Category: Philosophy
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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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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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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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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…
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Getting started in research Every now and then, someone asks me where to start learning about Indian philosophy. It’s a good question, since what we call “Indian philosophy” includes a vast number of texts written over thousands of years in multiple languages. Should you start at the beginning? Should you try to get an overview?…
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Here are three words that would help media and society think more carefully about difficult cases involving slurs and disability: utter, use, and mention. They don’t mean the same thing. Someone who utters a word produces it. A person who is under anesthesia, whose brain is stimulated by a neurosurgeon, might utter the word “stupid.”…