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