I am, as already said, a late adapter, but twitter made me get in touch with interesting people coming from outside my direct field and I enjoyed several insightful conversations. One such conversation is directly relevant for many readers and I would be glad to read your opinion about it.

Short premiss: Someone (teaching in another institute) writes me explaining that their university would like to open a position on “Indian philosophy”, but that some colleagues are against it, claiming that “it is all religion”. Now, it might at times be disheartening to hear such opinions coming from colleague philosophers, but how would you react after a few deep breaths?

Here below comes my first reaction:

There will always be people who think they know what there is even in places they never visited, and I guess it must be hard for you to be patient and try to explain your reasons without getting angry. Usually, books like Matilal’s and Ganeri’s ones are really helpful here. Perhaps, you might also point them to the podcast by Ganeri and Peter Adamson on the history of Indian Philosophy? […] Many philosophers (especially historians of philosophy) know and trust P. Adamson and might be convinced by his opinion.

Also, perhaps you might try to understand where these people come from. Are they historians of philosophy? Analytic philosophers? Phenomenologists? Using Matilal and Mohanty for the latter two groups respectively might really help… Ch. Ram-Prasad’s books are also great to reach people working in the so-called “continental philosophy”.

Last resort: Give them a book which looks “religious”, like Parimal Patil’s Against a Hindu God and ask them what they think of the Buddhist syllogisms and their refutations of the Brahmanical ones.

P.S. I know that your colleagues meant “religion” in a derogatory way, but South Asian philosophy that engages with religion is intellectually extremely stimulating, too (and would they really want to cancel Thomas Aquinas or Augustinus from their philosophical syllabi?)

How do you react in such cases? I have strong hopes in young colleagues (like many of the ones I mentioned above) and in the positive effect their contribution will have, especially once added to the tasks which have already been accomplished by their forerunners. Till that moment comes, however, we will have to think of convincing and polite answers. What will your answer be?

Every year, when I introduce Indian philosophy to my students, I deal with the problem of the alleged absence of ethics from it. I basically deal with this absence in multiple ways:

• First, and more important, I point out that “philosophy” is not a natural type. There is no binding reason why something should a priori belong to philosophy and, in fact, historically, different texts have been considered philosophically relevant or not (from the Suttanikāya to the Presocratics, from St. Augustin to Levinas, from Nietzsche to Th. Bernhard and G. Leopardi). Hence, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a philosophical tradition developing more, say, philosophy of language and less, say, ethics, or vice versa. That we think that there are “core” disciplines within philosophy is only the result of specific historical circumstances.
• Then, there have been some specific attempts to locate the place of ethics in Indian thought outside of “philosophy”. Shyam Ranganathan has spoken therefore of its presence in bhakti and has accordingly reinterpreted most of what we would call “religion” in India. Similarly, Amod Lele has frequently discussed ethical issues in Buddhist thinkers and observed that it is weird that these discussions are excluded from “philosophy” stricto sensu. Last, recently Muzaffar Ali has shown that the way debates took place in Indian philosophy allows one to reconstruct ethic reflections about one’s engagement with the Other.
• Among these attempts to individuate the place for ethics in Indian thought, a specific paragraph needs to be dedicated to B.K. Matilal’s well known volume “Ethics and Epics”, in which he individuates such place in the Epics.

No. 3 allows me to introduce a talk by Chakravarti Ram-Prasad which perfectly exemplifies the topic. The talk deals with several ethical challenges, such as gender equality, and looks at the Mahābhārata. We see how these issues are, perhaps not solved, but certainly enacted by characters within this epics. In his contribution to In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions (Routledge, forthcoming), Ram-Prasad similarly looks at the Mahābhārata way of looking at the issue of speciesism and how it lets a snake speak for himself. In both cases, there is an intriguing similarity with what Richard Rorty’s described as the ethical advantage of literature over philosophy, namely its ability to let the protagonists speak for themselves. One does not discuss in theory the advantage of being open to equality among animal species, but listens to a snake’s plea against unfair treatment.

However, as soon as one encounters Buddhism, one is faced with the alternative: Either Buddhism is a religion (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of religion) or it is a philososophy (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of philosophy).

A similar case regards categories such as “Atheism”. Atheism as it is common nowadays is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Euro-American world, so much that one risks to postulate that it is a result of the Enlightenment, of Positivism, of the success of Science etc. A glance at South Asia shows that this is not the only way atheism can find its place in the history of philosophy. As shown by Larry McCrea, atheism might have been the rule rather than the exception in South Asian philosophy until the end of the first millennium. This also means that the later shift towards theism has a completely different flavour, insofar as it comes out of a different background.

I am especially intrigued by the moment in which this turn took place, with thinkers composing theistic texts and/or reinterpreting their texts and traditions in a theistic way. A typical example is the adoption and adaptation of Mīmāṃsā (originally an atheist philosophy) within theist Vedānta in the first centuries of the second millennium CE. I have already discussed about the various steps of this incorporation by Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha. What remains fascinating is

1. how Mīmāṃsā was rebuilt through this encounter, with its atheism reconfigurated as negation of a given form of theos, but not of any form whatsoever.
2. how Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta was challenged to produce a sustainable version of theism.

To elaborate: Theism in South Asia needed to grow in an environment in which atheist objections where the norm. It had, therefore, to inoculate itself with possible answers to these objections and to rethink an idea of the divine which could resist these attacks.

How could this phenomenon be studied? As usual with South Asian philosophy, many of the fundamental texts have never been edited and remain in manuscript form. Of the ones which have been edited, only a tiny minority has been translated. Of these translations, only a minority can be understood on its own right and independently of the Sanskrit (or Maṇipravāḷa) original. Still less common are works elaborating on the theology entailed in these texts (among the exceptions let me name Carman, Clooney, Mumme and Oberhammer; Ram-Prasad’s Divine Self especially focuses on Rāmānuja’s different concept of God). In short, texts need to be edited, translated, studied, compared with each other and read keeping in sight the goal of understanding the phenomenon of the convergence of theism and atheism.

Why at all should it be studied? The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila Bhaṭṭa writes that without a purpose, even a foolish does not act, and in fact Sanskrit authors regularly announce at the beginning of their treatises the proximate and remote purpose of their works. In the present case, the proximate cause is the desire to understand the interactions between atheism and theism by looking at them from an unexpected perspective and to throw light on a fundamental chapter in the history of South Asian philosophy.

As a scholar of Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā I am well aware of how the normative is often disguised as descriptive. “It is seven o’ clock” says the mother, but what she means is rather “Get up! You have to go to school”.

Similarly, complex discourses about the nature of philosophy, how it was born, e.g., in Greece or in Plato’s Republic, and how it developed in (Latin), German, (French) and English, are only meant to say “We are not going to welcome colleagues working on things we do not care for in our departments”. Why so? Because as soon as one tries to reason with the authors of the allegedly descriptive statements (as done here by Ethan Mills and here by Amod Lele), one gets answers such as “the universality of philosophy”, “the primacy of logical argumentation”, “the importance of debate”, “the supremacy of reason over tradition” etc. All of them can be easily found at least in some Indian schools. I am not saying that they are not found in African, Chinese, Mesoamerican philosophy, I am just saying that no matter how restrictive your definition of philosophy, Navya Nyāya, etc., will fit in. Conversely, Thomas the Aquinas, Augustine, Nietzsche etc. will end up being excluded by such definitions. Thus, the argument is in fact overtly not descriptive.

Does it mean that we should try to make philosophers accept at least Navya Nyāya etc? Or should we rather uncover the normativity of the discourse and call for a broader definition of the enterprise of philosophy?

UPDATE: An insightful discussion of the same issue, with extensive quotes and critical reflections about them can be read in Malcolm Keating’s blog, here.
Eric Schwitzgebel offers further interesting reflections on the issue in his blog (be sure to check the comments and his accurate replies to the “ignorance justifying ignorance” argument, as well as the labels for the “not really philosophy” and “low quality” arguments).
SECOND UPDATE: “Prof Manners” has an interesting post here explaining that articles trying to say that Confucius is not “philosophical” because philosophy is x, y, z in fact only list “generally desirable and admiration-worthy qualities”.

What do readers think? Do we need more dialogues (with whatever tradition), more space for the great traditions of Indian philosophy, etc., or a little of both?

from http://sebersole.wordpress.com

(i.e., an invention of contemporary Western-trained Buddhists). The question is in itself interesting, but the discussion it triggered is even more, since Jayarava (who blogs here) added the problem of the possible inconsistency of the doctrine of karman if one denies the continuity of the self. That there is a problem cannot be denied: Why should we care about the karman our actions accumulate, if it is not going to affect “us”?

Now, I am tempted to answer that we should care, just like we should care for global warming, although it is not going to affect us. We should start thinking altruistically about future human beings and their well-being. Similarly, if I were a 5th c. Buddhist, I would want to avoid accumulating bad karman, since this would lead to bad consequences, although not for me (since I do not exist). Incidentally, one might add that I do not care for the consequences of global warming on future generations just because I am deluded and think of them a substantial selves very much different from my self. Once I realise that there is no continuity in what I consider to be my self, I will probably cease seeing the discontinuity as so sharf. Jayarava replied to the above point by saying that this would not motivate anyone to be moral —in fact, global warning does not seem to motivate most people to act for the benefit of other people in the future. I agree that it does not motivate normal (i.e., deluded) people, who only act for the sake of their non-existent self, but I think that it could motivate people who have undertaken the Buddhist path and are becoming aware of the reality of anātmatā. I agree with Jayarava that normal people will need to think of karman as something regarding themselves and that in this sense there are two parallel narratives in Buddhist texts (one about anātmatā and one about morality—which presupposes an enduring self). However, as someone who methodologically tries to make as much sense as possible of the texts she reads, I feel compelled to try to find a possible way to avoid the contradiction —and the global warning parallel comes to my mind as a suitable one.

However, another commenter, Jim Wilton, takes a different line of defense, namely, he says that the idea of a permanent self as a support for the continuity of karman is a sort of a merciful lie, needed for us, deluded people, although its falsity is clear to the Bodhisattva who utters it. Jayarava replies that he does not want a patronalising Bodhisattva treat him like a child. This is an interesting (and appealing —at least to me) reaction. Thus, I wonder:

Does the doctrine of upāyakaśalya imply or at least justify merciful lies?

from http://www.popsci.com/should-animals-same-rights-people

1. If, in fact, humans have more rights than animals because they are the dominant group, then this resembles very much racism or any other dominion of one group over the other.
2. If, by contrast, humans have more rights than animals because they are different than animals, then what does this difference consist of? If it amounts to rationality, should psychically empaired human beings have no rights?

Since after the end of the Nazi experiments a (more or less) general consensus has been achieved about the fact that psychically empaired human beings deserve the same rights, one is led back either to No. 1 or to a different basis of the human claim for rights. This could be Peter Singer’s claim that one’s moral stand should be calculated not on the basis of one’s ability to reach a soteriological goal or one’s rational value but on the basis of one’s ability of experiencing pain (Singer 1975). This includes psychically empaired human beings. But it also includes at least many animals (one might argue about the fact that many invertebrates with no nerve ganglia cannot literally speaking experience pain).

The discussion about the inclusion of animals within the realm of beings to whom human rights can be ascribed, thus, seems to hit a nerve in Western thought. It seems that no straight line can be legitimately drawn to separate animals and humans and that there is more a net of family resemblances than a straight opposition between the two groups (a dolphin or a gorilla, just to take an obvious example, seem to me to resemble a human being much more than they resemble an amoeba, although all three can be used for the sake of medical research or kept in zoo-like institutions).

The situation is slighly different in other traditions of thought. In Classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, for instance, the idea that we have stronger obligations towards the members of our extended family and towards further “proximate” people is a viable option and one could easily extend this model to animals, so that it would be legitimate to attribute rights first to the members of our families, then to members of our communities, then to further human beings, then to pet-animals, then to further animals with whom we are somehow connected and only at last to further animals. However, this option clashes with the Western ambition of building a universal ethical system, does not it?*

I wrote about Indian reflections on this topic in a forthcoming article (a preliminary draft of which is available here), where I basically argue that most Indian thinkers seem to see non-human and human animals along a hierarchical sequence with no brisk interruption.
Daya Krishna connects this with the utilitaristic approach to knowledge which characterises most Indian explicit reflections about it:

The usual Indian analysis is centered around the hedonistic view of human nature which sees it as naturally seeking pleasure and avoding pain and has a pragmatic view of knowledge which sees the `truth’ of knowledge in terms of its ability to avoid pain and afford pleasure to the humanking. But on this view no distinction is possible between the human and the animal world as the latter also is supposed to seek pleasure or avoid pain and `sees’ the `truth’ of its knowledge in terms of the `success’ achieved by it in this enterprise. In fact, the whole learning theory in modern psychology and the training of animals is based on this premiss (2004, p. 237)

Let me just add that Daya Krishna is thinking of the first aphorism in the foundational text of the Nyāya school (NS 1.1.1), where knowledge is linked to the achievement of one’s summum bonum. In another philosophical school, the Mīmāṃsā, animals are also considered on the same level as humans when it comes to the fact of desiring happiness (PMS chapter 6).

* I am grateful to L.E. for having discussed this topic with me. For a critical discussion of the concept of “rights”, see Amod Lele’s discussion here (and in the previous posts). On why I am citing Daya Krishna, see this post. Within Chinese philosophy, on Confucius vs. Mozi regarding the universality of rights see this post by Eric Schwitzgebel.

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