Graduate and advanced undergraduate students
The number of philosophy programs, graduate or undergraduate, where students can seriously study Indian philosophy is small, compared to even ancient Greek philosophy. The Indian Philosophy Blog keeps a list of graduate programs, including religious studies and area studies program. No such list exists for undergraduate programs, but I’d suspect few departments have a faculty member working in Indian philosophy, let alone multiple, to whom students can go for advice.
Since I’ve had many students over the years ask questions about research in philosophical texts from the Indian subcontinent, I’ve collected some opinionated advice below. As I’m not at a graduate program, my experience guiding students through a PhD is limited, but I can speak from my own experience earning a PhD and publishing in the field.
Topics
- What skills do I need?
- What is a good thesis topic?
- How can I publish papers in Indian philosophy?
- How can I make connections with faculty and other people working in the discipline?
What skills do I need?
Language skills. If you want to work on Indian or South Asian philosophy more generally as your main area of research, you will need language skills. You should start on this as early as possible (if you haven’t before the PhD) and find as many opportunities to read in those languages as you can. That’s because otherwise you will be at the mercy of existing translations to understand and evaluate the arguments of Indian philosophers.
If you want to work mainly in a more “traditional” area of philosophy but engage with Indian philosophy in a secondary way (often known as an “area of concentration”), you may not need to learn these languages, and instead you’ll rely on translations. However, it is still a good idea to have some basic familiarity with the language of these primary texts, since much secondary literature will presume it.
How to:
- Consider what texts you want to read. Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan are three of the most common languages students acquire, but philosophical texts in the subcontinent have been written in many other languages: Tamil, Prakrit, and beyond. In Buddhist philosophy, classical Chinese is helpful for engaging with later translations and commentaries.
- Find courses at your institution, if possible. Take advanced reading courses in genres other than philosophy, too. It will improve your language skills and give you a richer understanding of the intellectual context of these thinkers.
- Look for summer programs, both for language-learning and reading workshops, which are an excellent opportunity to immerse yourself in these efforts. Below are a few. There are more.
Logic and reasoning. One reason students working on Indian philosophical texts benefit from studying in a philosophy department is that they will (or should!) learn how to formulate and evaluate arguments. While the inferential form common in Indian philosophy, anumāna, is not the same thing as the deductively valid syllogism you’ll learn in a first-year logic course, learning logic and the features of good argumentation more broadly will help you in a few ways. (Learning the anumāna and other Indian philosophical argumentative forms will also help your reasoning skills!)
Your papers will need to be argued well. This means that you should have familiarity with deductive, inductive, and abductive forms of reasoning and when they’re appropriate.
Much work in Indian epistemology, language, and logic assumes competence with logic. For instance, to understand contemporary debates around the catuṣkoṭi in Buddhist philosophy, you need to understand something about dialetheism. Work on Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics and theorizing about commands draws on modal logic. And so on.
How to:
- Take logic classes. If they aren’t required, take one anyway.
- Pay attention to the structure of arguments in papers you read. Identify what kind of argument is being made by the author. If they haven’t presented it explicitly, try to reconstruct it in your own words using an argument structure you’ve learned. Then check it—this is a starting point for generating your own work, too.
- Force yourself to be explicit about your own arguments. You don’t need to present every argument in your papers in numbered premise form, but it is good practice to try putting it in that form at some point. You may catch yourself making mistakes. More fundamentally, ask yourself what kind of argument you’re making. For instance, textual arguments are typically inference to the best explanation, so be explicit about what makes your explanation the best (and what the competing ones are).
Research skills. There are scholarly norms governing work with ancient texts and with Indian philosophical texts, too. Depending on your program and advisor (and your own background), you may have to work harder to learn these than students from religious studies or area studies backgrounds. You will need to learn where to find texts and how to engage with the wide range of sources (philological, historical, philosophical) that you need do Indian philosophy.
How to:
- Ask your advisor and other mentors to describe their research process to you—they may assume you already know how to read and compare printed editions, how to find and evaluate secondary material, and so on. However, this process is not always explicitly taught, despite its being important to historically grounded work (whether your methodology is “history of philosophy,” “fusion philosophy,” “comparative philosophy,” and so on).
- Look at the Indology website as a starting point for learning where to find texts and use textual tools.
- Look at publications in well-regarded journals (see below) for their use of sources, transliteration styles, bibliographies, and so on. Read not just for content (arguments, claims) but for style, structure, and method.
- At some point, read a little about philosophical methodology, for instance “comparative philosophy” versus “world philosophy” versus “history of philosophy,” etc. This is a big topic, and personally, I don’t think students should get too focused on metaphilosophical questions early on, but it’s worth reflecting on how your work fits into the larger set of approaches. You may need to explain your approach to referees when you submit to journals.
What is a good thesis topic?
Scope and topic. If you are writing a significant work, like an undergraduate honors thesis or a PhD dissertation, it’s important to have a good understanding of the scope of such a project. Your advisors will help you with this, as it’s common for students to begin with too large a topic, at any level. (Professional philosophers do this too, and we often find ourselves splitting papers or deciding that a paper should really be a book.)
Whether a thesis or a dissertation, your work will have a general topic, a background conversation, and your thesis, which is an intervention into that conversation.
For instance, you might be interested in the topic of the metaphysics of the self. There are multiple philosophical conversations within this topic, with multiple participants. For instance, there are premodern Indian philosophers debating about whether a self exists, what kind of self it would be, how we could know such a thing exists if it did, and so on. So you could decide which conversation you are interested in: perhaps you want to look at how Vācaspati Miśra responds to Buddhists like Dharmakīrti. (Note that this project would require Sanskrit skills, since Vācaspati’s work is not translated in full, and Dharmakīrti’s is notoriously difficult, even in translation, which is also incomplete.)
But there’s also a contemporary scholarly debate about how to understand these philosophers. This debate has participants. And, further, there is a conversation in analytic philosophy about the metaphysics of the self. Some of these participants overlap with the scholarly debate about Indian philosophy, but not all. So, if you want to write about the metaphysics of the self, you will need to think about what you’ll contribute to which conversation.
Your contribution should be a truth-evaluable claim or set of claims. It should be something interesting, in the sense of not being obvious. It should be something related to an ongoing conversation. But it should take the conversation in a new direction. It doesn’t need to be completely “novel” in the sense of being disconnected from all prior philosophy. And your contribution should be something you can support positively in your thesis and also defend against actual or potential objections.
How to:
- Read and decide which primary texts you will be engaging with. How much interpretive work will you need to do? What can you consider to be broadly accepted, interpretively? This impacts the size and complexity of your argument.
- Read and decide which secondary texts you will be engaging with. Locate yourself in the conversation. Are you siding with someone? Staking out a new position? Are you engaging with a particular individual or a collection of views?
- Consider what kind of evidence supports your thesis. Is it textual? Conceptual? Empirical? What kind of evidence would show you are wrong? Consider people who might say you are wrong and take them seriously. How would you respond to them? Once you’ve gotten clear about supporting the thesis, reflect on how much you need to do in order to explain this to the reader.
How can I publish papers in Indian philosophy?
Journals. There is no generally accepted “ranking” of journals in this subdiscipline. Years ago, I asked for suggestions of friendly journals at the IPB, but some of the landscape has changed since then. Basically, though, there is a difference between specialist journals, which are for people working in Indian, Asian, and broadly cross-cultural philosophy, and generalist journals, which take submissions from philosophers of all kinds. Some area studies journals in Hinduism, Buddhism, religious studies, etc., also publish philosophy.
Some specialist philosophy journals are:
- Journal of Indian Philosophy
- Philosophy East and West
- Journal of World Philosophy
- Comparative Philosophy
- Asian Philosophy
- Journal of Buddhist Philosophy
- Journal of Buddhist Ethics
Some area studies journals that also publish philosophy are:
- Journal of the American Academy of Religion
- Journal of Dharma Studies
- International Journal of Hindu Studies
Some generalist journals that have recently published in Indian philosophy or indicated openness to it are:
- Ergo
- The Philosophical Quarterly
- Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
- Journal of the American Philosophical Association
- History of Philosophy Quarterly
- British Journal for the History of Philosophy
- Sophia
- American Philosophical Quarterly
- International Philosophical Quarterly
- Idealistic Studies
- Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
- Journal of Consciousness Studies
Knowing when and where to submit. Advice on writing for, and submitting to, journals is easily found on blogs like Daily Nous and the Philosopher’s Cocoon. I’ll just add a few comments about this process for the subdiscipline of Indian philosophy.
Knowing when a paper is ready to publish isn’t easy, but one suggestion is to make sure you have gotten feedback from a few groups of people. If you’ve given a talk on the paper two to three times or had several different readers give you comments, you can have more confidence that it will hold up to review.
It can also be useful to have different kinds of readers. Typically, a paper in Indian philosophy will have a reviewer who is a subject matter expert in the texts as as well as a reviewer who is a subject matter expert in the topic (sometimes you will have three or four readers). Sometimes these overlap, but not always. For example, the person who can read the Sanskrit text may not be trained in broadly Western metaphysics. And the metaphysician may have no idea about the text you’re drawing from. Ideally, your paper, if it’s engaging with contemporary or broadly Western philosophy, should pass muster with someone who knows about, e.g, metaphysics broadly and someone who knows about, e.g., Buddhist metaphysics.
How to:
- Consider what conversation your paper is intervening in (see “What is a good thesis topic?”). Depending on this, select a journal with readers likely to appreciate that contribution. For instance, if you are making a historical point about the development of Indian philosophy, you might consider a specialist journal or a history journal. If you are making a first-order philosophical claim about epistemology, metaphysics, etc., by drawing on Indian philosophy, consider a generalist journal or a comparative philosophy specialist journal.
- Look at where people whose work you admire have published. Try sending your paper to the same journal, but before you do, look carefully at the way the author frames their work. How much textual work do they do? How much familiarity with, e.g., analytic philosophy do they assume? You may find that your paper isn’t well-suited for the same journal or needs to be revised.
- Do a careful copyedit of your paper before submitting and look at the journal submission requirements. While typos and errors creep into even published work, you don’t want to irritate your reviewers, and some will find bibliographic mistakes or typos frustrating. (Try Zotero for generating citations.) Even professional copyeditors have someone else look at their work, so don’t feel bad about asking someone else to help you. (I suggest using AI for these purposes with caution—here is what some professional copyeditors say about the tools. Spoiler: they are not impressed.)
How can I make connections with faculty and other people working in the discipline?
Colleagues. Studying in a program where the tradition is mainly Anglo-European can be lonely. As well, if your approach is historical rather than analytic (or the reverse), this can add to the sense of disconnect with other people’s projects, depending on how they approach philosophy. It’s important to find people that support your work and to support them, too.
How to:
- Be a good contributor to philosophy more broadly in your department. Actively support your peers and attend their talks. This can demonstrate you’re not “only” an “Indian philosopher” but a philosopher more generally. It sharpens your thinking and broadens your horizons.
- Look for a South Asian Studies or Religion program at your university, where you may find fellow travelers who are philosophically minded, or who are interested in the same texts from different angles. Sit in on some classes or go to talks.
Mentors. Unlike Anglo-European philosophy, which is represented broadly in philosophy programs in the English-speaking world (and, frankly, beyond), at most programs, you will be lucky to find more than one person working in Indian philosophy. It is essential that you find mentors beyond them, not only pragmatically (for recommendation letters) but also philosophically.
Example: suppose you want to work on philosophy of mind in Buddhism. Even if you are at a program where this is someone’s main area of research, it is important to understand the broader context of, say, Dharmakīrti. This could mean understanding Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā contributions. Your advisor may not focus as much on these traditions. Further, even the most well-rounded philosopher has limitations and their own perspective. You want to ensure you are entering into the broader conversation in the field and not only taking on your advisor’s perspective (even if you ultimately agree with them!).
How to:
- Talk to guest speakers and go to conferences. Follow up after talks by email, go to dinners and social opportunities as energy and your schedule permits. The discipline of philosophy is small and the subdiscipline of Indian philosophy even smaller. You’ll encounter the same people throughout your career, so it’s good to be friendly and professional.
- Ask questions and enjoy the chance to learn at talks and conferences. There may be a feeling of pressure to “perform” in the sense of showing that you are smart or philosophical, but I’ve found that I learn more by asking questions than pretending I am familiar with every philosopher, argument, or term that comes up in conversation. Philosophy globally is big and the Indian subcontinent’s history is thousands of years long. Of course no one knows everything.
- Email people whose work you appreciate—but use proper email etiquette. (And before asking someone to advise you, definitely do some research on how they treat their advisees: are they actively engaged, kind, constructive?) Below are some tips.
- If you’re going to email someone you don’t already know, keep the email short. Introduce yourself, explain how you know their work and what you’d like from them, and sign off. Reserve long discussions for later, if it’s appropriate.
- Be sure you know their work. Just because someone is listed on a website as having “Indian philosophy” or similar as an area of expertise doesn’t mean they can act as an advisor for your thesis on Advaita Vedānta. Make sure their actual publications match your interests. (And that they are taking on students—are they even at a PhD institution to begin with?)
- Use the proper honorific (“Dr.” or “Prof.”) rather than addressing them by the first name. While many faculty will be happy to be on a first-name basis with you, it’s still standard to begin on a more formal basis.
- Do ask specific questions but don’t expect the faculty member to do your work for you. At the outset, it’s a good idea to ask narrower questions or if they have time for a short Zoom conversation. Sending a paper unbidden and asking for general feedback is not a good strategy. Ask if they’re willing to read your work, and give them specific things you’re interested in knowing.
- Bottom line: faculty are busy and get lots of strange emails. Make it easy for your email recipient to reply. And if they don’t respond, don’t take it personally—academics aren’t always great at email.