I am Jonardon Ganeri, philosopher working on mind, metaphysics and
epistemology across the Eastern and Western traditions. AMA!
Abstract
I am Jonardon Ganeri, Professor of Philosophy, Arts and Humanities at
NYU Abu Dhabi. I studied Mathematics at Cambridge, including an MMath in
Theoretical Physics, before turning to Philosophy, which I studied first
at King’s College London followed by doctoral work in Oxford under the
supervision of Bimal Matilal and John Campbell. I taught for many years
at various universities in Britain, and I have been a visiting professor
at the Universities of Chicago, JNU Delhi, Kyunghee Seoul, EHESS Paris,
and UPenn, and a Fellow of Clare Hall Cambridge. I now make a living
doing teaching for NYU in its global network, but also have visiting
positions at King’s College London and the School of Oriental and
African Studies. You can read a bit more about me in this interview in
3:AM magazine. And I have made a lot of my writings available on
academia.edu. With roots in Britain and India, my work has focussed
primarily on a retrieval of the Sanskrit philosophical tradition in
relationship to contemporary analytical philosophy, and I have done work
in this vein on theories of self, concepts of rationality, and the
philosophy of language, as well as on the idea of philosophy as a
practice and its relationship with literature. I have also worked
extensively on the social and intellectual history of early modern South
Asia and on the socio-political concept of identity. One of my areas of
interest has to do with the nature of the human being as a place of
selfhood and subjectivity, and of the person as a category of moral
identity and social importance. Through a retrieval of theory from first
millennial India, I have sought to show that Indian conceptions of the
human subject have a richness and diversity that can enable modern
thinkers to move beyond the traditional oscillation between materialism
and dualism, an oscillation that has dominated and restricted
philosophical understandings of human subjecthood. Another area of
interest is in the nature of modernity. I believe that we should move
away from a “centre/periphery” model that sees modernity as an
originally European discovery which propagated out to other parts of the
world; rather, there have been many geographical locations of distinct
forms of modernity at different times. Over the last few years I have
made an extensive study of one particular location, the early modernity
of ‘new reason’ philosophers in Vārāṇasī and Navadvīpa in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. My book about this, The Lost Age of Reason,
as been well-received and generated a new appreciation of the
philosophical richness of this period, when a Sanskit cosmopolis and a
Persian cosmopolis encountered each other for the first time. Recently I
have been working on the notion of attention and connection between
attention and subjectivity. I have just published a book about this,
Attention, Not Self already available in Europe and out in the States
next February. The book draws 6th century Buddhist theories about
attention into conversation with contemporary philosophy and cognitive
science. I argue for cosmopolitanism in philosophy, the view that
philosophy must of necessity make appeal to a plurality of intellectual
cultures if it is to avoid parochialism in the intuitions that guide it
and the vocabularies in which it is phrased. I think we need new kinds
of philosophical institution to make this happen. It’s also very
important that there is a reform of the university curriculum in
philosophy, to make it richer though a proper representation of all the
world’s philosophical heritage. I have been very busy, recently,
preparing a range of teaching and self-study materials for Indian
Philosophy. I just published, after 5 years work, the Oxford Handbook of
Indian Philosophy, I’ve been collaborating with Peter Adamson on a
series of podcasts about Indian philosophy in his wonderful Philosophy
Without Any Gaps series, and I brought out a four-volume collection of
essential secondary literature in the field with Routledge. So if you
want to get your knowledge about the world of Indian philosophy up to
speed, some combination of these resources will hopefully do the trick.
Links of Interest: “Conceptions of Self: An Analytical Taxonomy” -
first chapter from The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the
First-Person Stance Interview at 3:AM Magazine Short piece at Aeon:
“The Tree of Knowledge is not an apple or an oak but a banyan”
Interview at Current Science NYT interview: ”What Would Krishna Do? Or
Shiva? Or Vishna? My books. OUP has been kind enough to offer a 30%
discount on all of these by using discount code AAFLYG6 at checkout at
the OUP website. Attention, Not Self The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness
and the First Person Stance The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of
Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology The Lost
Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 Semantic
Powers The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy