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 Scotland and the United Kingdom (I traveled to England as well as the Isle of Skye, which is gorgeous.) And the philosophy department at Glasgow is welcoming and vibrant.

This was my first extended period in a large, predominantly analytic philosophy department since my PhD at UT Austin, since after graduation, I’ve been at liberal arts colleges, both with explicitly pluralistic and global approaches to philosophy. I came here hoping not only to learn from analytic philosophers of language, like my host, Bryan Pickel, but also to test out different ways of presenting Indian philosophy to non-specialist audiences. And I wanted to reflect on my own approach to Sanskrit texts. The semester was extremely useful for progress in both research and methodology.

So, some rough thoughts:

• Beginning with an initial question or potential point of tension drew talk audiences into conversation with Kumārila’s text pretty easily, even if this required some unargued-for starting points. Such an approach didn’t require identifying his problem as being a version of an existing problem, but usually people would be able to identify analogs in their own areas of research once the problem was sufficiently clear.
  • For example, without having to give a lot of initial background about the Vedas as a source of knowledge for ritual action, it’s possible to motivate a potential puzzle in two claims Kumārila makes: (1) most people, whether now or in the past, utter falsehoods, and (2) we are prima facie justified in beliefs that arise from determinate cognitions that things seem to be a certain way, including beliefs from other people telling us things. But if (1) is true, why would we even prima facie be justified in believing what someone tells us is true?
  • Of course, unpacking this involves talking about svataḥ prāmāṇya and its relationship to various conceptions of justification. But just those two claims can get something interesting going.
• Gestures at connections with analytic philosophy seemed helpful as conversation-starters, not as endpoints in themselves. And since the conceptual landscape is complex, initial points of contact are often more complicated and contentious than they might initially appear. So saying that Kumārila is committed to something like the principle of compositionality is helpful, but that’s only a first stop on the way to precisely what that principle is, why he has this commitment, and its application in different cases.
• Including one or two untranslated key Sanskrit terms per talk helped in conversation about what the concepts were, especially when they are the concepts under investigation (so leaving prāmāṇya untranslated in an epistemology talk). But stipulative uses of terms like “cognition” for jñāna didn’t block understanding, since it’s common that central English terms aren’t used to mean precisely the same thing by philosophers writing in English (to wit: “justification” in epistemology!). Though it was helpful to run different translations of terms by test audiences after explaining concepts. (“Intrinsic validity” was pretty universally disliked for svataḥ prāmāṇya!)
• Translations of the text as part of talks seemed well-received, even by audiences who were mostly not historians of philosophy. For philosophy of language talks, including the Sanskrit above English glosses and translations, even for non-Sanskrit audiences, was helpful, too. Since Indian philosophy is not as widely known as ancient Greek philosophy, there’s an element of “showing your work” to demonstrate that the arguments really are in the text, and not contemporary philosophers reading into something ambiguous.
• Finally, I am even more convinced that collaborative work is important for bridge-building and even simply first-order work in understanding the texts. Reading Kumārila in translation with people trained in epistemology, language, metaphysics, etc., yielded insightful questions about the structure of his arguments, and frankly, was just fun.