This CfP posted at the request of Scott Stroud, Professor of Communication Studies, University of Texas-Austin. John Dewey’s philosophy has had a global impact. Well known are the stories of his students from China such as Hu Shih and the reforms and visits that they spawned. More attention, however, is turning to the applicability of pragmatism to India. Sitting next to Hu Shih in Dewey’s classroom was a young Indian, Bhimrao Ambedkar. Ambedkar would return to India from his sojourn in the west and create a philosophy of democracy that both extended and resisted vital themes in what Dewey tau ..read more

Dr. Matthew LoPresti (Hawaii Pacific University) recently informed me of this fellowship opportunity, which is sponsored by the University of California, Irvine. A summary from the call for applications: The University of California, Irvine (UCI) Program in Religious Studies supports promising PhD students or recent graduates (within 1 year of graduating with PhD and in an teaching or independent research position of some kind) to pursue targeted scholarship in Process-relational philosophy in substantive dialog with any aspect of South Asian traditions and praxis. Projects that engage t ..read more

Readers may be interested in a new article by Scott Stroud that traces the influence of American pragmatist John Dewey on his student, the modern caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar ..read more

I have been working for years on reconstructing the deontic landscape of Mīmāṃsā, but at this point I realise that “landscape” might be a misleading metaphor. In fact, Mīmāṃsā authors were not just describing a natural scenario. They engineered a highly sophisticated system, with bridges connecting different actions and sewage systems to get rid of unwanted left-overs. That’s why even though new Mīmāṃsā authors might change the flag on the top of the hill (as Maṇḍana did with his iṣṭasādhanatā enterprise) or some particular aspect here and there, they were cautious not to jeopardise such a car ..read more

I have been working for years on mapping the deontic space of Mīmāṃsā authors. In order to do that, I tried to find a balance between systematicity, for the purpose of which I need as many information as possible and I often take whatever I can from whatever source, including many different authors, and historical attention to individual authors. In order to strike this balance, I tend to assume that by default the same deontic concepts are shared by all authors, unless and until the opposite is proven, either because someone has an explicitly competing theory (e.g., Maṇḍana’s iṣṭasādhanatā) o ..read more

Céline Leboeuf just interviewed me about philosophy for her “Why Philosophy?” newsletter. I discuss the role that Buddhism and Śāntideva have played in my philosophical formation and conception of philosophy, so I thought the interview might be of interest to readers here ..read more

The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discussed a recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an a ..read more

Kalidas Bhattacharyya. New Perspectives in Indian Philosophy [Ed. Nirmalya Narayan Chakraborty]. X+435pp., index. The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 2023. ₹ 600.00 (paperback). The New Perspectives in Indian Philosophy (henceforth NPIP) edited by Chakraborty is a scholarly collection of philosophical lectures delivered by Kalidas Bhattacharyya (1911-1984) at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture during last two decades of his life. Bhattacharyya continued the philosophical legacy of his father, the notable modern Indian philosopher, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949) b ..read more

As part of an international collaboration, three of us (Muzaffar Ali, Savitribai phule Pune University: Richa Shukla, IIT Bhubaneswar; Mansi Rathour, OP Jindal Global University) will be co-editing a volume, Women in Indian Thought: Ancient, Modern and Contemporary. The main idea behind co-editing this volume is to discuss and bring to the fore previously neglected voices of Indian women thinkers and philosophers. We invite interested scholars and academicians to contribute an intellectual biography of any neglected or lesser-known Indian women thinkers/philosophers for the volume. However, yo ..read more

A message from Malcolm Keating (Smith College): Blog readers might be interested in this call for papers on resemblance, which is open to all philosophical traditions. Papers on sādṛśya, upamāna, etc. are welcome. Call for papers: special issue on resemblance in the Asian Journal of Philosophy Guest editors: Ben Blumson (NUS, Singapore), Malcolm Keating (Smith College, USA) The nature of similarity (or resemblance) and our epistemic access to it have been important topics in both contemporary philosophy and historical traditions, including, for example, Indian and Medieval European philosophic ..read more