance on the scientific method meant a radical openness to defeasibility of one’s beliefs and to a data-based approach.

Let me add a few words about Johannes Bronkhorst as a human being. The Indology list was full of “Bronkhorst stories” and therefore I will not need to take too much of your time with them (you can read them on the Indology archives). Let me just point out how Bronkhorst was generous and supportive with younger scholars and even students, but in a very unique way. I still remember our first meeting. I was an undergraduate student and he immediately asked me which were my key interests (I was unable to give a specific answer, at that point I was just busy learning Sanskrit and reading as much as possible of any text my professors read). I read or hear similar stories from others, all pointing to how Bronkhorst took people seriously, even young people. He was supportive, but not patronising. He was interested in one’s opinion, but would not refrain from saying that it was wrong if he thought so, according to the scientific method discussed above. He would not mince words to attack a view, but not so when coming to the person holding it, and I have seen him greeting warmly people with whom he had had violent disagreements on specific issues.

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Unrequested advice for students translating (Sanskrit) texts (will be updated)

This list will be updated and I will add here links to other posts where I discuss parentheses, brackets, footnotes and so on.

1) On parentheses and brackets: https://elisafreschi.com/announcements/how-to-use-parentheses-and-brackets-in-your-translation-my-tips/#more-3372

2) On transcribing Sanskrit passages: https://elisafreschi.com/2018/05/28/dividing-words-in-transcription/

3) I am very much in favour of being more explicit in highlighting objections and replies, e.g.:

[Objection:]…

PARAGRAPH BREAK

[Reply:]…

PARAGRAPH BREAK

Just saying “you may object” is not enough, because it does not identify the end of the objection and often leaves the beginning of the reply unmarked. Moreover, adding specific markers forces us to be clear in identifying objections and replies, whereas just translating Sanskrit markers like “nanu” might leave ourselves and the readers in the dark about who is talking (“nanu” usually introduces an objector, but not necessarily so!).

4) How to cite Sanskrit words: https://elisafreschi.com/2020/01/20/how-to-deal-with-sanskrit-words-in-an-english-article/

5) Refer to specific sūtras, not just to page numbers (e.g. “TV ad 1.1.2”, not “TV 1929, p. 101”). In case of longer passages, adding the page number might be necessary, in which case using the most authoritative edition is the thing to do. For Kumārila’s TV and ṬṬ it has become customary to refer to Subbāśāstrī’s 1929 edition. For NM, Mysore edition (whenever there is not a critical edition available, such as Harikai or Graheli respectively).

6) Scholastic Sanskrit is primarily about nominal sentences, not so English. Hence, break up nominal sentences into verbs+nouns ones. Don’t say “because of the absence of the possibility of X” but “because X is impossible” (for X-upapatti-abhāvāt). Repeating the nominal structure of the Sanskrit in an English sentence is not “being faithful to the Sanskrit”, since the Sanskrit sentence did not sound awkward to its readers/listeners, whereas the allegedly faithful English translation that preserved its nominal style is unbearably cumbersome.

7) I disagree with experts completely prohibiting the use of passive sentences in English. Nonetheless, the use of the passive is not marked in Sanskrit (meaning: it is considered as absolutely normal by readers/listeners), whereas it is often marked in English. These cases of undesirably marked passive need to be rendered into active in English. For instance: “Who is reading the book?” rather than “By whom is the book being read?”. This also has the advantage of forcing us to reflect on the agent (is it the siddhāntin saying it? The pūrvapakṣin?). By contrast, unmarked passive can be rendered as passive.

8) As a rule of thumb, Sanskrit philosophers were smart guys. If your translation attributes them an inconsistent thought, you must rethink it.

Btw, unrequested advice on bibliography: https://elisafreschi.com/2025/04/15/unrequested-advice-on-bibliography/

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Unrequested advice on bibliography

A bibliography is key to verify one’s claims. It is needed to move from vague claims to an epistemically justified assessment. It is fair to acknowledge our sources, but we cite them also because testimony is a source of knowledge only insofar as it is based on reliable authors.
Since my students keep on doing the same mistakes in their bibliography, I thought that it might be helpful to have a single place to point them to. This will be that place.
1) A bibliography needs to be complete (author, date, title, journal, number, pages OR author, date, title, publisher, book’s editor(s), pages or chapter number).
2) A bibliography needs to be consistent (choose the model you like, be it Chicago or MLA etc.), but stick to it.
3) A bibliography needs to list authors in alphabetical order. If there are more than one title by the same author, list them chronologically.
4) An editor ≠ an author ≠ a translator. You need to list them all, but separately. You don’t attribute Plato’s Republic to “Plato and G. Smith” as if G. Smith had been co-authoring with Plato. Same with book editors, who are not the authors of the individual chapters.
5) DOIs may be added, but are not enough on their own (a study by Nature showed that only 68% are actual identifiers of uniquely located articles and chapters).
6) “Accessed on…” is only needed for webpages. No need to say that you accessed Plato’s Laws on March 15 2025. It surely did not change in the last thousand years.
7) Similarly, web-addresses are only needed for webpages. No need to say that you accessed Plato’s Symposium through your local library. It is a physical book and it does not change from library to library.
8) Similarly, there is no nee to add the web-address of the random depository where you found a certain article. R. Swinburne’s articles, for instance, are published somewhere and it is irrelevant that you found them on JSTOR or the like.

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How to write a good Sanskrit philosophy article?

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!

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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.
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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.

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Mapping the territory: Sanskrit cosmopolis, 1500–today

There is a lot to do in the European intellectual history, with, e.g., major theories that await an improved understanding and connections among scholars that have been overseen or understudied. Using a simile, one might say that a lot of the territory between some important peaks (say, the contributions of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Heidegger) is still to be thoroughly investigated.

When one works on the intellectual history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis*, by contrast, one still needs to map the entire territory, whose extension still escapes us. Very few elements of the landscape have been fixated, and might still need to be re-assessed.

What are the mountains, main cities as well as rivers, bridges, routes that we would need to fix on the map? Key authors, key theories, key schools, as well as languages and manners of communication and how they worked (public debates? where? how?).
I mentioned authors before schools because for decades intellectual historians looking at the Sanskrit cosmopolis emphasized, and often overemphasized the role of schools at the expense of the fundamental role of individual thinkers, thus risking to oversee their individual contributions and to flatten historical developments, as if nothing had changed in astronomy or philosophy for centuries. This hermeneutic mistake is due to the fact that while the norm in Europe and North America after Descartes and the Enlightenment has been increasingly to highlight novelty, originality is constantly understated in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. It is not socially acceptable to claim to be novel and original in the Sanskrit world, just like it is not acceptable to be just “continuing a project” in a grant application in Europe or North America.
Still, schools are often the departure point for any investigation, since they give one a first basic understanding of the landscape. How does this exactly work?
For instance, we know that the Vedānta systems were a major player in the intellectual arena, with all other religious and philosophical schools having to face them, in some form of the other. However, it is not at all clear which schools within Vedānta were broadly influential, where within South Asia, and in which languages. Michael Allen, among others, worked extensively on Advaita Vedānta in Hindī sources, but were they read also by Sanskrit authors and did the latter react to them? Were Hindī texts on Vedānta read only in the Gangetic valley or throughout the Indian subcontinent? The same questions should be investigated with regard to the other schools of Vedānta (Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śaivādvaita…), the other vernacular languages they interacted with (respectively: Tamil and Maṇipravāḷam, Kannaḍa…), and the regions of the Indian subcontinent they originated in. And this is just about Vedānta schools.
Similarly, we still have to understand which other schools entered into a debate with philosophy and among each other and which interdisciplinary debates took place. Scholars of European intellectual history know how Kepler was influenced by Platonism and how Galileo influenced the development of philosophy. What happened in the Sanskrit cosmopolis?
Dagmar Wujastyk recently focused on the intersection of medicine (āyurveda) alchemy (rasaśāstra) and yoga. Which other disciplines were in a constant dialogue? Who read mathematical and astronomical texts, for instance? It is clear, because many texts themselves often repeat it, that Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vyākaraṇa (hermeneutics, logic and grammar) were considered a sort of basic trivium, to be known by every learned person. But the very exclusion of Vedānta from the trivium (it cannot be considered to be included in “Mīmāṃsā” unless in the Viśiṣṭādvaita self-interpretation) shows that the trivium is only the starting point of one’s instruction and is not at all exhaustive. And we have not even started to look at many disciplines, from music to rhetorics.

One might wonder whether it is not enough to look at reports by today’s or yesterday’s Sanskrit intellectuals themselves in order to know what is worth reading and why. However, as discussed above, such reports would not boast about innovations and main breakthroughs. Sanskrit philosophy (and the same probably applies to Sanskrit mathematics etc.) is primarily commentarial. That is, authors presuppose a basic shared background knowledge and innovate while engaging with it rather than imagining to be pioneers in a new world of ideas. In a commentarial philosophy, innovations are concealed and breakthroughs are present, but not emphasised. Hence, one needs a lot of background knowledge to recognise them.

I would like to map the territory to realise who was studying what, where and how. How can this be done? The main obstacle is the amount of unpublished material, literally millions of manuscripts that still remain to be read, edited, translated and studied (I am relying on David Pingree’s estimate). Editing and translating them all requires a multi-generational effort of hundreds of people. However, a quick survey of them, ideally through an enhanced ORC technology, would enable scholars to figure out which languages were used, which theories and topics were debated, which authors were mentioned, and who was replying to whom.

This approach will remind some readers of the distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti. I am personally a trained philologist and a spokesperson for close reading. However, moving back and forth between the two methods seems to be the most productive methodology if the purpose is mapping an unknown territory. Close reading alone will keep one busy for decades and will not enable one to start the hermeneutic circle through which one’s knowledge of the situation of communication helps one better understanding even the content of the text one is closely focusing on. As hinted at above, this is particularly crucial in the case of a commentarial philosophy, where one needs to be able to master a lot of the author’s background in order to evaluate his contribution.

*As discussed several times elsewhere, I use “Sanskrit philosophy” or “Sanskrit intellectual history” as a short term for “philosophy in a cosmopolis in which Sanskrit was the dominant language of culture and everyone had to come to terms with it”, as with the use of “philosophy in the Islamic world”, that includes also thinkers part of the Islamic world but who were not themselves Muslims.

(The above are just quick notes. Any feedback is welcome!)