Epistemology, Śrīvaiṣṇavism and Comparative Philosophy at my new blog

Epistemology
This post deals with the epistemology of public shaming.
This post deals with arthāpatti and inference.
These two posts discuss expert knowledge (as in the case of gemmologists who recognise gems perceptually) in Sanskrit sources (especially Vedānta Deśika and Kumārila and Dharmakīrti).

This post discusses whether one can understand a sentence without believing its content to be the case.
This post discusses language as an instrument of knowledge.
This post discusses sentences and sentence-meaning according to Śabara.
This post discusses words as instruments of knowledge according to Śabara.


Śrīvaiṣṇavism and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
A tentative hypothesis about its reconstruction is discussed here.
This post focuses on the three different narratives about the reconstruction of the history of Śrīvaiṣṇavism.
This post discusses the Teṅkalai position about one's absolute love for God.
This post discusses Vedānta Deśika's relation to Nyāya.
This post is dedicated to the ways to know about God.


Comparative Philosophy
Graham Priest explains here why one should study Asian philosophy.
This post discusses whether there are infinite philosophies (African, Australian…) or whether there are just a few philosophical traditions (Greek, German, Indian…).
This post focuses on the issue of narrative as a way to overcome the crudity of pure philosophy (with references to the Islamic world).
This post discusses humans (as) animal beings.

Methodology of translations from Sanskrit
This post focuses on the translation from Sanskrit.
This post discusses the differences between jñā- and vid-.
This post discusses the history of the expression padavākyapramāṇa-.


Long sellers: Quotations and Daya Krishna
This post is dedicated to reuse in the history of art.
This post discusses my reasons for engaging with Daya Krishna's thought.

You can find further short posts, Call for papers, quotes, etc., at my new blog.

In the last few months I wrote mainly about comparative philosophy, arthāpatti, deontic logic and methodology…

Comparative and Western Philosophy
Why should one engage in non-Western philosophical ideas? The topic is discussed at my new blog, here. On a related line, this post discusses "common sense" and asks whether it is not just "English common sense", this one discusses common prejudices about Indian philosophy, and this post discusses Ankur Barua's discussion on whether there is Philosophy in India. The 172nd Philosophers' Carnival has been, by the way, also hosted on my new blog, here.
This post discusses the McGurk philosophy as an evidence of savikalpa pratyakṣa.

Methodology
As for methodology, this post discusses edited books, for both editors and contributors and this one discusses the methodology of group translations. By the way, in case you are looking for an Indological job, don't miss this post.

Arthāpatti
I recently started a new project on an instrument of knowledge called by Mīmāṃsā authors arthāpatti 'cogent evidence'. You can read about it here, here and here (discussing Kumārila's point of view)

Deontic Logic
As for the deontic logic project, you can read about it here, here (on necessity in Mīmāṃsā) and here (on dyadic conditions).

Great authors
This semester, I am teaching Kumārila's Ślokavārttika. Thus, I get inspired to write this post.
This post discusses a line by Veṅkaṭanātha.
This one discusses Daya Krishna's view of the Nyāyasūtra.

You can find further shorter posts, book announcements, CfP and the like at my new blog.

Deontic logic, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and comparative philosophy

Until the end of February, I will be mainly busy working on dentic logic in Mīmāṃsā. You can read about my musings on this topic here (on hermeneutic principles in Mīmāṃsā), here (on prohibitions), here (on the principle of parsimony) and here (on conditional obligations in Mīmāṃsā).
Here you can read some thoughs on comparative philosophy.
You can read here my thoughts on free will in Rāmānuja.

IABS, IDhC conferences and other posts (including various CfP)

You can find a summary of my posts on the IABS (International Association of Buddhist Studies) Conference on my new blog, here.
You can find a summary of my posts on the IDhC (International Dharmakīrti Conference) on my new blog, here.
Further, you can find a post on bhakti and Daya Krishna here.
A post on common misunderstandings of Mīmāṃsā can be read here.
Are you interested in philosophy and epistemology of language and in testimony? Read this CfP.
The Call for Papers for the next CBC can be read here.

Be sure to check my new blog's archives for August and September for further short posts.

A new post on Hayagrīva and further interesting ones

You can read my June posts (on Mīmāṃsā's theory of language, Hayagrīva, Bogdan Diaconescu, Editing proofs, Veṅkaṭanātha's Buddhist quotes and Philosophy) at my new blog, here.

Will the journey ever come to its goal? On comparative theology in Clooney 2013

How does one compare theological poetry? Some thoughts can be read at my new blog, here.

Doing research on free-will in Indian philosophy

As a scholar trained in Western Academia, one has at least three choices while dealing with Sanskrit Philosophy:

1. One can treat it as if it were Western philosophy and discuss, e.g., of monotonic or non-monotonic logic in Nyāya,
2. One can deal with it in its own terms, e.g., by describing the inner-Mīmāṃsā controversy about whether one has to study the Veda because of the prescription to study it or because of the prescription to teach it (since, in order for someone to teach, someone else must be learning from him),
3. One can attempt a compromise, looking for how a certain topic is configured in Sanskrit philosophy.
4.  

Please read the rest at my new blog.

शब्दविषये रसेल(Russell)मत: संस्कृतायां वाचि निरूपितः

इह पठनीयः ।

Investigatio semper reformanda

Should we try to periodise Indian philosophy or shall we give up any attempt, since each one will be criticised and is in some respect flawed? Periodisation, as recently highlighted by Julius Lipner, is a form of classification and as such also a form of controlling (Lipner 2013).
Please read the rest at my new blog, here.

Do you wish you had a job instead of Christmas presents? Check here!

The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia, USA) looks for a faculty member specializing in Asian Philosophy. Please read the rest at my new blog, here.

Where are the Yoga philosophers?

Today I read in Philipp Maas's contribution to Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy (edited by Eli Franco) an intriguing critique of Colebrook and of all the Indologists who, seemingly following him, thought that there was nothing philosophical in Yoga apart from its Sāṅkhya component and that what was typical of Yoga alone was not philosophical.
Is it really the case? Read the rest at my new blog, here.

Disciplines, Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity etc. in Sanskrit (and) Philosophy

If you have ever felt comfortable in one discipline… lucky you!

If not,  please read the rest of this post at my new blog, here.

9th Annual International Conference on Philosophy, 26-29 May 2014, Athens, Greece

I keep on thinking that one should prepare a panel on Indian philosophy for one of these conferences, but it is always too late when I finally remember it. Perhaps next year? Or do you have something ready?
Please read the full post at my new blog, here.

"Philosophy is the only thing alive''. An interview with Aleix Ruiz-Falqués (part 2)

Aleix Ruiz-Falqués (his blog is here) studies (in Cambridge) Pāli Grammatical Literature written in Burma. He is an engaged scholar and one who is not shy to get involved in controversies about ideas. You can read the first part of this interview here. This time I will be asking him more general (and more provocative) questions.
EF: In some of your posts (see here and here), you seem to be quite sceptical about Anthropology as applied to Buddhism (i.e., you seem to share the textual-based approach you described in the first part of your interview). You also exhibited some scepticism concerning comparative philosophy and comparatism in general. How do you see interactions with people outside your field? Are they still possible, these premisses notwithstanding?
ARF: I'm ---more or less--- a philologist. Thus, I don't believe interdisciplinarity is something additional. It is part of the discipline, since you can't do philology without history, etc. The problem I have with other disciplines, sometimes, is that they try to answer philological questions without philology and I think that's not possible. One needs to read the texts.
For instance, I read some time ago about the idea of canon in Pāli. Some anthropologists have been disputing the fixed idea of canon meaning the Tipiṭaka as we know it. They claim that in some libraries in villages in Thailand you don't find the whole orthodox canon but just parts of it, and then other texts that are not usually called canonical (some call them apocryphal). Now, all this information is really interesting, but it has nothing to do with the idea of canon in Pāli scholarship in Pāli, and I don't know why some scholars are against accepting the fact that some ideas are fabricated by an élite and still that's how they are. What the villagers do is not important at all.
EF: In my opinion, we are just talking about different things. Whenever I give a talk I tend to say at the beginning that I am not talking about the Veda as it is, but only with its intellectual reflection within the works of an intellectual élite.
ARF: Moreover, against those who consider Philosophy dead I maintain the opposite: Philosophy is the only thing alive.
EF: I cannot but agree. Saying that philosophy is dead is just part of a philosophical discussion. But then: if you cannot avoid asking philosophical questions, whence your hostility to using philosophy in the case of Buddhist studies?
ARF: Because I don't think that there is "philosophy" but "philosophies" and they are mutually incompatible. Thus, I like "applying" the philosophy I consider correct and I dislike applying the philosophy I consider incorrect. I more or less follow the ideas of a Spanish philosopher called Gustavo Bueno, who says that Philosophy is a knowledge of second degree. Philosophy would be the critical analysis of previously received knowledge, preferably knowledge already systematized, but not necessarily so. There are many disciplines and sciences and the main job of philosophy is the critical analysis of what we know.

EF: Can't this critical analysis (insofar as it is critical) be a shared enterprise? Why does it need to have only, say, Burma as its precinct of application?
ARF: It could be a shared enterprise, and in fact I believe it can only be such. If you want to say that I seemed to imply that I don't need comparisons to study Burma, well, I know that's not true.
We all need to compare. My problem with comparative studies is different, it has to do with the logic behind it, the aims of this research and its results, which seem to me very dubious most of the time. For instance,  I talk to a friend about Buddhist monasticism and the friend says "Oh, yes, that happened in Europe as well..." and he gives me the Rule of Saint Benedict. Now, I think that's a perfectly good topic of research, but the sheer comparison, trying simply to point out similarities as if they meant something in themselves, this I think is pointless.
EF: Well, I would say that sheer comparison (A is found also in context B) is non interesting because it is plainly descriptive. In other words: everything descriptive is uninteresting. I am also terribly bored by articles about history of art if they say things like "this sculpture represents a naked woman holding an arch".
ARF: I totally agree! My favourite target is "Buddhism and Science" ("What Kant said was already realized by Lord Buddha"…).
EF: I know this questions scares many. Do you have an overall idea of what you want to achieve within your research area? Are there priorities in your work or do you let yourself be driven by your interests of the moment?
ARF: I think I know (but then I might change my mind), but yes, right now I have a crystal clear idea of what I would do. I would like to study Pāli literature written in Burma and Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, from a  historical perspective. There is far too much for one person, thus drop me a line if you are interested.
As far as I am concerned, I'll be happy if I could do these two things before I die:

1.  critical edition of Kaccāyanasuttaniddesa
2. A study of Ariyavaṃsa and his Abhidhamma commentary Maṇisāramañjūsā

EF: Did you obtain a scholarship to study in the UK? Has it been difficult? What did you do ''right'' (I am asking so that someone else might copy you)?
ARF: I knew from a friend that there were some scholarships offered by one of the most powerful financial institutions in Spain, which has a sort of Fund for social work, scholarships, etc. They give yearly 20 scholarships for Masters and PhDs. Thus, I applied for a scholarship to study abroad and I got it, probably because they wanted to be sure that the person they give the scholarship to is passionate about his/her topic. It is probably the most effective way to know that s/he will not give up. Thus, I was lucky.
EF:  You have been studying in Spain, India, UK and have been researching in Burma. What would you recommend to younger colleagues?
ARF: It depends on the case. In my case, to tell you the truth, I went to India because I didn't know how to manage in Europe. But then, the approach in Pune University was very much plunging into the texts, and in case of doubt, reading a Sanskrit commentary, forget about English secondary literature. And I really liked that! Therefore, I would recommend to know the methods of every place beforehand and choose the method which is more suitable to one's own temper and interests. I prefer reading the sources.

What would you recommend?
Interviews are posted each last Friday in a month. You can read the first one (to Michela Clemente) here and the first part of Aleix' interview here.

Secondary signification for Kumārila, Prabhākara and Rāmānuja

Can the Absolute be at the same time One and still be defined as existence, knowledge and bliss? Rāmānuja discusses this topic with an opponent in his Śrī Bhāṣya on Brahma Sūtra 1.1.1. The opponent says that if the Absolute brahman is only Oneness, then all attributes would end up as having to be understood only  metaphorically (lakṣaṇā). Rāmānuja replies that this would not be a problem, since contextual meaning (tātparyavṛtti) —which, we understand, includes the possibility of secondary signification (lakṣaṇā)— overrules direct meaning (abhidhānavṛtti):

Group blog on Sanskrit (and) Philosophy

I am firmly convinced that any purpose we might want to achieve within Sanskrit (and) philosophy can only be achieved through a joint effort (alone, we will never be influential enough). Further, working together means more fun:-) This is the foundation of the Coffee Break Project (see here) and I would like it to be the foundation also of a group blog on topics of Sanskrit (and) philosophy. It should work along the lines of other group blogs in the field of (Western) philosophy (see for instance: http://www.newappsblog.com/ or http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/) or of Chinese philosophy, see: http://warpweftandway.com/

Philosophical and Humanistic Jobs

The website philjobs (here) has just opened as an annex to philpapers.org. It already lists an enormous amount of jobs loosely related with philosophy, including many "open" positions in the Humanities. If you are looking for a job/a scholarship, or if you are looking for a new collaborator within a project, have a look at it!

Goldberg and the problem of Anonymous Assertions

If one studies Indian accounts of Linguistic Communication as instrument of knowledge (śābda) one is immediately confronted with two different paradigms:

• the Nyāya paradigm, according to which an act of linguistic communication conveys knowledge if it is uttered by a reliable speaker.
• the Mīmāṃsā paradigm, according to which an act of linguistic communciation conveys knowledge, until and unless a flaw in the speaker interrupts this ability.

The first account presupposes a parataḥ prāmāṇya 'extrinsic validity' theory, that is, on the idea that an instrument of cognition becomes able to bestow knowledge only if connected with some external factors "enhancing" it, e.g., in the case of Linguistic Communication, a reliable speaker. The second account relies on a svataḥ prāmāṇya 'intrinsic validity' theory, that is, on the idea that an instrument of cognition is valid unless and until it is falsified.

This also entails that the Mīmāṃsā account can admit as valid the Veda (the Sacred Texts believed by Mīmāṃsā authors to be authorless and beginningless). In fact, since the Veda has no author, no author's flaw can ever invalidate it. By contrast, the claim that, e.g., the Buddhist Sacred Texts are reliable is easily invalidated, given that the very idea that their author, the Buddha, had access to unknowable realities such as dharma and karman can be easily falsified through an appeal to our common experience (where no one ever has access to unknowable realities) and to the inferential evidences about the fact that what is by itself unknowable cannot ever be intellectually grasped, even by enhanced sense- and intellectual faculties.

By contrast, the Nyāya school can only accept the Veda insofar as it regards it as authored by a reliable speaker (namely God).

Thus, it seems that if one wants to accept authorless assertions as valid, one needs to agree with the Mīmāṃsā authors and disagree with the Nyāya ones.

Similarly, a leading and thought-provoking scholar of epistemology, Sanford Goldberg, deals with Anonymous Assertions (forthcoming on Episteme, available here) relying on a theory which is quite close to the parataḥ prāmāṇya one, namely, on the idea that the validity of an assertion depends on an "epistemic norm", entailing the reliability of the speaker and the awareness of it by hearer and speaker at the same time ("in asserting something, the speaker performs an act regarding which it is common knowledge that her act was proper (warranted) only if she had the relevant epistemic authority", p. 6).

Now, what happens in the case of anonymous assertions?
1) That the speaker is not bound by any epistemic-norm-enforcing policy, since no one will be able to trace her back and hold her responsible for what she said or wrote.
2) That the audience is aware of that and has, consequently, grounds for scepticism.
Thus, "the hearer is unwarranted in thinking that the speaker satisfied the norm of assertion" (p. 27) and, consequently, anonymous assertions are (unless in particular cases), even if true, unable to convey justified beliefs.

Are there exceptions? Yes, and Goldberg (p. 29) mentions two:

• "the 'security wall' model": one where a security wall warrants for the reliability of anonymous assertions. Goldberg does not mention any example of it, but one might think of moderated blogs admitting only those anonymous assertions whose reliability has been checked.
• "the 'Wikipedia' model": one where the cost of correction is low and one can therefore hope that mistakes would have been detected.

Is this enough to make sense of all the reliable anonymous assertions we regularly encounter? I am not sure.
Let me start by listing them: Apart from the ones mentioned by Goldberg, one encounters anonymous assertions also in the case of editorials on newspapers (at least in continental Europe, the most influential articles are not signed), of encyclopaedic entries, of laws (where a pool of people is involved, many of which are not mentioned in the final text). (I will not deal with this last case, since Goldberg focuses only on assertions (and not on exhortations).)
An author would be more cautious while writing an anonymous editorial or an anonymous encyclopaedic entry than while writing a signed article, since much more is at stake. Signing an article means anchoring it (only) to its author, whereas letting it unsigned means entailing that the whole authority of the newspaper is at stake with it. Thus, the case of editorials and of encyclopaedias can be dealt with with the security wall model (i.e., it is the general reliability of a certain newspaper or encyclopaedia which vouches for the reliablity of each editorial or entry). However, they also hint at a further point, i.e., that in (Western) culture anonymity has long been a sign of authority (!), insofar as no limit to the authority is put.
This is even more evident in the case of Sacred Texts. Let us assume, as most historians do, that Sacred Texts (as, e.g., the Pāñcarātra Sāṃhitās) are authored by human authors. Let us also assume that these people were not only or not always driven by egoistic purposes, such as the desire to fool other people and/or gain money or influence in this way. Why would they nonetheless efface themselves in the works they write? Because, if they spoke as themselves, they would limit the authority of the final text to themselves. If this were the case, a certain text would be reliable insofar as its author is reliable, but not of the highest authority. Thus, it is easy to imagine that a certain person X would be careful while writing or teaching in his own name, but MUCH MORE SO while writing a Sacred Text deemed to depict an absolute Truth.

Can a justified true belief be based on an anonymous assertion? 

For another post on Western epistemology of testimony, see here (on J. Lackey). Similarly on testimony and justification, see this post. On the validity of Sacred Texts, see this post. To Linguistic Communication as instrument of knowledge is dedicated my first blog (in Italian), plus many posts on this blog labelled with "śabda".

Philpapers' discussions

I am now adding Philpapers to my essays to join Indian and Western philosophy in a single debate. You can read my first two threads here.

Why?
1. Because I try each path where Indian and Western philosophers can be met.
2. Because philpapers is a site developed by philosophers for philosophers.
3. Because, though slow, there are some discussions going on in it (for a comparation of Academia.edu and philpapers see this ---though not updated--- article).

For some of my similar attempts, check this post (and/or join me).

The context principle and some Indian controversies over Meaning —B.K. Matilal and P.K. Sen

The context principle and some Indian controversies over Meaning is a milestone in Indian studies, and in the history of their interaction with mainstream (i.e. Western) philosophy. Since it was published in 1988 on Mind (one of the top-5 journals in Philosophy, inaccessible for most authors), virtually everyone (in Indian philosophy) has read it.

Have you also re-read it?
I re-read it after some years this Summer and I have to admit that it was again a surprise. The article starts with a discussion of the Context principle in Frege and Quine (does the principle mean that words HAVE no meaning outside a sentence, or that their meaning can only be UNDERSTOOD within a sentence?). In this connection, M & S discuss a strong and a weak interpretation of the Context principle (according to whether it should answer the first or the second question). They end up saying that the strong interpretation clashes with Frege's later work (see below), whereas the weak interpretation (the context is only needed to understand the meaning of words) is trivial. Thus, an intermediate interpretation needs to be adopted, namely that "the meaning of a subsentential expression is nothing but its contribution to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs" (p. 80).

Next, Matilal and Sen discuss also Russell's On Denoting (another milestone of contemporary Philosophy of Language). I have to admit that I could not understand Matilal and Sen's treatment of it until I actually read Russell (but the fact of making a reader undertake further studies might be conceived as a further result of Matilal and Sen). Until M & S, in fact, I had always thought of Russell's philosophy of language as correspondentist, whereas M & S interpret Russell's strategy of reduction (through his "contextual definitions") as also (implicitly) presupposing some sort of Context principle.

A further step is the analysis of Frege. In fact, the Context principle seems to clash with the sense-reference distinction, outlined by Frege in his later work. M & S use Michael Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language to claim that both theses can co-exist: words' meanings are outer referents, but "we cannot say anything, in the strict sense of the word 'say', without the use of whole sentences" (p. 80). After a short excursus on Kant's unity of thought, Michael Dummett's book is also quoted to discuss the distinction between the Context principle and the Composition principle. According to the latter, the meaning of a sentence is the result of the composition of the words forming it.

Does this sound familiar? If not, it means that you have not been working on the Kumārila-Prabhākara-Bhartṛhari-Nyāya controversy on word- and sentence-meaning. In fact, as shown by M & S in the second part of their work (pp. 84--97), the Indian scenario also revolves on similar issues. Bhartṛhari is clearly an holist: for him the meaning of a sentence is a whole and word-meanings are only secondary abstractions. Kumārila and Prabhākara represent two different positions, possibly identifiable, respectively, with the weak and the intermediate interpretation of the Context principle.

This leads to a further problem, i.e., the link between linguistics and ontology. The topic is only hinted at at the end of M & S's article, but it is, in my opinion, the most thought-provoking contribution of the article (together with the very idea of joining Frege and Kumārila side by side in a philosophical debate).

In fact, if words express their meanings only once already related in the context of a sentence, as upheld by the Prābhākaras, what consequences does this have for the Prābhākara ontology? If, for instance, "cow" in "Bring the cow!" does not mean  a separate cow, but a cow insofar as it is related to the injunction of being brought, does this entail that a "cow-connected-with-the-injunction-of bringing" exists out there? What sort of cow would this be? Surely an incomplete cow, one which is completed by the injunction of bringing. Should one admit —for the sake of maintaining the correspondentism between meanings and outer world— that there are "unsaturated entities" out there?

My personal answer is that ontology is less relevant than linguistics for the Prābhākaras (unlike for most Western philosophers and common folks) and that, as a matter of fact, this sort of correspondentism is already ruled out by the Prābhākara stress on exhortations as the paradigm of all sentences.

What do you think? Can there be linguistics without ontology?
Moreover, methodologically speaking, I wonder why M & S has not been enough for further studies of this sort to be the rule on Mind (and other philosophical journals). Does this failure depend on their style? (Or should we just start working as a task-force and submit many articles of this kind?)

On ontology and Mīmāṃsā, see this post. On ontology in Indian philosophy in general, see this one.
As hinted at in the Introduction, this was not the first time I read M & S's article. You can read a further post about it (focusing on the Prābhākara linguistic theory) here. On Frege's and the Prābhākara philosophy of language, check this post.