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.

• Esther Solomon, Indian Dialectics. Methods of Philosophical Discussion (Ahmedabad: B.J. Institute of Learning and Research) 1976;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Modes of debate and refutation of adversaries in classical and medieval India: a preliminary investigation”, Antiquorum Philosophia 1 (2007), 269-280;
• Johannes Bronkhorst, “Does India think differently?”, in Denkt Asien anders? Reflexionen zu Buddhismus und Konfizianismus in Indien, Tibet, China und Japan, edited by Birgit Kellner and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2009), 45–54;
• Sung Yong Kang, Die Debatte im alten Indien. Untersuchungen in der Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna 8.15-28 (Reinbeck: Wezler 2003);
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate in the Context of Indian Medical History: Towards a Critical Edition of the Carakasaṃhitā”, in Encyclopedia of Indian Wisdom. Prof. Satya Vrat Shastri felicitation volume, edited by Rāma Karaṇa Śarmā (Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan 2005), 394-403;
• Bimal Krishna Matilal, “Debate and Dialectic in Ancient India”, in Philosophical Essays. Professor Anantalal Thakur Felicitation Volume, edited by Ramaranjan Mukherji (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1987), 53-66;
• Gerhard Oberhammer, “Ein Beitrag zu den Vāda-Traditionen Indiens”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Süd- und Ost-Asiens 7 (1963), 63-103;
• Karin Preisendanz, “Debate and Independent Reasoning vs. Tradition: On the Precarious Position of Early Nyāya”, in Harānandalaharī. Volume in Honour of Professor Minoru Hara on his Seventieth Birthday edited by Ryutaro Tsuchida and Albrecht Wezler (Reibeck: Wezler 2000), 221-251;
• Ernst Prets, “Theories of Debate, Proof and Counter-Proof in the Early Indian Dialectical Tradition”, Studia Indologiczne 7 (2000), 369-382;
• Ernst Prets “Futile and False Rejoinders, Sophistical Arguments and Early Indian Logic”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 29.5 (2001), 545-558;
• Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Solomon’s book is a classic, although somewhat outdated reference book on the topic of dialectics in Nyāya and in other schools.
Among the other authors, Bronkhorst suggests 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). Kang and Prets (“Theories of Debate”) focus on the (indigenous) roots of dialectics in the medical tradition, where a discussion (called sambhāṣā ‘conversation’) among practitioners was meant to establish the truth about the patient’s condition through the evidence at hand (their symptoms), whereas the term vāda meant a hostile debate and included the subgroups of jalpa and vitaṇḍā). Oberhammer, Preisendanz, Prets and Nicholson focus on the early history of vāda and its more technical elements.
All of these scholars agree on the presence of hostile (‘agonistic’ in Nicholson’s book) and collaborative (‘non-agonistic’) forms of dialogue in pre-Classical and Classical Indian Philosophy, with the latter possibly having developed out of the former (see the Conclusions in Nicholson’s book).
B.K. Matilal (1935–1991), himself an analytic philosopher and a scholar of Indian logic and philosophy in general, performed a move similar to that of Daya Krishna, insofar as he focused on the epistemological potential of vāda (although, differently from Daya Krishna, he did not exploit the creativity of this concept in different contexts).

1. Because he is a philosopher
2. Because he deals with texts of other schools and thus aims at being understandable
3. Because he is a talented writer

But what should you read in order to better understand Jayanta?

• Graheli 2012 (OA on JIPh) gives you a comprehensive overview of the manuscript sources. Graheli 2011 (RSO) and his forthcoming book further elaborate on which manuscripts and editions you can rely upon.
• Kei Kataoka has published (mostly alone, but in a few cases together with other scholars, such as Alex Watson and myself) an impressive list of editions, (English and Japanese) translations and studies on various parts of the Nyāyamañjarī. You can find them all listed on his blog. Most of them can also be downloaded from there.
• Jonardon Ganeri has dedicated various articles (see, e.g., Ganeri 1996 on JIPh) on the issue of meaning in the Nyāyamañjarī.*
• Similarly, P.K. Sen dedicated several interesting essays to the philosophy of language of Jayanta, see especially Sen 2005 and, if you can read Bengali, his 2008 translation of the fifth book.
• For a historical overview on Jayanta, you can read Slaje 1986 and the introduction of Dezső 2005 (Clay Sanskrit Library), which is an enjoyable translation of a philosophical drama by Jayanta.
• Should you be able to read Gujaratī, Nagin Shah’s translation of the Nyāyamañjarī is the best one, so far (in my opinion) (Shah 1975–1992). English readers can get some sense of it through Shah’s book-long study (1992–1997).

*By the way, should you need some foundations on Indian theories of language, you can think of reading Chakrabarti’s short Introduction to this topic (JIPh 1989) and then Matilal and Sen 1988.

]]> https://elisafreschi.com/2015/09/28/basic-bibliography-for-bha%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada-jayanta/feed/ 0 1962 https://elisafreschi.com/2015/04/10/why-daya-krishna/ https://elisafreschi.com/2015/04/10/why-daya-krishna/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2015 07:49:52 +0000 elisa freschi http://elisafreschi.com/?p=1600 I just noticed that the one I published yesterday was my tenth post on Daya Krishna. Since I usually dedicate that many posts only to Classical Indian philosophers, this might demand some explanations. Why engaging with contemporary Indian philosophers? And why Daya Krishna in particular?

I am generally interested in thinking people, who often happen to be philosophers, but might as well be anthropologists, linguists, scientists and so on, and in this sense I will not start by explaining why on earth I read philosophical texts. However, I have to admit that I started reading contemporary Indian philosophers (back in 2002) because I hoped to better understand classical Indian philosophy through their eyes. Even before that time, I had read B.K. Matilal’s works or J.N. Mohanty’s ones (not to speak of J. Ganeri’s ones) not for Matilal’s or Mohanty’s sake, but as a way of approaching Nyāya, Navya Nyāya or phenomenology. Reading K.C. Bhattacharya seemed to me like a continuation of that line of thought (following the steps of great forerunners). However, K.C. Bhattacharya proved to be too difficult to work as a doorway to something else and too interesting not to be read for his own sake.

Long story short: I read Daya Krishna (and further contemporary Indian philosophers) for their own sake, as I would read Kripke or Austin. No matter what he engages in, he offers an ever-fresh vision of things, relentlessly looking for what a text or an idea mean and not just for what one is used to think that they should mean. Daya Krishna’s work blossoms with openness to the “other” point of view hiding in texts, ideas or concepts: He is not content with the usual or the conventional and is clearly annoyed by whoever is. He constantly seeks for a counter-perspective, and should his ideas have become mainstream in one or the other field, he would have probably challenged his audience to question them again, always looking for prairies of thinking which could have allowed room for creative and yet rigorous enquires.

On top of that, Daya Krishna has for me the additional appeal of being interested in things I myself find interesting, such as Nyāya’s epistemology or Mīmāṃsā’s difficult relation with ritualists —something very rare in other philosophers who, especially in the West, are often rather pray to the fascination of the “new” and would not spend too much energy in the exegesis of an obscure school of Indian philosophy. By contrast, Daya Krishna does not seem to be ready to close a topic unless he has fully understood what is at stake, no matter if this has become outdated by new researches in the meantime (think of his invitations to Kashmir Sufis who were and are for opposite reasons —being too much or too little “Islamic”— often neglected both in Pakistani and Indian philosophical and theological discourses).

]]> https://elisafreschi.com/2015/04/10/why-daya-krishna/feed/ 5 1600 https://elisafreschi.com/2015/02/23/is-there-philosophy-in-india-and-what-this-question-tells-us-an-essay-by-ankur-barua/ https://elisafreschi.com/2015/02/23/is-there-philosophy-in-india-and-what-this-question-tells-us-an-essay-by-ankur-barua/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2015 10:55:00 +0000 elisa freschi http://elisafreschi.com/?p=1453 After many years, I am sort of fed up with having to answer the question above, and this is also why I had not read the essay by Barua (bearing the title Is there ‘Philosophy’ in India? An Exercise in Meta-Philosophy and available here) until he recommended it to me. In fact, the article tells more about what it means to ask the question, than about the answer (which is a straightforward “yes”).

First, the question bears on the distinction between faith and reason and theology and philosophy (and the consequent dismissal of Indian philosophy as a quest for liberation, mystical etc.):

[There is an] often-heard criticism that classical Indian thought cannot be characterised as an intellctually acceptable branch of ‘academic philosophy’ becayse it is entangled with ‘religion’ (p. 14).

And already on the first page, Barua speaks of the parallel condemnation of the medieval Scholasticism and of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas:

The Schoolmen are not ‘philosophers’ because they are Churchmen whose point of departure is a specific Christian world-view, and hence thier learned treatises are to be cognised, as David Hume famously put it, to the withering flames of logical analysis.

Thus,

Anglophone philosophy’s rejection of its internal other, medieval Scholasticism, is paralleled by its suspicion of its external other, Indian darśana —both are supposed to be fatally implicated in Metaphysics, Authority and Tradition (pp. 14–15).

This conclusion supports the more general point that “philosophy is not a natural kind” (p. 6) and that, thus,

Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude (Russell 1975:7, quoted at p. 7).

In this sense, the question at the title of this post opens an exercise in meta-philosophy (“What do we expect ‘philosophy’ to mean?”). As for the possiblity of detecting “philosophy” in India,

as it often happens with the translation of terms which are richly woven into one specific cultural universe into those of another cultural universe, we may argue that terms such as darśana and ānvīkṣikī are ‘not the same, and yet not another’ from philosophia (p. 27).

But this by no means means that one should refrain from using the word “philosophy” while speaking of Indian schools and discussions. On the one hand, as shown by Barua, the soteriological commitment of several Indian schools does not mean that they did not engage in philosophical arguments about the issues deriving from such a commitment (e.g., the nature of reality and of the self). On the other (at last, in the present writer opinion),

As for western philosophers themselves, in the wake of Kuhn and other thinkers who have developed various froms of social epistemology, they have become less shy of speaking of authoritative testimony (pp. 27–28).

As for the sociality of the scientific enterprise, this article focusing on the Western scenario by Dominik Wujastyk is also worth mentioning.

Beside the above, Barua’s essay also deals with several instances of debates both in India and in the West. Barua refers to J. Ganeri’s point that we have to “rescu[e] a story suppressed by Orientalism — the story of reason in a land too often defined as reason’s Other” (Ganeri 2001: 4, quoted at p. 26). Nonetheless, whereas Ganeri and Matilal dealt with the accusation that Indian thought is just mysticism by showing its rigour, Barua recurs to Hadot and shows that also in the West philosophy does not need to be disinterested and pure theoresis. Section “C” is in fact a long discussion of Augustine’s conception of time and of how his philosophical reflections are not “an exercise in idle speculation but are closely related to his exegetical struggles with the Biblical text” (p. 12).

A further, personal comment: Some time ago, a friend has been interviewed for a leader position in an institute for Asian thought. She said she would like the institute to have a “philosophical focus” and one of the people in the committee (who does not work on philosophy) rebutted that using the word “philosophy” could be suspected of a “colonialist attitude”, since “philosophy” is a Western concept. I am sure this objection was well-meant, but I am suspicious of its consequences, namely the implicit statement that only Westerners are able to think philosophically. While thinking we are fair and diversity-aware, we are in fact delegitimizing centuries of philosophical elaborations by refusing to call them “philosophy” just because they happened to take place East of Suez.

CAVEAT LECTOR: These are only my personal reflections on this topic and my reading of Barua’s article. Don’t read in the article anything but what is explicitly said in it.

]]> https://elisafreschi.com/2015/02/23/is-there-philosophy-in-india-and-what-this-question-tells-us-an-essay-by-ankur-barua/feed/ 10 1453