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87Can you seek the answer to this question? (Meno in India)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4): 571-594. 2010.Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ?Meno's Paradox??the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, wher…Read more
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8Attention and self in Buddhist philosophy of mindRatio 31 (4): 354-362. 2018.Buddhist philosophy of mind is fascinating because it denies that there is a self in one of the ways that has traditionally seemed best able to make sense of that idea: the idea that the self is the agent of actions including the thinking of thoughts. In the Buddhist philosophy of mind of the fifth century thinker Buddhaghosa what does the explanatory work is instead attention. Attention replaces self in the explanation of cognition’s grounding in perception and action; it does this because it p…Read more
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19Mental Time Travel and AttentionAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 353-373. 2017.ABSTRACTEpisodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an …Read more
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3Mental Time Travel and Attention: Replies to CommentatorsAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 450-455. 2017.
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14Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self (edited book)Ashgate. 2012.The debates between various Buddhist and Hindu philosophical systems about the existence, definition and nature of self, occupy a central place in the history of Indian philosophy and religion.
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102Epistemology from a Sanskritic Point of ViewIn Stephen Stich, Masaharu Mizumoto & Eric McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 12-21. 2017.
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7What Is Philosophy?The Harvard Review of Philosophy 24 1-8. 2017.Three rival conceptions of philosophy overlap, we may imagine, in the Sassinid court of Chosroes (r. 531–579). One is due to Priscian, a refugee from Athens after Justinian’s closing of the philosophical schools. A second and third are from India: the Buddhist conception of Vasubandhu and the Nyāya view of Vātsyāyana. I will argue that the rivalry between these three understandings of philosophy ultimately rests in three different conceptions of what makes an inner life one’s own.
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8Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian PhilosophyMind 110 (439): 749-753. 2001.
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153Attention, Not SelfOxford University Press. 2017.Jonardon Ganeri presents a radically reoriented account of mind, to which attention is the key. It is attention, not self, that explains the experiential and normative situatedness of humans in the world. Ganeri draws together three disciplines: analytic philosophy and phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and Buddhist thought.
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10The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy tells the story of philosophy in India through a series of exceptional individual acts of philosophical virtuosity. It brings together forty leading international scholars to record the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute philosophy in the geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, a region sometimes nowadays designated South Asia. The chapters provide a synopsis of the liveliest areas of contemporary research and set new agend…Read more
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103Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in IndiaRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74 75-94. 2014.The much-welcomed recent acknowledgement that there is a plurality of philosophical traditions has an important consequence: that we must acknowledge too that there are many philosophical modernities. Modernity, I will claim, is a polycentric notion, and I will substantiate my claim by examining in some detail one particular non-western philosophical modernity, a remarkable period in 16th to 17th century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label.
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5Drawing on Indian discussions of public and practical reason, the book argues that individual, moral, and political identity is a formation of reason.
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74Cross-modality and the selfPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 639-658. 2000.The thesis of this paper is that the capacity to think of one’s perceptions as cross-modally integrated is incompatible with a reductionist account of the self. In §2 I distinguish three versions of the argument from cross-modality. According to the ‘unification’ version of the argument, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to identify an object touched as the same as an object simultaneously seen. According to the ‘recognition’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity, havi…Read more
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87The Self restatedPhilosophical Studies 174 (7): 1713-1719. 2017.This is a short summary of the book The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance. It introduced an “author meets critics” panel at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco 2016. I try to relate the discussion in the book to recent work that has appeared since its publication.
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6The concealed art of the soul: theories of self and practices of truth in Indian ethics and epistemologyOxford University Press. 2007.Hidden in the cave : the Upaniṣadic self -- Dangerous truths : the Buddha on silence, secrecy and snakes -- A cloak of clever words : the deconstruction of deceit in the Mahābhārata -- Words that burn : why did the Buddha say what he did? -- Words that break : can an Upaniṣad state the truth? -- The imperfect reality of persons -- Self as performance.
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8Semantic powers: meaning and the means of knowing in classical Indian philosophyOxford University Press. 1999.Jonardon Ganeri gives an account of language as essentially a means for the reception of knowledge. The semantic power of a word and its ability to stand for a thing derives from the capacity of understanders to acquire knowledge simply by understanding what is said. Ganeri finds this account in the work of certain Indian philosophers of language, and shows how their analysis can inform and be informed by contemporary philosophical theory.
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4Mind, language, and world: the collected essays of Bimal Krishna MatilalOxford University Press. 2002.On different aspects of Indian philosophy; chiefly on Nayāya and Buddhist philosophies.
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7Contextualism in the Study of Indian Intellectual CulturesJournal of Indian Philosophy 36 (5-6): 551-562. 2008.When J. L. Austin introduced two “shining new tools to crack the crib of reality”—the theory of performative utterances and the doctrine of infelicities—he could not have imagined that he was also about to inaugurate a shining new industry in the philosophy of the social sciences. But with its evident concern for the features to which “all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial,” Austin’s theory soon became indispensable in the analysis of ritual, linguistic and e…Read more
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8The Character of Logic in IndiaSUNY Press. 1998.The last work of the eminent philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal, this book traces the origins of logical theory in India.
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117An Irrealist Theory of SelfThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 12 (1): 60-79. 2004.It has become a common-place to read the ‘no-self’ theory of the Buddhist philosophers as a reductionist account of persons. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit himself seemed to endorse the association, having learned of the Buddhist theory from his colleague at All Souls College, Bimal Krishna Matilal. The Buddha’s denial that there are real selves metaphysically distinct from continuous streams of psycho-physical constituents lends itself, to be sure, to a reductionist interpretation. I beli…Read more
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1Traditions of truth – changing beliefs and the nature of inquiryJournal of Indian Philosophy 33 (1): 43-54. 2005.
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4Epistemology in PracÄ«na and Navya Nyāya (review) (review)Philosophy East and West 57 (1): 120-123. 2007.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Epistemology in Pracīna and Navya NyāyaJonardon GaneriEpistemology in Pracīna and Navya Nyāya. By Sukharanjan Saha. Kolkata: Jadavpur University, 2003. Pp. 166.Epistemology in Pracīna and Navya Nyāya, by Sukharanjan Saha, usefully collates ten previously published essays on Indian epistemology: two longer essays first published in 1986 and a series of more recent shorter pieces. The leading thesis of the book is that the …Read more
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411Indian logicIn Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the history of logic, Elsevier. pp. 1--309. 2004.
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3Cross-Modality and the SelfPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 639-657. 2000.The thesis of this paper is that the capacity to think of one’s perceptions as cross-modally integrated is incompatible with a reductionist account of the self. In §2 I distinguish three versions of the argument from cross-modality. According to the ‘unification’ version of the argument, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to identify an object touched as the same as an object simultaneously seen. According to the ‘recognition’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity, havi…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
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Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Asian Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Asian Philosophy |