Jonardon Ganeri

Seeing and Subjectivity is a search for the emergence of subjectivity within our abilities to see. The book argues that if we are to make sense of ourselves as subjective creatures we must recognize that the notion of presentation which undergirds all our perceptual commerce with the world we inhabit is more complicated than has hitherto been realized. The book distinguishes between two types of perceptual consciousness: ‘ animal ’ perception and ‘ reflective ’ perception. Reflective perception is a sophisticated and advantageous variety of perception, more so than animal perception alone, a sort of perception requiring subjectivity in the perceiver and whose most minimal form is the perception of absence. It is the enhanced perceptual capacity to see what is missing in our environments that explains the value of subjectivity to creatures like us. For it is in those situations that our seeings serve no longer simply to mirror the world of our immediate surroundings; then we are reflectively perceptual creatures. So the book ’ s thesis is that a recognition of the fundamentality of the notion of reflective perception is key to understanding our place as subjective beings in the world. Its existence is most prominently witnessed in our perception of artworks, in poetic experience, and in aesthetic emotion. This book draws on Indian theories about the nature of perceptual consciousness, on insights into aesthetic subjectivity from Sanskrit aesthetics, and from the ideas of brilliant twentieth-century Indian philosophers. The philosophical method employed in the book is an avowedly cosmopolitan one.

Recent years have seen the beginning of a radical reassessment of the philosophical literature of ancient and classical India. The analytical techniques of contemporary philosophy are being deployed towards fresh and original interpretations of the texts. This rational, rather than mystical, approach towards Indian philsophical theory has resulted in a need for a work which explains afresh its central methods, concepts and devices. This book meets that need. Assuming no prior familiarity with the texts, Jonardon Ganeri offers new interpretations which bring out the richness of Indian theory and the sophistication of its methods. Original in both approach and content, philosophy in Classical India contains many new results, analyses and explanations.

A natural way to think of epistemic virtue is by analogy with an archer. Just as a skilled archer is able to take aim and hit a target, a skilled epistemic agent will aim at truth and, if things go well, get things right. Here we highlight aspects of epistemic virtue that do not fit this model, particularly ways in which epistemic virtues can be non-voluntary and not goal-directed. In doing so, we draw on two important figures in the history of philosophy: the 6th-century Indian Buddhist Buddhaghosa and the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil. Despite many differences, both thinkers emphasize the importance of attention in moral and epistemic virtue. Their work highlights ways in which attention that is neither voluntary nor goal-directed can nevertheless play an important role in moral and epistemic life.

The soul is an elusive thing, and anyone who wants to describe it must do so with metaphors, painting it in a picture of words. The metaphors one chooses for this task will reflect the aspects one is most eager to promote of what it is to be a person, a living, breathing, thinking presence in the world. Popularly, the soul is often pictured as a little fellow inside one's head, a homunculus with whom one is in constant communication. Such a picture lends color to the idea that to be a sentient being is to be in a condition of inner dialogue with oneself, reasoning things out, talking things over, and perhaps also being guided by one's conscience, an inner voice heard only by oneself. Notice that the soul so.

I would like to thank the editors of Philosophy East and West for courteously asking me if I would like to respond to Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips' very thoughtful remarks about the review I wrote of Phillips' translation and commentary on the pratyakṣa chapter of Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi, prepared in collaboration with N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya (Phillips and Tatacharya 2004). Let me begin by reaffirming what I said at the beginning of my review, that the book is "a monumental and momentous achievement, one whose importance cannot be understated." I have indeed enormous admiration for the magnitude of their achievement and respect for the contribution they have made through this translation to the field of ..

The world of academic philosophy is now entering a new age, one defined neither by colonial need for recognition nor by postcolonial wish to integrate. The indicators of this new era include heightened appreciation of the value of world philosophies, the internationalization of the student body, the philosophical pluralism which interaction and migration in new global movements make salient, growing concerns about diversity within a still too-white faculty body and curricular canon, and identification of a range of deep structural problems with the contemporary philosophical academy in its discursive, citational, refereeing and ranking practices. We are entering what we might call " the age of " re-emergence, " a new period the key features of which are as follows. First, philosophies from every region of the world, locally grounded in lived experience and reflection upon it, are finding new autonomous and authentic forms of articulation. Second, philosophical industry, leaving behind a center-periphery mode of production, is becoming again polycentric: the philosophical world is returning to a plural and diverse network of productive sites. Third, Europe and other colonial powers have been provincialized, no longer mandatory conversation partners or points of comparison but rather unprivileged participants in global dialogue. Fourth, philosophers within the largely Anglophone international academy are beginning to acknowledge their responsibility to arrange international institutions to enable wide and open participation; that is, acknowledge that their control over the academy is a fallout from colonialism rather than a reflection of intellectual superiority. We may thus look to a future when there will be a vibrant pluralistic realism in departments of academic philosophy around the globe, and a new cartography of philosophy.

I defend a cosmopolitan conception of philosophy. I construct a typology of cosmopolitan philosophical skill around a division into seven categories: assimilative, autonomous, comparative, diasporist, imperious, bicultural, and interjacent. I also try to begin to think through what kinds of reform of the academy will best serve to create institutions that foster the skills I identify as most helpful for philosophical progress. My paper is a reflection on what the profession of philosophy must be in a culturally polycentric world, and on what new models of institutionalisation will best serve it in the future.