Anyone who is familiar with premodern Indian philosophy written in Sanskrit knows that philosophers were not above using insults in their work. J.M. Verpoorten (2002) has a paper collecting these insults, which include akṛta-buddhi (having an unformed mind), paśu (animal, Continue reading
Via Warp, Weft, and Way, from the editor of British Journal of History of Philosophy on its 25th anniversary (bolding is mine): As we move forward, what we would like to promote, above all, is more work on non-Western philosophy, Continue reading
In my previous post about the way the mind’s automatic processes get things wrong (and how that point is important to Buddhists), I turned to the experiments of Daniel Kahneman (and Amos Tversky) on false cognition. I claimed that the Continue reading
Dear Indian Philosophy Bloggers and Readers I would like to share with you news of my in-press book. It is scheduled to be out in July, which is late to be considered for September teaching and research, so I thought Continue reading
I’ve been thinking further on the decision/capacity distinction first articulated by Andrew Ollett, and I want to take a further step. So far Andrew and I have merely acknowledged the existence of this distinction – identifying different thinkers on either Continue reading
In her recent post on theories of sentence meaning in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā, Elisa talked about a possible “contemporary Prābhākara” viewpoint about sentence meaning: …a contemporary Prābhākara might suggest that some preliminary understanding of word-meaning is immediately denoted by each word, Continue reading
Buddhist texts frequently stress the liberating power of prajñā or paññā, metaphysical insight. It is one of the three major components of the path in early texts, one of the six perfections in Mahāyāna. To know the truth about existence Continue reading
At the beginning of January, I traveled from Singapore to Kolkata to join a group of scholars from around India as well as the US and New Zealand–this was for a seminar at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture that Continue reading
Let me begin with a guessing game, for those readers who consider themselves relatively widely read in philosophy. I am thinking of a text that examines two different views of human beings. It examines on one hand the view that Continue reading
Next week I’m very pleased to be participating in a seminar at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute, Kolkata, along with co-blogger Anand Vaidya and a range of esteemed scholars (see program here). Jaysankar Lal Shaw, whose work was recently collected in Continue reading