Round-table on the philosophy of testimony: UPDATED

Within the 2013 Coffee Break Conference, I will host a panel on the Philosophy of Testimony. Besides the usual scheme (short presentations+long discussions about each of them), I am thinking of having a final round-table, open also to people working with testimony (e.g., anthropologists, scholars working with statistics…). In order to avoid to have nothing but a final chat (which is always nice, and will anyway take place throughout the conference), I and the other participants agreed on some of the questions we would like to discuss. We will next send them to the participants of the other panels of the CBC conference.

Here are our proposals (1--4 are my ideas, whereas I owe to Massimo Cuono, Marco Lauri, Sudipta Munsi and Roy Tzohar the other suggestions):

1. 1. Is it legitimate to pay one's witness (as is frequently the case in anthropology and/or whenever one works with statistics)? How much does economical interest alter the testimony?
2. 2. Is perception reliable enough to become the object of testimony (can we, e.g., trust someone when she refers about what she has seen, although we know that it was dark and that she probably believes to have seen more than she has actually seen)?
3. 3. Is second-grade testimony (e.g., I refer that S told me that p) reliable?
4. 4. How can the reliability of a witness be tested? Can, e.g., the fact that she is honest be a criterion? Or that she has proved to be reliable in a certain (different) case?
5. Is the medium of testimony neutral? In other words, what role does the form of testimony play? This is especially relevant in the case of written testimonies from authors of the past.
6. How much does testimony depend on memory? Can we trust the former and mistrust the latter?
7. Is testimony publicly available? Or are only some interpreters allowed to interpret it? 
8. Connected with the above is: What distinguishes the judge's and the historian's (etc.) use of testimony?

What would you add/change? Which aspects of the philosophy of testimony need to be debated?

For further information on the CBC in general and on Philosophy of Testimony in particular, see this  (CBC) and  this (Testimony) wiki page. Within this blog, see this post. For the original post on the philosophy of testimony, see here.

A(n Indian) world full of creatures: Gilles Tarabout on nature

From Hompi, Karṇataka

Is the world as we see it or not? Both in India and in the West, one has believed for centuries that this was not the case and that the world was full of living, though unperceivable, beings. The historian of philosophy Tullio Gregory writes that the space from earth to sky was believed —in the Western Middle Age— to be full of various kinds of angels, hierarchically ordered.

In Indian religious and popular culture (though not in the philosophical reflection, I am inclined to think, see here) one similarly sees that one believes and believed in a variety of intermediate beings occupying each inch of land, earth and sky. The anthropologist Gilles Tarabout underlined this aspect in (at least) two of his papers. In one of them, published in RiSS and dealing with astrology in Kerala, Tarabout refers of how astrologers consulted by the committee of a temple regularly describe the temple as full of presences, part of which may need to be pacified.

In his recent speech at the conference on The Human Person and Nature in Classical and Modern India, Tarabout has repeated how "No place is free of occupants". Thus, while building something new, one needs to pacify these powers, especially insofar as several of them may be malevolent or at least ambivalent. Among the former are listed bhūtas, pretas (which are described by Tarabout's informants as malevolent due to their untimely death) and are violent deities, whereas among the latter are yakṣīs which are dangerous female beings, honoured as goddesses and thought of as the spirits of unmarried dead girls. Only the serpent-deities may remain and most gardens in Kerala have a spot which is left wild and where nāgas are thought to dwell. In an interesting document of the Colonial time reported by Tarabout a spot of land is said to be sold together with cobras, the sky above, the underground with its treasures and the corresponding part of hell…

I guess that ancestors (pitṛs) would instead be counted among benevolent creatures. Do you have any evidence of the contrary?

Furthermore, this background assumptions partly explain also why non-theistic religions such as Buddhism and Jainism did not feel the need to deny the existence of nāgas, devas, and so on, and why monotheistic Indian religions acted in the same way: these beings were not the object of a specific faith but were just part of the description of the world as it is. Thus, they did not compete with the Buddha, the Jina, Viṣṇu, etc., for their believers' hearts.

For the program of the Rome conference on nature, see here. For my contribution to the conference, see here. For a further contribution to the conference, see here.

Round Table on the Philosophy of Testimony

Within the 2013 Coffee Break Conference, I will host a panel on the Philosophy of Testimony. Besides the usual scheme (short presentations+long discussions about each of them), I am thinking of having a final round-table, open also to people working with testimony (e.g., anthropologists, scholars working with statistics…). In order to avoid to have nothing but a final chat (which is always nice, and will anyway take place throughout the conference), I am considering to send the participants some of the questions we would like to discuss.

The following ones are my proposals, for the time being:

1. 1. Is it legitimate to pay one's witness (as is frequently the case in anthropology and/or whenever one works with statistics)? How much does economical interest alter the testimony?
2. 2. Is perception reliable enough to become the object of testimony (can we, e.g., trust someone when she refers about what she has seen, although we know that it was dark and that she probably believes to have seen more than she has actually seen)?
3. 3. Is second-grade testimony (e.g., I refer that S told me that p) reliable?
4. 4. How can the reliability of a witness be tested? Can, e.g., the fact that she is honest be a criterion? Or that she has proved to be reliable in a certain (different) case?

What would you add/change? Which aspects of the philosophy of testimony need to be debated?

For further information on the CBC in general and on Philosophy of Testimony in particular, see this  (CBC) and  this (Testimony) wiki page. Within this blog, see this post.

Raffaele Torella on Nature in India and the West

"Nature" is conceptualised in different ways in different parts of the world and the Western concept of nature has been deeply influenced by Giordano Bruno's philosophy of nature, Descartes' dualism, Schegel's holism, the Romanticism and so on.
Such interesting implications have been highlighted by Raffaele Torella during his introduction to the conference on The Human Person and Nature in Classical and Modern India. Torella also noted that the term prakṛti, which is assumed as the standard translation of "nature" is altogether absent in the Vedic Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas and in the Vedāṅgas or in Grammar [and, I would add, in Mīmāṃsā and in ritual literature] it is found with a quite different technical meaning. It has, thus, no cosmological implication and no association with materiality. A form which is described as prakṛti is foundational in a structural, but not material sense.

Within Sāṃkhya, prakṛti is a feminine term, but there is no clear assertion that it is feminine in the Sāṃkhyakārikā, apart from its comparison to a nartakī 'dancer' [Attention: in a contribution to the same conference, Bruno Lo Turco has, by contrast, maintained, that the equation prakṛti-feminine and puruṣa-masculine is evident in the Sāṅkhyakārikās, due to the gender of the two terms and to the fact that puruṣa does originary mean 'male'). The polarization of feminine-masculine is, instead, found in tantrism, with the feminine as the source of the world.

Furthermore, in both Classical India and the Classical West, one encounters both a natura naturans and a natura naturata. The first one conceals itself behind the phenomena. The Sāṅkhya prakṛti, due to its subtlety is not accessible to perception, just like Heraclitus says that physis "loves to hide" (kryptesthai philei).

Do you have further elements on nature as feminine before tantrism?

For the program of the conference, see here. For my contribution to the conference, see here.

āpātadhī in Vedānta Deśika and Rāmānuja

Reading Vedānta Deśika (aka Veṅkaṭanātha) often means having to do with syntetic expressions which can be understood only if one knows their background. One of such cases is āpātadhī or āpātapratīti, which recurs in the Seśvaramīmāṃsā, the Mīmāṃsāpādukā and in other texts by Vedānta Deśika (I owe this last notation to Marcus Schmücker).

An āpātadhī/āpātapratīti is, literally, a 'dropped down notion'. But what does it mean for a notion to be fallen down? I was first stimulated to read its antecedents in Rāmānuja's Śrī Bhāṣya by Halina Marlewicz' The question of the unity of Karmakāṇḍa and Jñānakāṇḍa according to Rāmānuja (available here). There, she translated this expression as follows:

[…] due to an instantly apparent (āpāta) and clear ascertainment of a durable and eternal effect, which is immortality, [which ascertainment is obtained from] the Upaniṣadic statements, occurring in the same part of the Veda of one's own Vedic tradition acquired by learning, one becomes qualified to study Uttara Mīmāṃsā […]
(adhyayanagṛhītasvādhyāyaikadeśipaniṣadvākyeṣu cāmṛtatvarūpānantasthiraphalāpātapratītes tan […] śarīrakamīmāṃsāyām adhikaroti). 

However, I am not completely convinced by the idea of equating āpātadhī with a sort of instantaneous enlightenment, as if it were due to a śaktinipāta.
Consider, by contrast, the following statement in a previous page of the Śrī Bhāṣya:

āpātataḥ pratītir vidyata eva, tathāpi […] āpātapratīto 'py arthaḥ saṃśayaviparyayau nātivartate.

The context is that of VS 1.1.1, discussing whether one needs to undertake a further study of the Vedānta, although one has already studied the phonic form of the Veda. The propounder says:

There is indeed a notion [of the content of the Veda] which derives out of descending down [automatically, from one's study of the phonic form of the Veda], nonetheless the meaning [of the Veda which one has acquired through] a descended cognition […] is still liable to doubt and contradictions.

If I am right, then, the āpātadhī is the cognition of the Veda's meaning one obtains automatically, as a consequence of one's study of the phonetic form of the Veda. This is still not stable enough and could be assailed by doubts, thus one needs to study the meaning of the Veda systematically, through the (Pūrva and) Uttara Mīmāṃsā.

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

Applying for (Indological) grants

While you are writing an application, who is your target reader? And which are the main elements in your cv you should be highlighting?

I spent a (long) day in a couching workshop of the Austrian FWF, and the following points are the most interesting things I learnt (please note that the German grants tend to work in a similar way, whereas there might be differences where research is funded by private trusts).

1. 1. One writes for the Expert Evaluators (aka Peer-Reviewers, Gutachter). No one else will decide about the content of one's application.
2. 1.1. This means that the structure and the form of the application will never be more important than its content. 
3. 1.2. A further implication is that one should not worry about being understood by lay readers. There are no such ones.
4. 2. About 30% of the applicants have their applications funded.
5. 3. Projects are not rejected because the co-applicant is not qualified enough, nor because the international cooperator are not enough qualified, nor because other projects on the same discipline have already been funded, nor because humanities are not "significant". The main reason for failure is the project's intrinsic weakness.
6. 3.1 Reasons for failure might be: lack of a hypothesis (sheer datebanks are not financed), lack of discussion of the status quo of research, no previous publications, vague methodology, really poor English.
7. 4. A further reason for failure is the fact of trying to fit an interesting project into a funding instrument which does not correspond to it. In short: if you are an established researcher, don't try to apply for an early-career grant. Vice versa, if you are at the beginning of your career, don't try to apply for funds for established researchers. Find the right funding instrument for your project.
8. 5. Women are less than 25% of the applicants, whereas they are almost 45% of the funded grants.
9. 6. It is important to be able to show: a network of international cooperation and, more importantly, an excellent track of publications on international journals. All the rest (prices, publications on local journals and newspapers, teaching experience) does not really count much. 

 What are your experiences with accepted/rejected grants? Do you plan to submit a project?

For concrete opportunities I am aware of, check the label "opportunities and projects".

Likes and Dislikes in an Indological conference

What works and what does not work in a (traditional) conference? This is my personal list:

DON'TS:

1. 1. Don't read. I can understand that reading helps if you are shy and/or you cannot speak English well enough and in similar cases. But please consider that reading will strongly diminish the likelihood that you can communicate something. Thus, rather focus on speaking less or in a simpler way, but without reading.
2. 2. In this connection, I wonder whether we should really keep on forcing everyone to speak in English. Perhaps simultaneous translations would be a more expensive but much more effective alternative?
3. 3. Putting down your thesis with no evidence (no texts being quoted, no secondary literature, no interviews, nothing!).
4. 4. Only putting down evidences with no thesis (describing what you have read/listened to, with nothing new added).
5. 5. Too many words in the slides (one does not know whether she should read it or listen to what is being said).
6. 6. Slides with typos (as a consequence: write less in your slides, so that you can have enough time to proof-read it).
7. 7. Too few slides: One rightly tries not to have too many slides, but too few also do not work, since one is distracted by a slide referring to X while the speaker is talking about Y. Thus, if you want to use a ppt, be sure you have an image for each one of the main parts of your speech.
8. 8. Don't recycle a speech deemed for a different audience/purpose. It feels bad to be a second-choice-listener!

DOS:

1. 1. Refer to other speeches within the same conference (it feels like being in a workshop and one sees links one might have missed).
2. 2. Focus on your strengths: if you are a great narrator, narrate. There is not a single way to be an academic and there is no point in being, e.g., a shallow manuscriptologist although you think that manuscriptological studies are more "scientific" than narrations.

What would you add or delete from the list?

On reading at conferences (pros and cons), read this post (and its comments) and this post. On an alternative idea of conferences, see this one and the corresponding wiki. For a list of dislikes in Indological presentations, see this post. For a former list of dislikes at conferences, see this post.