CSAS Lecture Series | The Interjacent Intellectual: Conceptual Struggles for Authenticity in Three Indian Philosophers

For Surendranatha Dasgupta and his contemporaries in late colonial and early post-colonial India, the “impossible meeting” of East and West was not an abstract puzzle in the theory of interculturalism but a challenge to find an authentic interpretation of lived experience. What does authenticity consist in for a thinker as much rooted in two life-worlds, and as much thereby alienated from either? In the philosophical and non-philosophical writings of S. Dasgupta, K.C. Bhattacharya, A.C. Mukherji, S. Radhakrishnan, and others, questions of selfhood and subjectivity became, for good reason, dominant preoccupations. I will speak about their explorations of the phenomenology of interjacency and its relationship to the search for authenticity.

Jonardon Ganeri’s research interests are in consciousness, self, attention, the epistemology of inquiry, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literary form, case-based reasoning, multiple-category ontologies, non-classical logics, realism in the theory of meaning, the history of ideas in early modern South Asia, the polycentricity of modernity, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural hermeneutics, intellectual affinities between India, Greece and China, and early Buddhist philosophy of mind. Ganeri teaches courses in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, Buddhist philosophy, the history of Indian philosophical traditions. He also supervises PhDs on Indian philosophical texts in classical Sanskrit.

Ganeri’s books include Attention, Not Self; The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance; The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700; The Concealed Art of the Soul; and Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. He has published in Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Isis, New Literary History, Philosophy and Literature, Synthese, Analysis, Philosophy, in major Indology journals, and is on the editorial boards of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, the Journal of Hindu Studies and other journals and monograph series. Ganeri is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, drafting scripts about Indian Philosophy for the podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps, and thinking about philosophy, cosmopolitanism, and anti-coloniality.

Ganeri advocates an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies in philosophical research, together with enhanced cultural diversity in the philosophical curriculum. He strives to collaborate with philosophers, phenomenologists, cognitive scientists, historians, anthropologists, sinologists, persianists, buddhologists, classicists, and logicians. Ganeria is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and laureate of the Infosys Prize in the Humanities. He has been named by Open Magazine one of India’s “50 Open Minds” in 2016.

Cosponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and Asian Languages and Cultures.