•  16
    An Irrealist Theory of Race
    Critical Philosophy of Race 12 (1): 106-125. 2024.
    ABSTRACT In this article I draw upon an analogy between a debate in the critical philosophy of race over the metaphysics of race and a debate in Buddhist philosophy of mind over the metaphysics of selves. I argue that there is a defensible irrealist theory of race, corresponding to the performativist theory of self found in certain Buddhist thinkers.
  •  12
    7 Attending to Absence, and the Role of the Imagination
    In D. Graham Burnett & Justin E. H. Smith (eds.), Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, Columbia University Press. pp. 142-159. 2023.
  •  59
    Selfless Receptivity: Attention as an Epistemic Virtue
    In Tamar Szabó Gendler, John Hawthorne & Julianne Chung (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology 7, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-14. 2022.
    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 Buddhag…Read more
  •  7
    The author commences with a discussion on the connection between spiritual exercises and aestheticism. Acquiring knowledge of a certain privileged sort is the key spiritual exercise is the fundamental activity in what Hadot described as a “return to the self.” The section on philosophy and therapy talks about “spiritual exercise” as a practice of discrimination which leads to a “return to the self” in the form of the self's isolation from the perceptual world. The author then discusses returning…Read more
  •  1
    Hinduism
    In Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper & Philip L. Quinn (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.
  •  1780
    Is this me?A story about personal identity from the Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa / Dà zhìdù lùn
    with Jing Huang
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (5): 739-762. 2021.
    ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. We here present the first reliable translation directly from the Classical Chinese, and discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. We emphasise t…Read more
  •  26
    Fernando Pessoa: The Poet as Philosopher
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93 193-208. 2023.
    Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural, and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa's forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a lifelong love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal of travelling throughout an infinitude of inner landscap…Read more
  •  3
    In this chapter, my interest is primarily in the thought of the great Ābhidhārmika Buddhist intellectual Vasubandhu (c. 360 CE), author of the compendious Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. He has famously been described by Mark Siderits as a reductionist about the self, influenced by the seminal work of Derek Parfit. What I will argue is that the identification needs to be handled with care.
  •  2
  • Philosophy as a Practice of Estrangement
    THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHY IN KOREA 34 287-309. 2010.
  •  3
    Ethno-Epistemology: New Directions for Global Epistemology (edited book)
    with Masaharu Mizumoto and Cliff Goddard
    Routledge. 2020.
    This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a …Read more
  •  10
    Inwardness: an outsider's guide
    Columbia University Press. 2021.
    Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion-or worse, a deceit. Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections from many of the world's intellectual cultures, ancie…Read more
  •  8
    The author defends a conception of language as essentially a means for the reception of knowledge through testimony. He finds this account in the work of classical Indian philosophers of language, and presents a detailed analysis of their theories.
  •  14
    This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a …Read more
  •  11
    Indian Philosophy: A Reader (edited book)
    Routledge. 2019.
    The selection of essays in this volume aims to present Indian philosophy as an autonomous intellectual tradition, with its own internal dynamics, rhythms, techniques, problematics and approaches, and to show how the richness of this tradition has a vital role in a newly emerging global and international discipline of philosophy, one in which a diversity of traditions exchange ideas and grow through their interaction with one another. This new volume is an abridgement of the four-volume set, Indi…Read more
  •  27
    Cosmic Consciousness
    The Monist 105 (1): 43-57. 2022.
    The phrase “cosmic consciousness” has a surprising and fascinating history. I will show how it first enters into circulation in the writings of the remarkable Englishman Edward Carpenter, a socialist, philosopher, and prescient activist for gay rights and prison reform. Carpenter made a trip to India and Sri Lanka in 1890, where he spent two months sitting at the feet of Ramaswami, an Indian sage and disciple of Tilleinathan Swami. Carpenter invents the phrase in order to paraphrase Ramaswami’s …Read more
  •  121
    What Is Cosmopsychism?
    with Itay Shani
    The Monist 105 (1): 1-5. 2022.
    With the deepening crisis of physicalism and the decline in its status as a sustainable research programme, philosophers of mind have begun to investigate the alternative idea—now commonly designated panpsychism—that consciousness is a fundamental feature of nature, and that the mental states, properties, and events exhibited by human beings are metaphysically grounded in the conscious actuality of reality’s most basic entities. Cosmopsychism is the thesis that the cosmos as a whole displays psy…Read more
  •  18
    This book explores philosophical themes to do with self and subjectivity from the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, best known for the uncategorizable collection of fragmentary writings, published as The Book of Disquiet in 1982, forty-seven years after the author's death.
  •  455
    PPR Symposium on Attention, Not Self
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2): 470-474. 2020.
  •  36
    Response to Monima Chadha and Sean M. Smith Reviews of Attention, Not Self
    Philosophy East and West 69 (4): 1151-1156. 2019.
    I thank Sean Smith and Monima Chadha for their reviews of Attention, Not Self and for their commentary. It has been rewarding to think through the issues they have raised, and I am grateful to both.Let me begin with the methodological principle that Sean Smith endorses at the beginning of his review. Smith says this: "My main argument is that Ganeri attributes views to Buddhaghosa that the latter does not hold. Embedded in this complaint is the assumption that we should try to get a thinker righ…Read more
  •  8
    Book reviews (review)
    Mind 103 (409): 83-86. 1994.
  • Philosophy as Therapeia: Volume 66 (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2010.
    'Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers therapy for no human suffering. For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not expel the suffering of the soul.' The philosopher Epicurus gave famous voice to a conception of philosophy as a cure or remedy for the maladies of the human soul. What has not until now received attention is just how prominent an idea this has been across a whole sp…Read more
  •  50
    Epistemic Pluralism: From Systems to Stances
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1): 1-21. 2019.
    Drawing on insights from the epistemological work of the Jaina philosophers of classical India, I argue in defense of epistemic pluralism, the view that there are different but equally valid ways of knowing the world. The version of epistemic pluralism I defend is stance pluralism, a pluralism about epistemic stances or perspectives, understood to be policies or stratagems of knowing. I reject the view that the correct way to characterize epistemic pluralism is as consisting in a pluralism about…Read more
  •  59
  •  154
    Counterfactuals and preemptive causation
    with P. Noordhof and M. Ramachandran
    Analysis 56 (4): 219-225. 1996.
    David Lewis modified his original theory of causation in response to the problem of ‘late preemption’ (see 1973b; 1986b: 193-212). However, as we will see, there is a crucial difference between genuine and preempted causes that Lewis must appeal to if his solution is to work. We argue that once this difference is recognized, an altogether better solution to the preemption problem presents itself
  •  527
    Can 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
  •  75
    Attention and self in Buddhist philosophy of mind
    Ratio 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
  •  12
    Mental Time Travel and Attention: Replies to Commentators
    Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 450-455. 2017.