2023 Podcast Year in Review
New Books and Sanskrit Loanwords
This post lists all of the podcast episodes I managed to record this year, for folks who might want to go back and listen to some of them while relaxing by a fire or doing dishes after a family gathering.
Unfortunately, 2023 was the year that I lost my podcasting mojo, my momentum stalled, and I abruptly stopped producing episodes of Sutras & Stuff. Part of the reason was my overcommitting to projects, two of which I’ll announce here soon. The other part? I was plain overwhelmed and needed a break. I’m sorry to those listeners who were looking forward to new episodes.
I will pick season four back up sometime in 2024 (focusing on Indian philosophy through Sanskrit loanwords) because I think it’s a good idea, and I do enjoy making the episodes. But I can’t promise it will happen in January, since I’ll be settling into a new position as a faculty member at Smith College.
Despite spending most of 2023 taking on too many new projects and keeping existing ones on schedule, I did manage to carve out time for the New Books Network philosophy podcast. Since these are book-based interviews, I only had to find time to read academic books, usually ones I was already interested in, and then talk to their authors for an hour. Also, the production isn’t up to me—I just send the files to NBN. In total, I managed nine NBN interviews and three narrative podcasts.
Below, links to podcast episodes and a couple of sentences about them. Enjoy!
January 2023
“Karma” - S&S Season 4, Episode 1.
Does what goes around always come around? And is instant karma gonna get you? In the first episode of a season devoted to Sanskrit-to-English loanwords, we’ll examine how three groups of Indian philosophers understand karma: Jains, Buddhists, and Naiyayikas (or Nyaya philosophers).
February 2023
“Avatar” - S&S Season 4, Episode 2.
What do the Metaverse, blue aliens, and airbenders have in common? They’re all based on the idea of the avatar, which goes back thousands of years to the Sanskrit term avatāra. In this episode, we’ll explore what an avatar is and how thinking about these ideas in ancient Hindu and Buddhist contexts can help us think about reality, the divine, and even our survival after death.
Monima Chadha, Selfless Minds - NBN Philosophy.
In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha considers Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selves as well as persons and should take a strongly illusionist stance about our apparent senses of agency and ownership.
March 2023
Phillipe Schlenker, What It All Means - NBN Language.
In What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything (MIT Press, 2022), Philippe Schlenker takes readers on tour of meaning, from the animal kingdom to human culture, arguing that semantics should be taken to have a wide range of applications. He takes on bird song and primate calls, classical music and sign language, predicate logic and scalar implicatures.
April 2023
Eberhard Guhe, An Indian Theory of Defeasible Meaning - NBN Philosophy.
An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning: The Doctrine of upādhi in the Upādhidarpaṇa (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation of this anonymous Navya-Nyāya treatise predating Gaṅgeśa. Eberhard Guhe’s book includes a translation as well as an introduction to the important idea of upādhi, which vitiates inferential reasoning.
June 2023
Arvind-Pal Singh Mandir, Sikh Philosophy - NBN Philosophy.
In his new contribution to the Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair introduces readers to a tradition often ignored by contemporary philosophers. While simultaneously arguing for the fecundity of Sikh categories and concepts from a philosophical vantage point, Mandair scrutinizes the characterization of Sikh ideas as unified -ism, also problematizing the philosophy/religion divide.
September 2023
Piers Kelly, The Last Language on Earth - NBN Language.
The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Piers Kelly tells the story of the Eskayan language through linguistic, ethnographic, and historical analysis. Kelly investigates the origins of the Eskayan language as well as its role in political and conceptual controversies around language diversity and colonial contact.
Matthew R. Dasti, Vātsyāyana’s Commentary on the Nyāyasūtra - NBN Philosophy.
In Vātsyāyana's Commentary on the Nyaya-Sutra: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), Matthew Dasti unpacks a canonical classical Indian text, the Nyāyabhāṣya, while simultaneously demonstrating its relevance to contemporary philosophy. Dasti's guide includes his own translations of selections of the text and engagement with select interpretive controversies, such as a focused treatment of Vātsyāyana's approach to logic in an appendix.
October 2023
Chris Fraser, Late Classical Chinese Thought - NBN Philosophy.
Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Chris Fraser's topically organized study of the Warring States period of Chinese philosophy, the third century BCE. In addition to well-known texts like the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mencius, Fraser's book introduces readers to Lu's Annals, the Guanzi, the Hanfeizi, the Shangjun Shu, and excerpts from the Mawangdui silk manuscripts
November 2023
Yigal Bronner, Dandin’s Mirror - NBN Language.
A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary volume that introduces a remarkably long-lasting poetic treatise, the Mirror on Literature (Kavyadarsha), whose impact extended far beyond its origins in the south of India in 700 CE. Editor Yigal Bronner does not merely collect distinct, single-authored essays but rather interweaves the voices of the other twenty-four contributors (and his own voice) through chapters that are edited collections in miniature, as typically the subsections are written by different authors who engage with each other's material.
December 2023
Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin, Classical Theism and Buddhism - NBN Philosophy.
Despite the historical understanding that Buddhism and theism are in contradiction, Tyler McNabb and Erik Baldwin argue that there is conceptual space to affirm both basic Buddhist metaphysical claims and Classical Theism without contradiction. Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems (Bloomsbury, 2022) not only unpacks this thesis but also takes up historical Buddhist and contemporary philosophical objections to a divine being, argues for a synthesis of Buddhist and theistic ethics and soteriology, and closes with a discussion of the problem of religious pluralism for Christians and Buddhists.
“Mantras” - S&S Season 4, Episode 3.
It seems like everyone, from companies to online influencers to fitness coaches, talk about having mantras. But what are mantras, anyway? In this episode, we'll talk about how they compare to birdsong, Tibetan singing bowls, and spells at Hogwarts, as well as some ancient debates about whether they mean anything, and why that matters.