Shyam Ranganathan

All major religions in history have offered hope of some kind of afterlife to answer the perennial interest in the question of life after death. This volume brings together renowned experts in the philosophy of religion, Graham Oppy, David Apolloni, Shyam Ranganathan, Joshua Farris and Steven B. Cowan, to present four key starting points in the life after death debate. Providing a lively and collaborative dialogue between leaders in the field, each thinker defends a particular view of the afterlife and critically interacts with the alternative perspectives. They focus on the positions of No Life After Death, the Immortality of the Soul, Reincarnation and Resurrection, with each chapter drawing on views from naturalism, antiquity, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism and Yoga. This engagement moves the current debate forward to consider global perspectives whilst the clear and accessible structure allows for a developed exploration of the central issues at stake. Incorporating views spanning secular and religious spheres in both the east and west, this comprehensive guide will be welcomed by students and scholars of contemporary philosophy of religion and comparative philosophy.

Among people who regard themselves as informed by Disability Theory and are sensitive to discrimination against disabled people, a common view is that terms like "idiot" and "moron" are ableist as they have technical employments in eugenics discourse. I argue here, largely out of solidarity with people who are so labeled, and also for philosophical reasons, that this is a mistake. Drawing upon my Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism, I argue that oppression involves an irrational projection of the oppressor's fault of irrationality onto the victim, and hence terms like "idiot" better describe the oppressor and not the oppressed disabled person. Second, given the ordinary distinction between meaning and use, heavily loaded, descriptive, eugenic uses of a word like "idiot" will always be less basic than thinner uses to identify a failure of reason. Hence the latter will be the literal meaning of these terms, as this makes other uses, including the eugenic employment, intelligible. Third, even if we were to insist that the loaded eugenic uses of these terms are primary, it's not clear why we couldn't use them to criticize oppression. In order to motivate forbidding this, we would have to assume the Linguistic Account of Thought (LAT), which is instrumental to the West's history of colonialism, which generates ableism in the first place. To make this clear, I contrast disability theorists' approach to the anti-LAT philosophy of Lao Tzu. Also, ordinary cases of projection in political discourse (such as the idea that Mexicans are rapists and murderers, used as a justification for ethnic cleansing) reveal that we ought to reapply projected criticisms onto the oppressor and not regard them as terms whose meaning is the oppressed.

This is the first of a four-part series. The main theses that will be defended are that: (a) reason/logic/intelligence is a choice and not primarily an ability, (b) ableism is irrational, and (c) most (lots of) people are jerks. The people who reduce intelligence to an ability testable by performance on conventionalized tests, are top of the list of jerks. Oh, and (d) a jerk is someone who chooses not to reason. In Part 1, I make the case that ADHD is philosophically interesting because, in the case of untreated ADHD, the outward behavior is almost always opposite of the motivation or intention, and ADHD people exist today in a world that prescribes norms for self-regulation that backfire in the case of ADHD people, and their way to self-regulation will often involve doing the opposite of what is prescribed. This shows that agency is not the same as ability. Agents choose. And whether they are able to implement a choice is a largely contingent and variable matter, dependent on factors outside of their control.

This book argues that oppression is the social expression of literal, nonmetaphorical, irrationality: a failure at basic tasks of logic. Moral philosophy allows individuals to make their own ethical decisions. Colonialism denies the freedom to engage in moral philosophy by imposing interpretive frameworks that replace reasoning with propositional attitudes. The book draws on South Asian moral philosophy—rendered invisible through colonization—to show how oppression stems from "interpretation": the confusion of thoughts (propositions) with attitudes toward thoughts. In contrast, Indigenous traditions prioritize "explication," the logic based exploration of propositions. The book locates the origin of interpretation in the Linguistic Account of Thought (LAT), which equates what can be thought with culturally encoded propositional attitudes. LAT was rejected in ancient South Asia, challenged in China, and acclaimed in the West, where it underwrites a colonizing epistemic framework. Interpretation is not only oppressive: it appropriates Indigenous capital and epistemic labor. LAT contrasts with Linguistic Externalism (LE), thought as the disciplinary use of semantic expression. While LAT promotes anthropocentric, communitarian ethics, LE allows Indigenous people to acknowledge diverse persons including the Earth, treating learning as logic-based inquiry rather than cultural competence. The book explores LAT's basis for genocide and White Supremacy's 2000-year institutionalization of Secularism2 (defining the Western as secular, the BIPOC as religious). It illustrates how originally free people adopt colonization by cooperating with the colonizer, hoping for good outcomes, gambling away procedural justice and explication. Colonization stems not from stated values but from the metaethical choice to interpret, creating a rational obligation to decolonize. Drawing from Western, Chinese, and Indian traditions while making contributions to the philosophies of AI, science, race, reason, religion, language, thought, and translation, this book makes visible the Indigenous foundations of moral philosophy and all inquiry, along with the colonial origins of irrationality.

This paper critiques the appropriation and misrepresentation of South Asian philosophical traditions by Western thinkers and institutions, focusing on contemporary entities such as Yoga Alliance and historical figures like J.S. Mill. It argues that while these actors draw freely from South Asian ideas—particularly in ethics, metaphysics, and yogic practice—they simultaneously deny the intellectual maturity and systematic rigor of the source traditions. Such dismissal is not accidental, but part of a broader colonial pattern of epistemic erasure. The paper contends that rigorous, explicatory, logic-based, and objective scholarship is a form of activist ahiṁsā (nonharm), capable of disrupting inherited systems of epistemic injustice. Within South Asian traditions, two contrasting approaches to ahiṁsā emerge: the Jain virtue-ethical, teleological approach, which defines nonharm as the end of leaving things undisturbed; and the Yogic procedural approach, which frames ahiṁsā as the interruption of systemic harm. . Colonial and orientalist interpretations, by failing to recognize this distinction, have framed ahiṁsā as passive or escapist. In reality, the procedural model found in the Yoga tradition is the historical foundation for direct action activism.

This paper examines how Western colonialism erases the rich history of moral and political philosophy from South Asia, choosing to at once appropriate from it and depict it as too immature to be taken seriously. And yet, if we attend to methodological questions central to research, the question of whether we ought to explain anything by way of propositional attitudes like beliefs (interpretation) or engage in a logic-based recovery of reasons for controversial conclusions (explication) we see that the latter decolonial method shows that South Asian moral philosophers disagreed about ahiṃsā. Jains depicted ahiṃsā teleologically in accordance with their Virtue Ethics, while Yoga, a radically procedural ethical theory, entails that ahiṃsā is a procedure. The former idea is about not breaking things. The latter is about disrupting systemic harm. Insufficient attention to these contrary approaches to ahiṃsā are part of a pattern of dismissing the importance of learning from South Asian moral philosophers. Deliberate choice in contrast requires attention to this tradition and its exploration of ahiṃsā. Contrary to colonial glosses, we derive our contemporary tradition of progressive, activist politics from the Yogic approach to ahiṃsā.

White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy is to shield Western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation—explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication.

White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy is to shield Western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation— explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication.

Gārgī Vācaknavī is known for her challenging interrogation of the sage Yājñavalkya, in what was by then a male dominated activity: philosophical debate. Gārgī distinguishes herself for challenging Yājñavalkya, being rebuked and challenging him a second time. Gārgī demonstrates her mastery over the concept at dispute (Growth, Expansion, Development) by being able to revise her approach to the question. Gārgī philosophically demonstrates the very idea she is investigating. Her salvos at Yājñavalkya display the two contrasting modes of philosophical investigation of the early Vedas, characterized by naturalism, and the latter philosophy of the Upaniṣads, characterized as a procedural nonnaturalism. Gārgī engages in this dispute, challenging gender norms of her day. Over a millennia later, Gārgī and Yājñavalkya’s personas are reprised in a post-Vedic dialogue, the Yogayājñavalkya, on the technological application of Yoga philosophy. Here Gārgī is cast as the unassuming interlocutor—in stark contrast to her earlier firebrand, gender-norm-breaking performance in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (BU). As this latter depiction is not historically accurate, we will focus on Gārgī’s contribution to the BU.

Maitreyī has been renown since antiquity for her contributions to philosophy. In this chapter, her views as a proponent of Advaita (Monism) are explained. She was an explicator of a monistic approach to value that argues that the true Self, Ātman, is the basis of the highest values we hold and that knowledge of one’s true identity as Ātman, can be followed by acquiring a first person appreciation of one’s identity as Ātman. That deep axiological understanding, not merely intellectual comprehension, is liberation. Maitreyī (or someone by that name) is reported by the ancient epic Mahābhārata to have remained unmarried, but in one of the earliest of Upaniṣads, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Maitreyī is described as a philosopher (brahmavādhinī) married to the sage Yājñavalkya. Regardless of her marital status, a dialogue with Yājñavalkya is preserved in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad in which she explicates the function of Ātman, its unity with Brahman (Growth, Expansion, Development), and discusses the nature of love and its role in the self who is seeking liberation. That dialogue is explored and discussed in this chapter.