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?
How should we call half-baked editions?
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?
Collations, critical and diplomatic editions
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.
Teaching ethics to a machine? You need some casuistic reasoning
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?
“Do you know of any recent literature on X?”
This post is part of my series of suggestions for younger colleagues and students. I put here all the pieces of good advice I would have loved to hear while I was in their position…
There was a thing in the emperor [Akbar] that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one’s power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.
Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 402
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 402
“Sire,” said Mogor dell’Amore, calmly, “I am attracted towards the great polytheist pantheons because the stories are better, more numerous, more dramatic, more humorous, more marvellous; and because the gods do not set us good examples, they are interfering, vain, petulant and badly behaved, which is, I confess, quite appealing”.
“We have the same feeling,” the emperor [Akbar] said, regaining his composure, “and our affection for these wanton, angry, playful, loving god is very great.”
Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 175
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 175
“Your time has come,” the emperor assented. “So tell us truthfully before you go, what sort of paradise do you expect to discover when you have passed through the veil?” The Rana raised his mutilated face and looked the emperor in the eye. “In Paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing”, he declared. “The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion.”
Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 43--44
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Vintage Books, 2009), 43--44
Siddha and sādhya in Viśiṣṭādvaitavedānta
Has anyone read the Bhagavadguṇadarpaṇa?
At the beginning of his Seśvaramīmāṃsā, Veṅkaṭanātha tries to synthetise what he (and Rāmānuja) calls Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, with the further addition of the Devatā Mīmāṃsā.
In this connection he needs to address an apparent divergence, namely that between the siddha and sādhya interpretation of the Veda. In other words: Does the Veda always convey something to be done? Or does it always convey something established? The unity of the three Mīmāṃsās and of the Veda as their basis does not allow for a different interpretation of the statements in the Upaniṣads and in the Brāhmaṇas.
Veṅkaṭanātha cites Rāmānuja in order to show that there is no real opposition and that the sādhya-aspect is parasitical upon a siddha one. The example he reuses from Rāmānuja is that of taking action in regard to a hidden treasure: One starts acting only after having known that the treasure is really there. Thus, the sādhya element (taking action) depends on the siddha one (the acquired cognition of something existing).
At this point he also quotes from anoter Vaiṣṇava author, namely Parāśara Bhaṭṭa. His Bhagavadguṇadarpaṇa is a commmentary on the Viṣṇusahasranāma and here comes the quote:
How to translate ākāśa (and some thoughts on translation in general)
I recently discussed the translation of ākāśa with a senior and much more advanced scholar. Here come my thoughts thereon:
The first possible candidates for ākāśa are ‘space’ and ‘aether’.
I agree with my senior colleague that ‘space’ should not be used, because ‘space’ translates deśa and because one can imagine an empty space. In fact, the idea of avoiding an empty space is exactly the reason for postulating aether.
My current way of discussing possible translations is to create a conceptual map of the term I want to translate. In the case of ākāśa, this is
- 1. a substance
- 2. all-pervasive
- 3. not directly perceptible
- 4. postulated as the substate of sound understood as its exclusive quality
Ether, by contrast, is
- 1. a substance
- 2. all-pervasive
- 3. not directly perceptible
- 4. postulated as medium of propagation of the light waves and because pure empty space is unthinkable
- 5. has been used in the 18th c to explain some problems in the theory of gravity
Therefore, it is right that ākāśa is not exactly tantamount to aether, especially as for sound (for which European theorists thought that air was a suitable medium). Still, if one needs to avoid leaving the term untranslated, I think ‘aether’, especially if accompanied by an explanatory footnote is still the best solution.
What do readers think?