Does God have Free Will? Veṅkaṭanātha's answer

Can God have free will? If He has free will, then He is above everything, including the cosmic dharma, and the Vedas, which he might have chosen to be different than they are, and this patently contradicts the Mīmāṃsā standpoint. If not, than He is not a personal God, but rather the incarnation of Order (dharma), and this patently contradicts the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta standpoint. How can Veṅkaṭanātha, the eminent Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedāntin who wrote also Mīmāṃsā works, find a way out of this impasse?

Larry McCrea will hold a lecture on this fascinating topic in June in Vienna:

Larry McCrea
Does God Have Free Will?
Hermeneutics and Theology in the work of Vedāntadeśika

When:	Fr., 14. Juni, 15 Uhr
Where:	Institut für Südasien-, Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde (ISTB), Universität Wien
	Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2, Eingang 2.7, 1090 Wien
Organisation:	Elisa Freschi, Marion Rastelli, Marcus Schmücker (IKGA)
Cooperation:	ISTB, Universiät Wien

An abstract of the lecture can be read here.

Larry McCrea is Associate Professor of Sanskrit Studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in South Asian Languages & Civilizations in 1998 from the University of Chicago, and his BA in 1989 from Cornell University and he is among the world's major experts of the Indian scriptural hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā), especially of its hermeneutical approach. Among his most recent book projects, The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir, Harvard Oriental Series (Spring 2009), deals with the conceptual revolution in Sanskrit poetic theory brought about by the work of the ninth century Kashmiri Ānandavardhana. McCrea argues that the most crucial innovation Ānandavardhana introduced in the field of poetics was his application to literary analysis of a teleological approach to text interpretation imported from the discipline of Mīmāṃsā.

What do you think? Can God have free will?

For further posts on Vedānta Deśika's Seśvaramīmāṃsā, see this one and this one (in Sanskrit).

 

Do you happen to be in Rome? A conference and workshop by Philipp Maas

Thursday the 11th of April is a busy day for Indologists. Apart from the Buddhist Manuscript Seminar in Cambridge, they should be able to be in Rome for a full-day with Dr. Philipp Maas. Philipp has esited the first pāda of the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (i.e., the text formerly distinguished into Yogasūtra and Yogabhāṣya, but which probably came into being as such). He is also a talented reader of manuscript and has, among other things, written a fundamental article on the application of computer-aided stemmatics to text criticism.
On 11 am he will deliver a lecture Once again on the authorship of the Pātanjala-Yogaśāstra.
Then, at 4 pm he will lead a workshop on text criticism using as an example The classification of yogis and their spiritual progress in Pātanjala Yogaśāstra 3.51 and 2.27. The nice thing about the seminar is that he will present the collation of various manuscripts and discuss about which reading needs to be chosen.

If you manage to attend the lecture/workshop or to know Philipp Maas' work, don't forget to leave your comment here.

The next Coffee Break Conference: call for ideas

We (=I plus the other members of the Coffee Break Project) will be meeting on Friday to do some brainstorming about the over-next Coffee Break Conference, to be held in Rome, 2014. For the ones among you who do not know it, a Coffee Break Conference (CBC) is an informal occasion to exchange ideas, challenge oneself and expose oneself to other approaches and methodologies, though in an atmosphere which is as relaxed as during a Coffee Break in a "normal" conference.
You can find the program of the next CBC (Turin, September 2013) and of the previous ones here.
A CBC is usually organised in panels, which never run parallel (we want to avoid the typical conference effect, where one only listens to one's own things) and which are meant to be trans-geographic (we firmly oppose the idea of areal studies) and trans-disciplinary.

Would like to participate to the organization of the 2014 CBC? Do you have an idea for a topic which needs to be discussed in a CBC-format? Just let me know, either here or by dropping me a line.

The wiki of the CBC is here.  On Coffee Break Conferences in general, see this post, this one (or many others on this blog).

Implicit assumptions: the duty to make them become explicit

Unconscious bias can only be dealt with by making it conscious, by ensuring an instantaneous assessment is backed up by evidence and not just by one’s unthinking gut.

(from Athene Donald,  Systematic Errors of Judgement)

For more on my personal crusade against implicit assumptions, see this post, this one and, more loosely connected, this one.

varṇa: 'letter' or 'phoneme'? (Or: How to translate Sanskrit technical terms?)

How to translate Sanskrit technical terms? Do we have to keep their technical aspects or make them more readable through non technical translations?
In my opinion, the answer varies according to the target readership and the text one is translating. I remember having translated thali in a Hindi novel with 'plate' because its specificites were irrelevant. By contrast, I would have not acted this way in case I were translating a cooking manual meant for cooks.

Take, for instance the case of akṣara in Indian linguistics. I cannot understand why, after Wezler's illuminating essay Credo quia Occidentale one can still translate it with letter/lettre or any other European synonym. If one translates it with 'letter', one

a) subscribes to the Western prejudice in favour of the written form of a language (although the truth is that each language is pronounced before being written),
b) projects into a Grammatical text something it did not mean to say (several Śabdapramāṇa theorists explicitly maintain that only spoken language communicates knowledge and the few who address the problem of written language say that it can inferentially communicate something because one infers phonemes out of their written form): if one makes an author speak of "letters" a reader aware of the debate might think that he was a sustainer of the possibility of written language to communicate knowledge. Is this really the case?
c) A naïver reader might think that 'kh' is made of two akṣaras/letters.

Long story short: the meaning (artha) is —in Indian linguistics— not conveyed by 'letters'. It is conveyed by phonemes. It is a distinct achievement of Indian linguists to have understood it instead of falling in the trap their Western colleagues felt in (i.e., the one of the superiority of the written system, aptly denounced by Saussure in his Cours). I really do not want to level their achievements down to the average Western level.
Westerners should start to think more about the topic if they find sentences such as "The meaning of a linguistic expression is conveyed by the phonemes composing it'' wired. And is not this (=leading to further thinking) our purpose?

How do you translate technical terms?

The whole discussion has been triggered by Aleix Ruiz Falqués, who dedicated a thought-provoking post to it. Be sure to read also the interesting comments by Jayarava and Aleix' answers. 
UPDATE: Further interesting comments can be found here.

Why are there so few women blogging/commenting on Indian philosophy?

 What should or could one do to enhance the participation of women to the blogosphere, especially in the blogosphere dealing with Indian philosophy?
In case you think that the appropriate answer is "nothing", you are in good company. I myself used to think that the blogosphere is open enough to everyone and that participating to it is just everyone's personal decision, no special policies needed. Furthermore, personally I never asked for any special treatment because of being a woman. I just want to be considered a human being and not a "special case", in need of protection.

However, if one considers the issue more carefully, one must notice that the absence of women is striking. Already on this blog, it is interesting to notice that, although the main author is a woman, one needs to go back to January 2012 in order to find a comment which can be attributed to a female reader (who, very tellingly, labels herself Lajjikā). And since it is hardly believable that women are just not smart enough to write interesting things about Indian philosophy, one is forced to mourn about how much we are missing by willingly or unwillingly excluding them.

Thus, we are back to the initial question. Given that it would be quite strange to have reserved quotes for women in the blogosphere and that, personally, I would not like having the feeling that I am allowed to write in a prestigious blog only because of my gender, here is my proposal:

Try to engage with all comments written by a woman 

I know, one does not have time/energy/etc. to address all comments, but the male contributors to this and to any other blog might try to make special efforts to answer all the comments by female contributors, holding in mind that the latter might misunderstand the lack of answers as due to their gender and to the typical disregard reserved to women (usually considered to be "shallow").

What do you think? Do we have the responsibility to facilitate the access to the blogosphere of women, given that if we don't we will miss their contributions? Which other ways would you recommend?
And, if you are a woman, why do you/don't you write and comment? What helps and what does not?

On the few women blogging in the field of Indian philosophy (and related fields), see this post. On a parallel discussion (on women blogging about philosophy), see this post (in another blog).

Testimony and the requisites of the witness

What counts in testimony? The witness' beliefs or her statements? If the latter, how do we have to rethink the criteria for a valid cognition derived from testimony?

I just came across this book discussion and can't wait to have the book in my hands. If you have the time to run through it, please pause for a second on the problem of the involvement of the witness' beliefs. The author of the book (J. Lackey) concludes that in the act of testimony they are less important than her/his statements, since even an insincere speaker can communicate knowledge. This reminds me of the Navya Nyāya example of the lier who is himself unaware of the fact that he is telling the truth (i.e., he says that X because he believes that Y is the case and wants to lie, but in fact —unknown to him— X is really the case). Can his hearer claim to know that X?

I tend to think that those claiming that testimony is a kind of inference, with the witness' beliefs playing a major role as inferential probans (as, in India, with Buddhist Pramāṇavāda accounts of testimony) should answer that the hearer does not know that X (although he happens to believe that X on the basis of the lier's testimony and although X is true). However, one might suggest that it is possible to substitute "belief" with "statement" and still have a valid inference…?

Or should we just agree with the contemporary Navya Nyāya-influenced philosopher Sibajiban Bhattacharya and think that all true cognition is knowledge, even if it is not justified (i.e., if it is acquired in a way which does not stand a closer scrutiny, like in the case of the hearer's belief that X, obtained through the lier's testimony)?

Should we, thus, just focus on the witness' expertise as expressed in his/her statements, without taking into account his/her beliefs and his/her honesty?  

For further posts on testimony, check the labels "śabda" and "epistemology". My first Italian blog is completely devouted to an analysis of the philosophy of testimony in Indian and Western philosophy (until Michael Dummett).