A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
I have recently returned from a conference in India (the “Prakrit International Conference” or प्राकृत अंतर्राष्ट्रीय संमेलन्), about which I may or may not say more in a subsequent post, but I wanted to share this observation, which seems like Continue reading भारतीय दर्शन एवं भारतीय भाषाएं
I am a big fan of Paul Ricoeur. It’s shame, I think, that he never learned Sanskrit, because he was deeply interested in a number of issues that were of critical importance to Indian thinkers: the production of meaning through Continue reading Hermeneutics, “Ricoeurian” and “Jaiminīya,” and the Question of Writing
[The following is a guest post by Yigal Bronner and Andrew Ollett.] We would like to introduce the readers of this blog to the Pandit Project at www.panditproject.org. This is a new resource for students of the intellectual traditions of Continue reading Introducing the Pandit Project
On Sunday I was reading Sundarapāṇḍya’s Nītidviṣaṣṭika, an interesting collection of āryā verses on the subject of nīti (something like: how to act in the world), and later on caught up (very belatedly) on part of the debate occasioned by Continue reading Nīti and the two ways of “using” texts
Let’s say Devadatta is going to a party and brings a bottle of wine. When he gets there, he finds that Yajñadatta has already arrived—and that Yajñadatta has brought a bottle of the exact same wine that Devadatta picked up. Continue reading Artha: Semantics versus Pragmatics
About a year ago, I teamed up with my colleague Omar Farahat to do a roundtable discussion on the topic of the normativity of language in Mīmāṃsā and Uṣūl al-fiqh. The occasion was the annual graduate student conference of Columbia’s Continue reading Mīmāṃsā and Uṣūl al-fiqh: On comparison
I’ve just returned from a conference dedicated to “Digital Textualities in South Asia” at UBC. One of the main goals of the conference was to gauge what kinds of digital tools and resources are being developed in South Asian studies, Continue reading Digital Methods in the Study of Indian Philosophy
Mīmāṃsā has had a “split personality” for roughly the past millennium: interpretations generally follow one of the two great teachers, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa or Prabhākara Miśra, and attack the other. The historical development of these “two systems” still needs a good Continue reading Old Prābhākaras
I’m taking a cue from Malcolm’s contention that the tradition of poetics (alaṅkāraśāstra) can and should be brought into “philosophical” conversations. And since I recently attended a workshop in Jerusalem (organized by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Charles Hallisey) devoted Continue reading Daṇḍin and the Philosophy of Poetics
My title refers to a recent post on Language Log by Herb Terrace, which is a response to an article by Hauser et al. that appeared in Frontiers in Psychology last year. To review briefly: Hauser et al. argue that, Continue reading The origins of language: Akhaṇḍakhaṇḍanam