Hello and welcome to the Open Africa and South Asia Peacemakers series.
Please join us to let me think about the subthemes African and South Asian nation of our public policy Genoese.
We want to 10 to 20, 21 together.
The students begin to enquire about tuition and studied in your American philosophical institutions while investigating students in a way,
our traditions and philosophies and beyond.
We intend to participate, ameliorating deficits in representation with resources required to transform our minds.
Homosexual's sketched out at. My name is.
And today I'll be talking to Jonathan iJet and I are often on television specials with the Journal about their experiences of studying,
I think a lot, Jonathan. Each student at King's College London, working on the 17th century philosophical autobiography from Ethiopia,
exploring Ethiopian literature and history,
fighting Oriental scholarship and the shadow of Empire, Giese Philology and varieties of philosophical rationalism and critique.
Honokaa is a Masters student at Oxford University who works on Buddhist philosophy.
Thank you for being here. I thought that we could just get started with questions about, like,
how your first introduction to doing any sort of Western philosophy, but also specifically Africa and South Asian philosophy.
Oh, so young, I think for me, getting into the South Asian philosophy sort of happens simultaneously with getting into philosophy,
I think maybe for other people it tends to be different.
But I, I think well, maybe that's not this kind of goes back to a point where my memories are kind of blurred.
But I was kind of interested in philosophical thinking, I think, when I was quite young.
And then when I was 15, my religious studies teacher gave me a book on Buddhism,
Buddhism, plain and simple, by Steve Hegan, and that felt just like this lights on.
I don't think I ever had a particular draw to South Asian philosophy before that.
I think the things that I was interested in with these broader philosophical question,
but Buddhism just felt like it had this these answers to questions that I didn't really know I had.
But they were really pertinent to me. And I felt like I really just felt I encountered something that.
Made sense in a way that nothing else did. It really felt I remember like sitting there and thinking I found the meaning of life now and I'm only 15.
Wow. I'm very lucky. So so since then, I kind of just took on an interest in Buddhism in particular.
And it was always quite a personal, kind of practical kind of spiritual interest.
But I also had this mind that was interested in philosophical issues. And I did classics at school.
I did Latin and Greek. So I was generally in the world of philosophy.
I had this kind of spiritual interest in Buddhism, my personal interest. And so those two things sort of combined.
And I ended up going like the kind of obvious thing to do was to study theology and religion.
So I ended up doing that. And then my focus is in that sort of took me to I think I was always more interested in the kind
of philosophical aspects of theology than this once and then because of my interest in Buddhism,
Indian philosophy as well. Let me. Yeah, well, I mean, if I may,
one was a bit of a natural sort of marrying together of an interest in Buddhism and an interest in
philosophy minor certainly via the more sort of circuitous route in that I studied philosophy for,
I think eight years that university six, six,
six or seven years at university before ever really coming across Afrikaner philosophy is even a sort of a possibility of something to study for.
My my background in philosophy is much more sort of a traditional analytic
background who has been interested in taking classes in the history of philosophy.
But of course, the history philosophy tends to be the history of the particular tradition
that kind of culminates in the analytic academic philosophy that's done today.
And the first possibilities are really hard to do in the so-called non Western philosophies within on a year abroad in Paris,
where there were classes on Indian philosophy, Arabic language, philosophy, Chinese philosophy,
and this was really a sort of a bit of an eye opener to the different ways that things could be studied.
One of the things I was really impressed with was that there was always the insistence on if you're wanting to understand the philosophy,
you're going to need to know the languages.
One of the things I always didn't particularly like about the analytic approach as the sort of insistence that we're getting a universal truth,
but we're doing it by analysing the semantics of one particular language on the edge of the world,
or maybe a set of two or three languages or in this little corner of the European Peninsula on the edge of the world.
And it always seemed to me that without you know, if you take a serious philosophical interest in language,
you should probably take a serious philosophical interest in as many languages as possible.
So coming and coming sort of back to back to back to philosophy in the UK,
I tried to sort of pick up ways of doing philosophy and in some different languages.
And this interest sort of let me down trying to just explore as many different philosophies
from as many different parts of the world in many different languages as possible.
And so when I came across the writing of this, this text called that at the very yakob in an article,
and I was fascinated that there was a text that no one seemed to have heard about before,
written in an African language that seemed to be offering a lot of the same ideas and the same sort of general
philosophical outlook that generally gets called modern philosophy exactly the same time as Descartes was writing it.
And really it was going down this this very yakob rabbit hole, the question of its authorship,
the question of other philosophical antecedents in Africa in the general meta philosophical questions that get raised by Afrikaner philosophy that,
yeah, I'm essentially just still in that rabbit hole that opening the zodiac opened up.
So that's how I got here.
Well, I guess that just sort of touches on my next question and what your current research interests are and what you're working on at the moment.
Yeah, if you want to keep going. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So so my my doctoral research at the moment focuses on this, this text, the YAKOB,
which as you mentioned in the in the introduction, is this kind of philosophical autobiography.
So it's written in the first person from the perspective of a 17th century Ethiopian priest named Zarah Yakob,
who's educated in the traditional Ethiopian education system,
comes into contact with foreign ideas for the first time with the Jesuit priest who are at the core of
the Ethiopian king at the time and in the sort of ensuing sort of civil strife that goes on at the time.
He's is forced to flee, takes refuge in a cave where he sits down to meditate and composes this this philosophical work.
And as I said, with sort of being contemporary with Descartes Piscatella method, a lot of people have thought that this is the foundation,
this is an equivalent foundational work of modern philosophy,
which evidently would change quite a lot of what we tend to think about in terms of the history and development of modern philosophy.
I know that in recent times as well.
Jonathan Canary's done some really interesting work on, you know, thinking about what modern world philosophy would mean in a South Asian context.
One of the sort of point to my research, particularly interested in exploring, is the idea of global modern philosophy.
So whether we might think about the text that it talks about in the lost age
of reason and that Yacob and perhaps the works of Chinese thinkers like me,
as well as those responding to similar sort of distinctively modern predicaments in, you know, not unconnected sort of way.
So one of the sort of approaches for thinking about. Is what we call connected history, philosophy,
and the sort of the main orientation of my research is figuring out what kind of a methodology we
might need rooted in an analysis of the sort of particular material circumstances that are in common
that these thinkers from different parts of the world and how that might help us think about all of
these things together and how we might therefore try and write a truly global history of philosophy.
I suppose that's actually a secondary. And the first one is to figure out whether the text is actually written by a 17th century Ethiopian or not,
because that was a famous claim made by a 20th century scholar of Ethiopian literature that in fact,
far from being the work of this very Yakob writing from a cave in 17th century TIKRAI,
the text was actually fabricated by a 19th century Ethiopian Italian monk.
And so, yeah, the first question, I suppose,
is figuring out the authenticity debate and some of the sort of cultural political underpinnings of that debate over the last
hundred years and then sort of trying to try to use that to think about this global global historiography of philosophy.
Pretty 24 at. I guess the question is that, OK, I'm just I'm curious about one thing that you just said.
Yeah. This whole thing about. Maternity and paternity being something that a kind of category that we can use across different worldviews,
different places in space and time is interesting, is something that I've come across specifically in the Islamic world, as I did before,
the influence of the West or as the influence of the West was was growing in the Islamic world.
There were Sufi thinkers, particular Sufi thinkers, who were coming up with some of the ideas and instead it with modernity,
I think in particular kind of a reformulation of traditional thought and moving away from tradition,
the authority of individualism,
so that your idea about modernity being something that was rising in different places at a similar time is interesting.
Do you see that as a product of Western colonial influence in these respective places or happening apart from that?
Yeah, so, I mean, this is a really interesting, really interesting sort of question.
I think the the direction that I'm most interested in pushing the argument is one that doesn't emphasise
the primacy or the hegemony of of of Western forces in constituting this kind of this kind of modernity,
but that we think about these things as being a kind of globally constituted sort of system.
So, of course, the sort of increasing in global travel and trade that you get from sort of, you know, 40,
90 turbin and the sort of Portuguese Portuguese exploration's onwards is one of the major catalysts.
So what we're thinking about the similar material conditions that we get and lots of places,
one of the things that are similar is that different groups of people are being thrown
into contact kind of for the first time is that they are forced to argue with you,
argue with these European scholars and sort of think about his ideas in response to that.
But we also have cases like with the Macala daughter who comes up with this kind of syncretic workwise.
So he he's the heir to the throne, but he's very interested in various forms of Sufism and with and with Hinduism.
So he interviews pundit's as a European artist, philosopher Francois Barnier at his core.
And they're all sort of exchanging these ideas in a way that's certainly not fundamentally driven by European colonialism.
You know, the European Jews there is you know, he's a guest of a vastly more powerful ruler than exists anywhere on the European continent.
And he's one voice amongst many in these conversations, certainly not a dominant one.
And so I think it's it's it's sort of thinking about modernity or enlightenment,
maybe as the sort of intellectual sort of counterpart to that as being something which is.
Yeah, jointly formed by by different people in different parts of the world at this stage.
Although obviously the sort of the further you go on, the more that gets dominated by one particular view of what modernity and what enlightenment
supposed to be to the point that people forget that there were any other alternatives at all.
The idea of liberating materialistic formed Western particularism, but then still keeping it as a countercultural category.
Yeah, it's fascinating. And it's yeah. And it's it's one of these things.
It's very much a work in progress. I mean, you have to sort of decide and define what you take these important factors to be.
For me, the thing that I'm most interested in when it comes to modernity or to the idea of enlightenment,
thinking about what that might mean in different capacities instead of sort of taking the definition of enlightenment,
like we might get an essay as, you know, the power to think for oneself or is, you know, X, Y or Z, we have, you know, enlightenments.
To me, what's interesting is just any kind of intellectual critique in the service of an
emancipatory politics and a sort of intellectual critique of a system that gives us,
um. Yeah. A way of thinking about making human beings freer.
Um, but it's absolutely fascinating.
I also imagine that, you know, it's almost the worst of both worlds in the sense that you get pushback from historians as well.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. As long as you're pissing off both sides, you can feel confident enough that you're doing it right.
Well. I'm do you tell us what were you working on at the moment?
So I'm doing a master's in study of religion.
So the message itself is structured so that people can come in and study non Christian religions of whatever they want to.
I'm focussing on South Asian religions to Buddhism and Hinduism in particular. So I've done two extended essays.
One on my first one was on The Hindu Thinker, this 9th century Indian thinker Gupta, who lived in Kashmir.
And he is is a Kashmiri shivah. So he inherits this kind of particular religious tradition that's based on these tantric texts and has an idealist,
an idealist philosophy that has a kind of particular understanding of consciousness, vibration.
So I was working on in him the relationship between reason and ritual.
So if you read his text, he says that he says that the highest yoga, the high school practise is Turky.
And so then you might be led to the conclusion that he's some sort of rationalist,
I think from kind of particular modern Western interpreter blends with easy to start thinking that he's a rationalist in some way.
And I have particular people sort of do have that interpretation. And by rationalist, I mean that liberation,
that spiritual life is constituted by the kind of particular rational formulations that if you
read his texts and his and you you look at the bits where he's describing what torture is,
he's like, are you can intensify Durka by practising yoga, by doing ritual.
So clearly has very different understanding of the target and becomes this word
that has a semantic range that covers both what we would think of as reason, but also ritual and yoga.
So this kind of essay was trying to deal with what reason might look like in in his thought as a whole, kind of dealing with ritual practise.
And it's a whole aesthetic theory.
So how ritual then becomes this particular type of aesthetic experience where your rational conclusions gain a kind of experiential dimension?
And so this the broader sort of theme, I think, that wants to a lot of these different projects is,
is the relationship between spiritual life and philosophy like philosophy, a spiritual practise?
Then I did another essay on Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy, Mahayana philosophy,
and that was dealing with and the seeming contradiction between what I call Katsof at apophatic approaches to reality.
So some Buddhist texts and sutras and philosophical works will say that there is absolutely nothing that has intrinsic nature that is substantial,
that exists independently of the human mind. And then other texts will say that, no, there is lots of things that insubstantial,
but there is a fundamental ground reality that Buddha mind the Buddha on the grounds everything.
So these two things seem really connected and they seem to be in tension.
But I was trying to sort of reconcile the two in that they both have these self-referential paradoxes that come in in their thinking.
So and the classic one is like this statement is alive and it's in its seeming self self-contradictory statement.
And so in the apophatic instance, you have these and these statements,
like all all views or views on the world, are insubstantial, including this view.
So it seems to be self-contradictory.
But in the case of Outguns, you say that, well, all words fall short of the ultimate reality, of course, including these very words that have spoken.
So these paradoxes, although they allege these two schools and they contradict these paradoxes, are coming back.
And I was trying to make a conclusion about how these paradoxes can be indicative of the way in which these philosophies
are a form of spiritual practise and that their aims ultimately not at achieving a kind of subtle philosophical position,
but the sort of religiously situated in the fact that that means the methodologies of cultivating a kind of.
Relationship to our thoughts, experience beyond conceptuality, nonconsumption experience.
So, yeah, those those are two themes.
And now I now I'm working in a communist state too much because I'm in the process of working on this Buddhist Taxco.
Nobody ever taught us 9th century Sanskrit Buddhist poem and philosophical phenomenology.
So we saw quite a lot of policy and trying to do a comparative reading in order to
sort of try and bring out the fact that this text isn't because this text I mean,
maybe you could talk about this, but these texts are often read as kind of the object that indicative of the belief systems of other people out there,
these Buddhist people who existed long time ago. But I think reading it with philosophical phenomenology is interesting because although
the comparative project is for it's a minefield and that's an interesting issue.
But doing that kind of reading allows them,
I think kind of brings the text to life as a as a text talking about human life and structures of human life
on the deepest level so that you can then maybe both of you could talk a bit more about the sources actually,
and maybe language, but also like other sort of I guess like, you know,
diaries that you just have to cross to be able to do this kind of work with, especially when it comes to Western philosophy.
If you'd be happy to continue, I'd like to hear about this, the languages of those texts and in Sanskrit or the Buddhist philosophy in Sanskrit.
So I think so Buddhism starts in party, which is a language very related to Sanskrit.
What I think scholars, early Buddhism text anybody. And then you have the Mahayana tradition that develops.
And most of the philosophy that's done in Mahayana, in India, in South Asia, which is what I focus on,
is in Sanskrit and in my moves to China and East Asia and so takes on those languages.
But all of the text and sources that I've worked for in Sanskrit, so, yeah, it's Sanskrit is beautiful and ridiculously difficult language.
I was lucky enough to study a little bit of it in first year when it came.
I'm part of the theology degree. The undergraduate theology degree.
Oxford means that in your first year you studied scripture language so you could do Sanskrit, but you could do Vulgate Latza and you can do Gleek.
You can do poly, you can do Arabic. So you have a kind of choice depending on what sort of religious focus you wanted to.
And I did Sanskrit, which is really good fun. But then by the time at the end of that year, you sort of start getting to terms with the language.
And the way the course is structured is that you have to drop it. There's no formal way of continuing your teaching.
So are informal ways. And you can go to lectures.
And I I went to Nepal for two summers after my first year to study Sanskrit in a sort of more traditional South Asian context.
But yeah, I still don't have coming up with the language that I could sort of open the text in Sanskrit and read it.
I think that that's many years in the future.
But what what I can do is with the text in translation, have a look at the Sanskrit and get a sense of the text individual language.
So it is it is a it's about some of these texts and translated.
So when I was working with the time, which is his big magnum opus somewhere, we were kind of like his tomatillos is not translated yet.
There are I think there is one I you to call a devotional translations.
It went done in South Asia and modern South Asian University.
But I think that doesn't mean I wasn't able to access it, but I was sort of told that it doesn't have the kind of academic rigour.
At least that was what was implied.
So I was I was looking at some of the smaller works and the way that scholars would quote him in their secondary sources.
So the language is a bit of a barrier. Yeah. And.
Yes, that's, I guess, how I can with my sources, if that's how this is interesting,
isn't it, that even, you know, even when I'm in the same position as you,
I can't I'm not yet in a position where I can just pick up the hat at this area and read it, read it off the page without any problems.
But it's interesting that you sort of notice and it may be maybe more with philosophical texts
than with some of the other things that you can study in a language like apply or whatever else.
There's so much that you can get off of short word lists off of things like when you were
mentioning earlier these sort of interesting differences between reason and ritual.
I can't remember the sentence correct term to use, but, you know, drawing out the fact that,
ah, well, this time, which can be habitually translated as reason,
is obviously not exactly the same as a reason in the sense that we mean in the sense that a reason is not
what reason is going to be largely similar in French fries or in whichever other sort of European language.
But I mean, to take that example with with with the one that I'm working on and so that the this area is as you as it is, is in girls.
Girls is also a dead language. And then it's not spoken of as a mother tongue by anyone anymore.
It's still the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that's closely related to the modern Semitic languages.
And what is the Hebrew and Arabic? But.
So, yeah, the example of reason, as you said earlier, in in girs the term, which is translated most often,
is reason as a faculty of reason, because we have the same thing here, as you mentioned earlier with with your thinker,
that people like to call him a rationalist and whether we can make sense of
calling somebody a rationalist when the term they're using has less importantly,
different semantic feel.
So in the case of girls in this area, the word he uses is LUB, which literally is the heart and the heart in most Semitic languages,
I think in Hebrew and Arabic, who is seen as the seat of the intellect in the seat of Reesa,
quite as opposed to the sort of general use of heart in European languages, which, as you know,
you Kuzio you all your heart over your head or something, which is, you know, emotion of reason.
And you think that obviously that kind of distinction between emotional thought and rational thought is not really going to hold up in quite
the same way when we've got this completely different metaphor for the place that's meant to be the seat of reason and even just sort of,
you know, having pointing out these sort of small, subtle differences in a single philosophical term,
which you might find difficult to read in the overall sentence, already gives you a huge amount of philosophical material to work with.
Right. We already have some very different ideas about when people are making certain claims about, you know,
reason that they're actually saying something really very different than what we might be initially thinking of.
Something that might seem quite familiar to us is actually expressing something really very different or vice versa.
And I think the first thing that that's really important for is cautioning against really sort of superficial parallels,
because there's often the sort of attempt when you have this kind of comparative work,
the you know, we're reading through some really interesting Sanskrit text and we think, oh, my God, here's the here's the Indian montane.
Right. It's just the same as saying one tiny thing.
Or we come across, you know, the Ethiopian carped, which is the thing that everyone wants to say physically.
But we come across, you know, the the Mayan Plato or something like that, and these temptations to sort of draw these analogies based on,
you know, what might not be a particularly rigorous kind of translation, just the fact that, you know, we have this word reason here.
We have this word reason here. I think yeah, I think that knowing knowing the languages,
even if it's not necessarily to the point that you can sort of skim read them and remember them off by heart,
is is no one really important for sort of cautioning against some of the obvious mistakes that can
be made in comparative philosophy and just an incredibly rewarding philosophical thought itself?
It's funny,
it kind of reminds me yesterday I was reading a book by a guy called Talk and it was on it's a work on the project of comparative philosophy,
in particular with the interpretation of an Indian philosopher.
And he's talking about how if you look at the history of the West interpretation, Nagarjuna, it's this kind of process of Stainer verses.
And I like that in the 19th century that they have a sense of what nihilism might be in a God.
It's placed in the box of nihilism. And then they say, no, he's in the country and now he's you know, he's an analytical magician.
He in and now it's about Valenstein. I was all about Vacanti.
Think about this and that. The very incapacities deconstructionist. So, yeah, it's so easy, as you say,
with superficial translations when the languages aren't known in full depth and richness to place it in a
box that you've already kind of come to terms with that you're you're trying to see in your own tradition.
Yeah. So the language is fundamentally important.
I think a lot of the the comparative philosophies that I've looked at when it comes to methodology emphasised
repeatedly that the language learning the language have a good kind of philological awareness is foundational.
But even, you know, and that's that's a huge task for a lot of people.
And I think that's perhaps the tricky thing about this issue.
And this question is that like Sanskrit, you know, you talk to pundits say at least 10 years,
at least 10 years of full time Sanskrit, that then, you know, the language is inconceivable.
So I think what this discussion is highlighted is that you can get a lot out of just reading the English translation along sides, you know,
a kind of awareness of the Sanskrit terms that have been translated and maybe having the
text in transliteration next to you so that you can see what words have been translated,
as well as when you can come across these observations, as we have done of of wild Turkey has been translated as reason here,
but it's also being used in another context where might not be translated, as we said.
So if I if I didn't know that, then I would have a very different image of what the person is saying.
I think you can do a lot with that method beyond language, and you find other difficulties working with sources,
both in terms of having the access to archives or having access to,
like, you know, rigorous, like, you know, good digital copies of sources or sort of have to,
like, piece it together from, like, various texts which caught the materials at length and.
Yeah, well, in the last year, it hasn't been particularly easy to access anything and anything at all.
I mean, with with with the text that I work on the.
There's there's not a huge there's not a huge range of different and places to sort of find them,
there's nothing really in the way of proper scholarly attention to be for the hypothetical that there were two editions,
I think, in 1995 and 1997 with translations into Russian and Latin.
And then there was nothing useful. Yeah, yeah.
If in 1937, people are still using Latin as a scholarly language,
but it wasn't until 1974 that there was a critical addition and translated into English and there hasn't been one since.
I mean, my girl's teacher now is working on another translation.
And that's that's another point based on the thing we were saying about translations earlier,
one of the most useful things you can do, especially when you sort of have a grasp on the language,
but not a complete fluency, whether it is to compare different translations, different translation choices,
the sort of alternative ways that people can have for thinking them through.
And in particular, when you know something about the translation, the translators and that kind of lens that they're bringing to work on things.
So the first guy to translate that into English is a Canadian Jesuit, implored Sumner,
who said that at one point that he was I think he lived in Ethiopia for 50 or 60 years,
was fluent in multiple contemporary Ethiopian because he said it was a Canadian by birth in Ethiopia by choice.
And he sort of wrote this five volume work of of Ethiopian philosophy, some of the translations of really early texts in girls,
which themselves arose out of translations from Arabic or Greek, then that's a very Yakup himself,
which is sort of the critical edition of came up with some strong argument in favour of its authenticity and
then also collected a series of sort of creation myths and proverbs of the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia.
And he you know, he was he was a philosophically trained Jesuit scholar.
He was very interested in Descartes philosophy.
And you can tell when he's doing these translations that he has that the analogy in mind to the whole time.
There's lots of talk of the natural light,
of the faculties of reason of of struggling to think of too many other other specific analogies at the moment,
that you can really see that on the basis of this connexion that he's he's already drawn.
We have a particular kind of translation and that the new translation done by someone who
is not philosophically trained but has much more of a background in Christian literature,
is translating a lot of those things much more philosophically, neutrally, such that we don't have the natural light or the faculty of reason.
We simply have the God given intelligence or something like that when he's talking about it, which is, you know.
If you were to get these two taxed and try and do a philosophical analysis just of the English translation,
you would inevitably come to two very different conclusions based on these two different text,
based on the sort of presuppositions that we have gone through.
So one of one of the sort of big projects that I think needs to happen before serious comparative work can be done for for this text than other
ones is to sort of come up with something of a glossary or a lexicon of philosophical terms and the sort of range of text in the semantic field.
Some explanation, some examples. If this sort of comparative work is going to be more than general speculations of all reason, a natural.
Yeah, I think this is when you're looking at non European Western philosophy, it's going to be very different.
This is the kind of lucky thing about what it's when it comes to the stuff that I look at.
I think Buddhist philosophy has been been studied for centuries now, and especially with modern Western interpreters and a couple of people.
Oxford, there is a kind of growing sort of quite deep understanding awareness of these
philological issues and the importance of of translation and process of making processes.
That's one thing that does exist and it comes to Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist philosophy.
So I'm quite lucky in the especially the text that I'm working on the moment.
The to tell you what, the Torah is a very popular text in a text that's been translated multiple times for multiple languages.
And so so I have sort of the resources that for for the Buddhist philosophy that I'm looking at on the Kashmiri side,
on the side of the translations, as I've been saying, far more sparse.
And so, yeah, it's a process that's happening. And the people, the people approaching it, it's a mix.
It's sort of similar in a similar way to watching this one, saying that as philosophers coming out it a couple there's one guy called David Lawrence.
He's a I think a British trained quantitate.
He's trained in the continental tradition.
And he's really looking at it from the lens of a particular kind of Jesuit thought and transcendental argument.
And he does a lot of comparisons with the thought of going on as the Jesuit priest, I think called John Depute.
Interestingly, a Jesuit priest used as the sort of Jesuit Christian reading of these tantric ritual, which often involve like a load of sex.
And so it's quite funny that that interest and but then there's also the bit that big guy at the moment is working on Kashmiri Texcoco,
Alexis Anderson. So he's very much a Sanskrit scholar, philologists.
So these these perspectives are growing and you can sort of see it. I think there's more interest.
There's a lot more interest recently in Kashmir particular. So there's a growing body of scholarship and different translations rising.
But, yes, it's a work in progress. The only other thing that I would I would maybe add to that is that I think that
sort of contrast is really interesting in the case of Sanscrit philosophy.
We obviously have this incredibly long,
incredibly deep and rich tradition of writings that are obviously recognisable to even the most parochial Western philosopher whose philosophy.
You know, you have systems and rules of inductive logic.
Some of them might be couched in ideas of ritual that might seem a little bit distasteful to scientifically minded Western philosophers.
But ultimately, these things are quite obviously philosophy.
Whereas in the Ethiopian and the African case, we have apart from the fact that very yakob.
We have to be sort of ready to look at things as maybe being philosophical, which are obviously so so in the case of the Chapati,
you know, there's a kind of rationalism, there's a kind of theodicy and cosmological argument.
But that's that's one of the few tax like that, I mean, in sub-Saharan Africa.
You also obviously have that.
You have the Arabic and the Jummy language manuscripts of Timbuktu, which are continuations of broader philosophy in the Islamic world.
But if we're willing to look far for other things, many African philosophers have, you know,
been forced to come up with and think of very different approaches to subject
material and source texts such that in many cases these might not be written text.
How do we try and extract philosophy or something like that from a from an oral tradition?
And this is really why I think one of the most interesting philosophical questions that comes
out of this is that when we don't have exactly the same kinds of kinds of written text,
what we don't have things that are so obviously recognisable to us as philosophy, what's our method of trying to get philosophical ideas?
And, you know, I think that well, not only am I convinced that that's the case,
I think there are many cases where you can read philosophers and they have shown how this kind of extraction can work so well.
If someone like Henry Aruca or Frederick or cheering with Yambo, who do what's called sage philosophy,
where you go to they were based in Kenya, where you go to, you know, some some of the villages and you find,
you know, an elder of the village who doesn't speak a European language, has an encounter with education,
and you sit down and interview them in the original language in Luo or in or call you or Kumbo or other language.
And you take the thought of this individual thinker to be representative of a kind of philosophy of of the individual thinker.
There are other methods of, you know, you take the like I said,
would you take the proverbs or the creation myths or the religious text and you extract the philosophy from that,
which is the approach to something called ethno philosophy. Know this is characteristic of the whole group of people.
That's really the thing that the sage philosophers are trying to push back against.
There's no sense in which all Bantu peoples could be said to share the same political system.
That doesn't make any sense. Philosophy is something which is essentially critical and, you know,
detached from that in some way that we need to go and interview the individual thinkers and see how they criticise the sort of,
you know, the way things are habitually done. And just to sort of give one last example, coming back to the language question,
one of the other roots that was taken by a Rwandan philosopher, Alexis Kagame,
is to do an analysis of the structure of the language of Rwanda, Bantu languages,
and to say that we can derive again and ethno philosophical bullet replies to a group of people simply from the structure of that language.
You know, the particular type of you know, the tent structure is going to give us something of a philosophy of time.
Understanding how subject and project are used together in a sentence is going
to give us something of an idea of the underlying ontology of that language.
And I just think it's one of the things that's most fruitful for thinking about,
for even people who may not think that they're sort of interested in the content of some of these works of African philosophy.
People who might not be able to recognise their own philosophical interest in that is to think about these questions of,
you know, what forms of philosophy take, how can we how can we get out of there?
Not just for her, for that from Justin Smith, which says that you've got philosophy, which is, you know,
in the or of culture, we have this sort of, you know, gold or iron ore mixed in with all of the other rocks.
It's not so easily separable, as, you know, academic philosophy with articles and, you know,
not that bullet points and stuff, but the different kinds of extraction work can help help us to get the.
I think that's what was said, I think. Yeah, this.
I mean, yeah, I think sort of relating back to the South Asian context that I'm familiar with,
it's interesting that the issues you talk about, it's interesting that they're very different in this case as well.
I mean, I personally, I'm very interested in the question of like what becomes philosophy,
what kind of writing is counted as philosophical interest that is highly disputed in the case of a classical South Asian philosophy as well?
You know, the big thing that happens, I mean, in the case of philosophy,
I'm sure it happens elsewhere in other anonymous philosophy, whether it's philosophy or religion.
And this particular separation that has occurred in the history of the Western Academy has coloured the way that we look at these things.
And so then you can get you know, you can get dogmatist.
The concerns about epistemology that that's taken is somehow kind of, you know, religious as its fundamental association, Buddhism.
And then you have Descartes arguments for the existence of God, all of, you know, enlightenment philosophy,
all of the whole kind of tradition of US philosophy and its religious situation.
So, you know, you have this divide. And, yeah, I think it's interesting.
I mean, it's it is it colours the way the text that we take as philosophy.
But I think for me, it's also interesting in the you know,
it might show as well if we if we expand maybe our view of what philosophy is and take in some of these texts that might,
you know, actually seem like religion,
it can maybe transform our understanding of what philosophy is for us and maybe sort of it brings to light how kind of particularise and it becomes.
And yeah, I think it relates to sort of my broad interests in the way that philosophy can be integrated into a form of spirituality,
how we could conceive of philosophy and it's pulled away.
That has more to do with human transformation and changing individual lives and changing society and the way that we see each other,
which is a complaint that I think all of us like working at BP and people watching this podcast, what we have with.
With philosophy also looking outside of your way of thinking about that question, I think there's also I mean,
what Jonathan was saying in terms of Indian philosophy and, you know,
certain forms of Indian philosophy know still recognisable in the West philosophy,
but there are forms of Indian philosophy which are not like, you know, I mean, indigenous types of philosophy are like folk,
religious cultures, you know, that I'm familiar with and because of my cultural context.
But, you know, I wonder how much of that know.
I mean, I do I do think that there's something to be said about that, you know, when you don't even know,
like the sort of highest, most prominent way of doing, say, like in philosophy in the West.
And you're trying to introduce that project. You know, it's difficult to like bring in all of the other forms and obviously to, you know,
like a subcontinent with so many years of history and continued work of philosophy.
Yeah, I imagine that there's like a lot still to do in the field, but I guess that's a cause for optimism.
It doesn't feel, in a way,
that sort of studying maybe it's not something that I've done a huge amount that can imagine if you're trying to write something,
you know, it's going to be so you're going to be flooded with all these other writings
of other people who've really gone down a very similar line that you have.
But if you're doing comparative work, you're looking at texts that people haven't translated yet.
It's a fun exercise. Yeah, I really think so.
Oh, I just get out. Well, I mean, really, like we've talked about this throughout the podcast,
but maybe you could like talk about your experiences of studying like non Western philosophy in like
a formal way in Western institutions and speak to sort of the project of diversifying philosophy,
not only philosophy happening everywhere else, but like really this idea of like decolonising the curriculum or.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's that's actually one of the points about diversifying and decolonising was one of the ones that I was just about to make.
So I guess I'll say that and then can can mention something about the sort of the context of it,
because I think that's of studying these things is very relevant. So I mean, with with what I was saying about, you know,
there's there's both the the interest of studying philosophy from other parts of the world simply because people
from different parts of the world have come up with different ideas and exciting new ones in different languages,
in different forms. And that's going to be intrinsically interesting anyway.
And if we want to teach the most interesting and wide ranging and profound range of things, we should include all of those stuff, too.
But I feel like if what if if our conception of diversifying philosophy is simply adding different
names and different languages to a list of things that are already broadly recognisable as philosophy,
then we've missed something of an opportunity. We haven't diversified as much as we can do in the sense that I think what some of the things that
these texts asking are they ask about this borderline between religious texts and philosophical ones,
ask whether that's really such an easily defined one and whether we should think about our conception as philosophers,
including the latter, as well as the forbearers, some of them or no.
Or whether some kind of scientific writings should be included or should know or whether some, you know,
mystical or historical reflections that Virge into philosophical territory might be included in a broader conception of it.
So I think it's not only the case that by studying on Western philosophies,
we can find other things that conform to our pre-existing idea philosophy to include in it.
But in encountering these alternatives, we're coming up with a new idea of it anyway.
We're rethinking what the canons meant to look like. Let's also think about what philosophy in general.
Well, with that and that, I think would be a good thing for philosophy, and that would be something that would be good for the academy more generally,
because at the moment we do have this kind of situation where I don't know if you
mentioned you in a philosophy department or are you in a sort of theology or.
Yeah, so exactly. You're studying stuff, which is obviously philosophy in the theology department.
I'm studying stuff. I mean, it's obviously philosophy with an intellectual historian and a comparative literature department.
And many other people end up in all sorts of different different parts of the academy to try and do this work and.
You can understand why, you know, things things have ended up in this way, different disciplines have sort of, you know, got their particular,
you know, institutional definitions, and especially when universities are having such a terrible time as they are at the moment.
And they're all trying to sort of throw their little funding pots for themselves.
If you need to have a very strong, rigorous definition and not allow anything that doesn't in the challenges that.
But it seems to me that especially given a lot of the stuff that we were saying about linguistic
backgrounds with historical backgrounds being really important for doing this sort of work,
it's got to be essentially interdisciplinary in some ways.
Right. You can't just be sort of doing your part to come close with with a little bit of logic and maybe the mathematics along the side.
You need to you know, you need you need to really brought in the range of stuff that you're interested in and studying.
And I just say that I think I think that philosophy departments are going to have to move in that direction,
number one, of offering more, you know, a wider range of historical philosophies and of.
Engaging with these sorts of questions that, you know,
with existential and political social questions rather than necessarily the sort of core topics at the moment.
If that if they're to have if they're to have much of a future and so the only thing I'd say somebody
who might be thinking about whether to do that or not is if you are interested in this stuff,
just do it. Do it in whichever department happens to be offering that stuff at the moment.
If you need to go to an Indian studies one, if you need to go to a comparative literature department,
go where someone will help you with the languages, go where you'll get a good supervisor.
Because by the time you finished your day, the particular hot topic in analytic metaphysics will probably have gone and passed.
But I think departments are simply moving in the direction of having to accommodate the sort of work.
So if you're if you're interested in it, just the. I also think that it's really come down to a question of how you do philosophy and,
you know, the kind of things we take for given while doing on Western philosophy, like contextualising or like, you know,
things sort of like or at least like a sort of appreciation of like a linguistic barrier or attempting to start context.
If we did that in the sort of traditional Western philosophies,
that would only enrich our understanding of these philosophies that we think we know so well.
So, yeah, yeah. I think analytic philosophy is kind of famous for things like silencing the history in its own kind of particularity,
in its broader historical context. So so, yeah, I think, you know, this whole incident, this time interdisciplinary,
I think it's sort of kind of sums up the direction that these departments and the way that we need to be thinking, whether they need to go.
Yeah, I mean, I think I have I've been quite lucky in that in the theology department in Oxford,
there are a couple of people who really take Southasian philosophy seriously as philosophy.
I could imagine that if I was in a different university with different department, I would have to study these things as philosophy.
And the people who had more historical kind of theological interests,
who were sort of more on the kind of Buddhist studies, religious studies kind of side of the department.
But I've been lucky enough to study and the people like Jessica Fraser,
government flood of people in particular, who really that work really is about taking somebody's philosophy,
having as much of the theological awareness as they can, but then putting it into conversation with modern philosophy and seeing it as philosophy,
the way that we treat modern Western philosophical texts.
So it's been nice to have that in the theology department, but.
Yeah, just thinking about how the departments separated in the way that they are.
I mean, it's it's I remember one of my tutors saying in a talk that she gave and she could envision a future Oxford,
where there wasn't a theology faculty and philosophy faculty.
There was just a philosophy faculty as a faculty in which these things were studied together in relation to each other.
And so that would then necessarily incorporate historical, linguistic, theological thinking, as well as philosophical thinking.
In the Atlantic tradition, Oxford's philosophy department is is constituted by.
But it would just be this general umbrella of studying the way that people
have made sense of the world and its kind of Buddhist in its broadest sense.
And I would see that as a very positive thing.
I think if I could imagine a practical and sort of future direction having a philosophy department, I mean,
in I'm not sure about colleges and universities and logistics, but yeah, that kind of way of thinking, I think it's useful.
Well, I guess we'll end with some reading recommendations or any other advice for students interested in these, you know, reading recommendations,
books, articles, podcast, or just like philosophers, contemporary and old, we've just opened up new ways of thinking for you.
And they don't have to be like, you know, from your traditions. That can be just anyone that you just enjoy the work that they do.
OK, like I put you guys on the spot. So, yeah,
that's I'll just list of some of the first things that come to mind if you're if you're interested in some of the
sort of meta philosophical questions that I was mentioning mind about different styles and approaches to philosophy.
The very best thing you can read on that is Souleyman Persuasions.
Think of The Scholars, which is a book about the methodologies of philosophy in Africa,
putting a particular emphasis on the written traditions which are often overlooked in discussions of philosophy and philosophy.
Anything, anything by Solomon Agendas is fantastic,
so that's that's all heartily recommended when it comes to the matter to the Ethiopian philosopher.
I was just talking about there are some scholars that Addis Ababa University who are doing really interesting work on this,
including Opinion Markkanen and Faisal Maroochy. Both of them will be speaking up.
Shameless plug. By the way, A to Z very Yakup conference which will be in Oxford next year.
That's plenty of plenty of thinkers in Peter Adamson from the History Philosophy podcast that I imagine everyone will have heard of is fantastic.
Justin Smith, who I know that phrase about the philosophy in the war of culture and who writes incredibly
interestingly about these different methodologies and ways of getting philosophy.
His book, The Philosopher and Six Types, is.
We heartily, heartily, heartily recommend it and yeah, that we read the terror itself, it's very sure it's very cool.
No longer has to pluming on their own.
Yeah, it's a good question. It's a hard question I can sort of mention as of the things that come to mind.
Well, one thing I've been reading somewhere, maybe not.
It's Stephen Batchelor's alone with us, along with others, an existential approach to Buddhism.
I think he was a monk in Tibet and in Korea for many years.
And so he has a really kind of firsthand insider's perspective on Buddhist practise.
But then he puts it into the terms of Western existentialist phenomenologists.
So it really kind of covers the foundations of Buddhism.
And he does what I'm really interested in doing, which is having a really faithful understanding of these traditions,
but putting it in language that kind of expands the scope of people who can understand
it and might also reveal aspects of that tradition that if you only go to translations,
you might miss. And so I think that's a great book. In the Buddhist ideas.
A guy called Carbon Hoso, he has a book called The Centre of the Sky, it's a massive tome on philosophy.
He, too, is a practitioner of someone in Tibetan culture tradition.
And that's a really fantastic book on the yamaka, really sort of quite readable.
He goes into the practical implications how to do meditation,
gives you kind of instruction in some of the forms of meditation to really bridge this gap between philosophy, religion and spirituality.
And then on the Hinduism side, there's people like Jessica Frazier, one of my duties,
as we call him the world views, as Nestande should be a one shot and Heidegger's phenomenology of the village life.
Those are great. That's a great essay. A great book. She is really interested in treating Hindu philosophy as philosophy.
And then The Hindu World, whose book has a really interesting opening section on philosophical methodology and philosophy,
talks about how many to question. She's a big supporter of Gadamer.
And still there's these Haspiel caramelised German musician.
So she has interesting perspectives on methodology. And then there's also people like Chakravarti Rampersad has a book, and I forget the name of that.
But I'm sure if you type his name in, you'll find it is Janardan Canary.
I had a very fascinating essay on Janah philosophy, and I think it's called Epistemic Pluralism From Systems to Stances.
That's a really fascinating, really kind of analytically written essay that brings in Atlanta philosophy as philosophers,
but uses philosophy as its foundation on. So, yeah, those are things that I can think of.
I'm sure this time much more and they are really great people, doing really great work in this field.
So. So, yeah, keep exploring and learn Sanskrit. Oh, yeah.
Well, thank you so much for the recommendations and thank you so much for being here
today and speaking to all of these different issues and questions and yeah.
Giving us a good idea of your experiences. Thanks.
Thanks very much for having us. Thank you for making room the possibility of strengthening our to create and full consideration.
Many thanks to the entire media to talk about what those teams will are crying with you and your next.
Possibly the next and. See you then.