Remembering Anand Vaidya

We are extremely sad to report that Anand Jayprakash Vaidya passed away on Oct. 11, 2024. He was Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University, champion for integrating Indian philosophy into the larger discipline, and a contributor to this blog.

You can find more details about him in this obituary on Daily Nous and on his website.

We decided the best way to honor Anand on the Indian Philosophy Blog would be to create a post here where his many friends, colleagues, and collaborators could share their memories and thoughts about Anand’s life, work, and legacy.

Please feel free to leave a comment on this post if you would like to share anything about Anand, whether you were a friend, colleague, or simply an admirer of his work.

6 Replies to “Remembering Anand Vaidya”

  1. I was friends with Anand for almost ten years. We first met and bonded at a conference in 2015, where we talked about philosophy in the hotel bar (a not uncommon occurrence that was reiterated several times at conferences around the world, most recently in San Francisco in the spring of 2023).

    Anand was a specialist in areas that some academic philosophers would consider “core areas” of the discipline: epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and so on within the analytic tradition of philosophy.

    Anand and I disagreed to some extent about whether “analytic philosophy” is necessarily continuous with “Western philosophy.” I tend to think that association runs deep in ways that most analytic philosophers don’t recognize (often due to their antipathy toward history of philosophy), but Anand usually seemed to think that if you take philosophical analysis as a method, you find that method (or something like it) in many philosophical traditions. He was especially interested in South Asian philosophy. But he also inspired me and many others to take other traditions seriously, like Mesoamerican, Maori, Native American, Islamic, African, and other traditions.

    It might sound odd to discuss this point of disagreement while honoring Anand. But if you knew Anand, disagreement and debate are the best ways to honor him.

    He loved to talk about philosophy, which he always did without the slightest shred of egoistic attachment to his own ideas or animosity toward the ideas of others. With Anand, it was always about the ideas themselves. He had a pure love for philosophy that the vicissitudes of academia dim in the rest of us.

    Anand was probably the most supportive colleague I’ve ever had. I could talk about how he organized a whole panel on my book at an APA in 2019, or how he encouraged me to submit my work in venues I normally wouldn’t consider. I could talk about he encouraged me, along with his wife Manju, to cofound the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, a society I hope to carry on in his honor with more events in the future.

    I could talk about all that. But I wouldn’t be the only one. I’ve always known he was supportive of others, but in the days since his passing, I’ve discovered that he was as supportive for many others as he was for me. I hope others will share here the ways that Anand supported them.

    The incentive structures of academia tend not to reward such supportive and collaborative action, but Anand was always trying to reach out and forge bridges between different colleagues and areas of philosophy. He often talked about how much he wished his colleagues in all areas of philosophy would walk across the hall at conferences and attend each other’s talks and engage with each other’s work.

    About a year ago Anand told me about his cancer. The last time I talked to him on the phone, he sounded optimistic despite the seriousness of his diagnosis. He was under no illusion about his odds, but he was still making plans for future projects.

    His cancer treatment left him unable to travel, which was a major blow. He was one of the best traveled academics I’ve ever known. He was always off to India, New Zealand, Europe, etc. to give talks that no doubt stimulated audiences everywhere.

    Luckily I was able to send him a brief video message toward the end of his life. I thanked him for being such a supportive colleague, a great philosopher, and above all an excellent friend and human being.

    The discipline is worse off without him. And I will miss him. Farewell, my friend.

  2. I got to know and interact with Prof. Anand Vaidya for hardly few months (since July this year). He was a fine person, a brilliant philosopher, keen on learning about Vedanta from the perspective of traditionalists. With me, he was interested in the traditional interpretations of knowledge in Shankara and Ramanuja. We were to resume our conversations, thereafter on aprthak-siddhi of Ramanuja. It is very sad that after a long silence I learned that he was no more. Om Shanti.

  3. Anand and I became friends after he wrote an article in 2013 engaging with a paper I had written the year before. I reached out to him after I had read it, with some notes of appreciation and some gentle disagreements, but from the outset our relationship was friendly and appreciative on both sides. I’m grateful for how seriously he took my work at that early stage of my career–it meant a lot–and, further, for the way he used his talents as an analytic philosopher and comparative philosopher to advance the cause of Indian philosophy in the discipline.

    In our interactions, Anand was unfailingly humble and willing to learn just as he was creative, insightful, and bold in his thinking. One of his last published pieces was part of a collection that Malcolm Keating and I put together in honor of Stephen Phillips, happily bringing together some friends and shared philosophical passions a final time. He was a good person and a good philosopher, and he will be missed.

  4. Anand was, as Ethan says, incredibly generous and supportive. He traveled to two workshops for books of mine (one of which he was contributing to, but the other was merely a manuscript-in-progress workshop). He would always read a draft and then Zoom about it, and then read another version and talk again. And, on the flip side, he was happy to have comments on his work. I have fond memories of time with him in Kanazawa, Calcutta, Singapore, San Francisco, and many other places. He made friends everywhere he went, it seemed.

    In so many ways, he was the kind of academic—and person—I aspire to be, and the times I spent with him always encouraged me to be a better version of myself (both academically and personally). It wasn’t simply his intelligence (though that was admirable), it was his openness to others and the lack of ego in his work. If he didn’t know something, he would say so. He’d ask questions without fear. He was interested in ideas and people. I hope that those of us who remain can continue his work, and do so in the spirit with which he engaged in it.

  5. I met Anand first in Vienna, when he contacted me and suggested that we had dinner together. We then spent a week together in Singapore at a workshop organised by Malcolm Keating (see his comment above) and we met again in Vienna thereafter.
    In all these occasions, I have been disagreeing with Anand about many issues (from the existence of discussions about modality in Sanskrit philosophy to arthāpatti being a source of knowledge or not), but in all cases Anand was ready to discuss and even to rethink his positions. He did not seem to be attached to any position a priori, but to be passionate about the debate itself. Moreover, he had all the nice qualities often associated with extrovert people, such as being able to be open about his family story, as well as being warm and welcoming, but without overwhelming others. His service to the cause of Sanskrit philosophy is hard to overestimate, since he seemed to be tireless whenever it came to present at conferences, contribute to panels and articles, always ready to make Sanskrit philosophy part of the current “philosophical conversation” and to connect it to presently debated issues.

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