Assistant Professor – South Asian Philosophy
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
Job category Junior faculty / Tenure-track or similar
AOS South Asian Philosophy
AOS categories Asian Philosophy
AOC Open
Workload Full time
Vacancies 1
Organization’s reference number SAP 1803366
Location Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Start date July 1, 2019
[T]he last few years have witnessed widespread interest in debates around atheism well beyond the boundaries of the academy. […] [M]any of these debates seem to be trapped within a particular mental world-view that is a product of Enlightenment modernity. The assumptions and history of this world-view are rarely questioned or even acknowledged, with the result that the world-view itself comes to appear as a timeless given rather than as an historical product. Participants in the debate may thus be forced into positions and faced with alternatives that are dictated by this world-view, and deprived of the opportunity of exploring alternative approaches and ways of thinking.
Wie schwer ist es, daß der Mensch recht abwäge, was man aufopfern muß gegen das, was zu gewinnen ist! wie schwer, den Zweck zu wollen und die Mittel nicht zu verschmähen! Viele verwechseln gar die Mittel und den Zweck, erfreuen sich an jenen, ohne diesen im Auge zu behalten. Jedes Übel soll an der Stelle geheilt werden, wo es zum Vorschein kommt, und man bekümmert sich nicht um jenen Punkt, wo es eigentlich seinen Ursprung nimmt, woher es wirkt. Deswegen ist es so schwer Rat zu pflegen, besonders mit der Menge, die im Täglichen ganz verständig ist, aber selten weiter sieht als auf morgen. Kommt nun gar dazu, daß der eine bei einer gemeinsamen Anstalt gewinnen, der andre verlieren soll, da ist mit Vergleich nun gar nichts auszurichten. Alles eigentlich gemeinsame Gute muß durch das unumschränkte Majestätsrecht gefördert werden.
Gerald Kozicz sent me a link to a new website he has been intensely working on. The website offers the chance to look at shrines and temples in the Himālayas (better: from Himachal) from different points of view. Not only you can see photos from different perspectives, but you can see the shrine being built in front of your eyes, layer after layer and focus on its different structural elements.
This also means that you are likely to better understand what the experience of believers entering the temple was, which is one of my main reasons for being impressed by Gerald’s work.
You can read more about Kozicz’ work on this blog, here. Don’t miss especially this post on the “Laternendecke”.
Evan Thompson pointed out this ad for an assistant professor (tenure stream) position in “Asian Philosophy” (South Asian and/or East Asian) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.
Here is a link to the posting: https://www.philjobs.org/job/show/10990
Good luck to all possible applicants!
The Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy started as an atheist school since its first extant text, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra. At a certain point in its history, however, it reinterpreted its atheist arguments as aiming only at a certain conception of god(s). In other words, it reinterpreted its atheism as being not a global atheism, but a form of local atheism, denying a certain specific form of god(s) and not any form whatsoever.
Suppose you are a devout Christian and you think that the Bible has been inspired by God. Would this mean that you cannot discuss the historical layers of the Bible? Or would you continue to investigate them, thinking of them as the way in which God assumed a historical form and communicated with human beings? In other words, does not faith regard only the ultimate level, leaving all the others unchanged?
After my last post on critical and diplomatic editions, a colleague wrote me inviting me to consider the case of half-baked editions. How should we call them?
Is any text which reports variant readings from other manuscripts a “critical edition”? And what is a diplomatic edition?
A text which reports all variant readings from various manuscripts without selecting a preferred one is a collation. In a collation, one typically reproduces also variant readings which are clearly wrong and will later be eliminated. Some of these details are irrelevant for the sake of the constitution of the critical text, but can be relevant for the history of the transmission. For instance, a manuscript often writing śa or ṣa instead of sa might be an evidence of the fact that the text was transmitted (at a certain point of its history) within an environment in which the dental sibilant was not distinguished, e.g., in Bengal. The same could be repeated, mutatis mutandis, about the use of retroflex ḷ for non Vedic words, the confusion between sounded and unsounded occlusives and so on.
Marcus Arvan convincingly argues in this article that while programming AI you can produce psychopathic behaviours both if you decide not to teach any moral target AND if you decide to teach moral targets.
Instead, you need to teach your machine some flexibility. Thus, I would argue, moral reasoning used for machines needs to be adjusted through a large set of cases and through rules dealing with specific cases. Can the Mīmāṃsā case-based application of rules help in such cases?