Recent posts
- Misgendering, pronouns, and AI
- Academic editing and style
- The Barcelona Principles and varieties of English
- On “Sanskrit Philosophy”
- Word macros and academic editing
academic writing AI announcements books comparative philosophy compositionality copyediting editing English gender global English graduate studies guides history of philosophy Indian philosophy Kumārila Bhaṭṭa lexicon linguistic justice LLMs macros methodology MS Word Mukula Bhaṭṭa philosophy of language poetics pragmatics professionalism pronouns reflections research Sanskrit semantics sentence meaning slurs style translation world English
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With the rise of AI-generated video, there’s a new place on the Internet to check whether the cute puppy video your grandma posted on Facebook is real: the subreddit r/isthisAI. Participants there have not only been discussing the origin of videos, but they’ve also been dipping into philosophy of language. I recently spotted a debate…
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Over the last two months, I’ve begun copyediting for the APA Blog, and I’ve also begun the last course for my copyediting certificate, offered by UC San Diego Extended Studies. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to edit academic writing to be clear and even stylish. In this post, I’ll explain how I…
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At the most recent Eastern APA (American Philosophical Association) meeting, there was a session on the Barcelona Principles, which argues that non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage in “analytic” or “Anglo-American” philosophy. The authors of the principles argue that this is because of the emphasis on “linguistic appearances” in evaluating journal submissions and the…
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Since the label “Sanskrit philosophy” is being used regularly by some of my colleagues who work on philosophy in the Indian subcontinent, I thought I’d write a post on why I don’t use the term and why I think it isn’t a good replacement for “Indian Philosophy” or “South Asian Philosophy.” What should a label…
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During the last several years, I’ve slowly been completing a copyediting certificate program. Part of the motivation for this additional training is that I realized editing is a skill that can benefit from training. A lot of academics think editing is just “proofreading,” by which they mean “catching typos” or fixing bibliographies. However, I’ve come…
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It’s been five months since I arrived in Scotland to spend a semester as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. When I arrived, the days were long, the sun setting between nine and ten at night. Now, darkness falls at four in the afternoon, usually accompanied by rain. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed…
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This week I, I took a trip to Dublin and viewed the Book of Kells and the Old Library at Trinity. In the exhibit, before visitors were funneled into the dark room that held the Book of Kells, I encountered a poem that made me think about current debates over artificial intelligence and also about…
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The principle of compositionality is, essentially, the claim that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its constituent parts (words and phrases) and the structure of those parts. This principle is often attributed to Gottlob Frege, but Indian philosophers have discussed versions of this principle and objections to it, as B.…
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The journal Philosophy East and West has just published a positive review of Classical Sanskrit for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners. The review is available here, though only for people with institutional access (I’ll excerpt a few bits below). The reviewer, Iwona Milewska, graciously calls the book “multi-sided and competent, but also charming.” As…
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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…