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?
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.
“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.”
“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.”