Jonardon Ganeri

Jaina Logic and the Philosophical Basis of Pluralism

What is the rational response when confronted with a set of propositions each of which we have some reason to accept, and yet which taken together form an inconsistent class? This was, in a nutshell, the problem addressed by the Jaina logicians of classical India, and the solution they gave is, I think, of great interest, both for what it tells us about the relationship between rationality and consistency, and for what we can learn about the logical basis of philosophical pluralism. The Jainas claim that we can continue to reason in spite of the presence of inconsistencies, and indeed construct a many-valued logical system tailored to the purpose. My aim in this paper is to offer a new interpretation of that system and to try to draw out some of its philosophical implications.

Mental Time Travel and Attention

ABSTRACT Episodic memory is the ability to revisit events in ones 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 earlier field of experience, yet attended to (organised, arranged) in a way that presents them as happening again, is, I suggest, a better one than that the memory perspective consists in taking as object-aspect the subject-aspect of the earlier experience, or the idea that it consists in labelling a representation of the earlier experience with an I-tag.

For a (Revised) PCA-analysis

Byrne and Hall (1998) have persuaded us that this is not quite right. But it is not far wrong. In this note we offer a modified version of our PCA-analysis which handles two of the three candidate counterexamples Byrne and Hall provide. The third example, we argue, does not in any case tell in favour of Lewiss quasi-dependence account (1986: 205-7) over ours so we stand by our original conclusion that our approach is preferable to Lewiss.

Can You Seek The Answer To This Question

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ‘Menos 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, where it is formulated with great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our ‘inquiry sceptic’ also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse.

Mental Time Travel and Attention: Replies to Commentators

I am deeply grateful for all the wonderful responses and comments that have been written with such care and, dare I say it, attention. The editors too were taken by surprise by the range and extensiveness of the responses, and asked me if I would not mind to limit the length of my replies so as to give as much space as possible in the volume for the responses themselves. I shall therefore make a few comments below, mostly indicative of what I have learned. With the help of a Virtual Reality (VR) headset one can find oneself standing on the surface of the moon or at the bottom of the ocean or at some other place that has never existed. One can, perhaps, see one’s hands and feet, and one occupies a position in a virtual space, a space that consists in a field of experience populated by virtual simulacra. One’s personal past is like a virtual world, and the fact that one has lived through it already means, extraordinarily enough, that one can step back into that world without the aid of any special technology. In doing so, it is as if one is there again, at the centre of a field of experience populated by present-tense simulacra of events now past. Attention is the activity of arranging of a field of experience, a field in which one is at the implied centre, and which is, in another sense of ‘centre’, centred on a particular place in the field whose contents are thereby foregrounded against an experiential background. What the VR headset enables is a distinct form of attention because it generates a virtual field of experience. There is a phenomenological difference between attending to a virtual field of experience and a real one, perhaps manifest in the absence of an expectation that the laws of nature hold. According to the mental time travel hypothesis, episodic memory is the active constituting of a field of experience populated by simulacra from one’s personal past. It is as if one were there again; one relives the past experience. What the episodic memory system enables is a distinct form of attention because it recreates a past field of experience. There is a phenomenological difference between attending to a past field of experience and a present one, which is what the sense of ‘again’ corresponds to, perhaps manifest in an anticipation of the sequence in which events unfold. I believe that such a picture of episodic memory was first discovered by the fifth century Buddhist philosopher Buddhaghosa. Even without the assistance of VR handsets he described the experience sustained in episodic memory as consisting in a kind of ‘as-if-ness’. What is intriguing about his account is that he did not feel it necessary to add any more robust analysis of the sense in which my past experience is experienced as mine, that is, of the ownership of one’s personal past. What, then, makes the episodic

A Return to the Self: Indians and Greeks on Life as Art and Philosophical Therapy

Of the many interrelated themes in Pierre Hadots Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault , two strike me as having a particular centrality. First, there is the theme of attention to the present instant. Hadot describes this as the ‘key to spiritual exercises’ (p.84), and he finds the idea encapsulated in a quotation from Goethes Second Faust : ‘Only the present is our happiness’ (p.217). The second theme is that of viewing the world from above: ‘philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity’ (p.242). Insofar as both attention to the present and raising oneself to an objective view imply the mastery of individual anxiety, passion and desire, they belong to a single conception, that conception being one of a ‘return to the self’: Thus, all spiritual exercises are, fundamentally, a return to the self, in which the self is liberated from the state of alienation into which it has been plunged by worries, passions, and desires. The ‘self’ liberated in this way is no longer merely our egoistic, passionate individuality: it is our moral person, open to universality and objectivity, and participating in universal nature or thought (p.103).

Intellectual India : reason, identity, dissent

The “idea of India” is indeed an open, assimilative, and spacious one, sustaining a plurality of voices, orthodox and dissenting, of many ages, regions, and affiliations. Modern Indian identities in the global diaspora, as much as in India itself, can call upon all these voices and traditions, rethink them, adapt and modify them, use the resources of reason they make available in deliberation about who to be, how to behave, and on what to agree. Amartya Sen argues the case with great force in his recent book, The Argumentative Indian . In the first part of my paper, I examine his argument in some detail and comment on what I perceive to be a serious omission in the book—the lack of any real engagement with India’s intellectual traditions, with roots in one or another of its religious systems. The background worry is that in developing the resources of reason within Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism, we are in some way making reason subordinate to tradition and religious command. Sen reads Akbar as resisting that threat with a strong insistence on the autonomy of reason. My argument is that we can respect the need for autonomy without restricting reason’s resources to those merely of allegedly value-free disciplines such as rational choice theory. My claim will be that the appeal to India’s traditions of argumentation and public reasoning is hollow if it does not engage with the detail of those traditions, for only in this way does the full panoply that a well-informed “argumentative Indian” has available to himself or herself come to the fore, in contrast with the restricted vision of a sectarian approach. Pointing to the brute existence of skeptical voices like that of Jāvāli is only the beginning of the story. What we really need to know is how a skeptic like Jāvāli adapted and manipulated the tools of justification and argument at his disposal so as to make possible his dissent. If nothing else, that would be a step towards understanding how heterodox voices might similarly empower themselves in global public discourse today. It is important to understand how the resources of reason can make internal dissent possible. In the second section, I document some of the evidence and begin to make good the lacuna I perceive in Sen’s work. In the third part of the essay, I show how “spacious” intellectual India really was in the seventeenth century, a period of increasing globalization, and one in which there was a rapid circulation of ideas between India and Europe.

Illusions of Immortality

This essay argues that a special type of illusion is what explains the grip of the idea of immortality. Throughout one’s lifetime one is aware of being alive, and so it seems as if one is always alive, even when, at the moment of death, the door of life is closed. You think the light of life is always shining; i.e., that you are immortal. Yet this is to forget that it is living which turns on the light of life. From the fact that for as long as we are alive we are conscious of being so, it does not follow that there is a similar consciousness even when we are no longer alive. This essay looks at responses to the illusion of immortality in two thinkers widely separated in time and space: the fifth century Theravāda Buddhist philosopher, Buddhaghosa, and the twentieth century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It discovers some profound and surprising affinities between these two thinkers, and suggests that each can be read in a way that helps to illuminate the thought of the other.

Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in India

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 16 to 17 century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label ‘modern’. It used to be a commonplace in studies ofmodernity, and remains one still in philosophical historiography, that modernity is something that happened first, and uniquely, in Europe; and attempts were made to convert the supposition into a tautology through defnitions of modernity that exclude nonEuropean periodizations and geographies (for example, in terms of capitalist modes of production, the emergence of nation states and nationalist collective identities, the industrial revolution, secularization, and so on). NonEuropean philosophies are traditional, and only European philosophy is modern. Progress of sorts occurred with the acknowledgement of the existence of alternative regional modernities, but the acknowledgement was tied to a centre/periphery model and to an associated ideology of European diffusionism. Eisenstadt, for instance, is willing to acknowledge ‘multiple modernities’, but only insofar as these new modernities imitate and copy a first modernity centred in Europe. Post-colonial writers such as R. Radhakrishnan have 1 The following quotation is representative: ‘Historically, modernization is the process of change towards those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth’ (Eisenstadt ‘Multiple Modernities’: 1). For similarly Eurocentric definitions of modernity, see also Giddens The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Hall and Gieben Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), 1–16 2 Eisenstadlt, Shmuel N. (2000) ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus 129(1): 1–29 75 doi:10.1017/S1358246114000071 ©The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74 2014 struggled with what they term ‘the curse of derivativeness’, and have sought to find in the interplay between colonised and coloniser, between tradition and modernity, a more dialectical pattern of engagement. What I will argue for in this essay is a more radical rejection of the commonplace picture. I will claim that we should think instead of modernity as a happening potentially indigenous to any culture, irrespective of period or place, that like the famous Indian banyan tree it is ‘polycentric’, here borrowing Susan Friedman’s very useful term. ‘The new geography of modernism’, Friedman says, ‘needs to locate many centres of modernity across the globe, to focus on the cultural traffic linking them, and to interpret the circuits of reciprocal influence and transformation that take place within highly unequal state relations’; it involves a recognition that these modernities are different, not derivative. There is just one way to substantiate such a claim, and that is through the detailed, painstaking, excavation of modernities that have been lost or lost sight of, and I will spend the remainder of this talk doing precisely that, unearthing an incipient early modernity in pre-colonial Indian philosophical theory. The arrival ofmodernity at a certain point in the history of philosophy seemingly admits of two non-compossible explanations. One model presents modernity as involving a thorough rejection of the ancient – its texts, its thinkers, its methods – as starting afresh and from the beginning. This was how the two figures who are emblematic of the ‘new philosophy’ in Europe, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Rene Descartes (1596–1650), chose to present themselves. 3 Radhakrishnan, R. (2002) ‘Derivative discourses and the problem of signification’, The European Legacy 7(6): 783–95 4 Freidman, Susan (2006) ‘Periodizing modernism: postcolonial modernities and the space/time borders of modernist studies’, Modernism/ Modernity 13(3): 429 5 Bacon: ‘There was but one course left, therefore,—to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.’ (Instauratio magma, Preface; 1857–74, vol. 4: 8 in The Works of Francis Bacon, J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds)(London: Longmans)). Descartes: ‘As soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters... For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study.’ (Discourse, AT vi. 9; 1984: 115, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham (ed.)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)). ‘The following

Words that Burn: Why did the Buddha say what he did?

Vacchagotta, whose questions about the immortality of the soul and the eternality of the world the Buddha famously refused to answer, would nevertheless later say that the Buddha ‘has made the Dhamma clear in many ways, as though he were turning upright what had been overthrown, revealing what was hidden, showing the way to one who was lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark’. In the Milinda-pañhā, the Greek King Menander challenges the Buddhist monk Nāgasena to explain how it could be that the Buddha was willing to remain silent and yet also assert that he had nothing to hide; that unlike other teachers he did not keep some things ‘in his fist’: