Not too long ago, I was in a local US grocery store, marveling at the range of ice creams available to consumers (and their price point relative to Singapore, where I have been since 2015), when I spotted a pint emblazoned with Sanskrit. Ben & Jerry’s has a flavor called “Karamel Sutra,” which is an allusion to the Kāmasūtra, mostly known in popular culture for being a sex manual, though it’s more than that. That pint reminded me of my delinquency in updating my own sutra: the podcast I’ve been producing for a few years. In case anyone is waiting anxiously for the rest of Season 4, on Sanskrit loanwords in English, I thought I’d share an update.
I’ve clearly not met my initial goal of a monthly podcast! In this current season, I’ve shifted to a narrative-style production of thirty minutes that involves a lot of editing, and this makes producing a single episode more involved than the earlier ones, which were shorter and mostly me monologuing or an interview. And, since I have other philosophical and scholarly obligations, the podcast keeps getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list.
However, I’m nearing the completion of two major projects, which I hope will give me more time to work on the podcast. These are projects that listeners to the podcast might also find interesting, so I’ll announce them here:
Classical Sanskrit for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners (Hackett Publishing)
By early August, I’ll have my draft to the publisher so it can be copyedited and put into production. Once I have a link for pre-orders and a publishing timeline, I’ll share them. I’m excited about this project because it’s a different way of introducing people to Sanskrit: it is not a “teach yourself” or “Idiot’s guide” book, nor is it an introductory textbook. It’s a guide in the sense that it explains how the language works using examples from important Sanskrit texts. And it includes some chapters on topics like reading translations well, understanding critical editions, reading commentaries, and Sanskrit poetic meter—even a short treatment of Sanskrit in the age of AI.
It’s aimed at people who have some interest in Sanskrit but find it daunting, yoga aficianados who might want to dig in a bit deeper, and even scholars, like philosophers who want to teach Indian philosophy but find the references to Sanskrit in English material to be a challenge. After reading the book and working through its lessons, you can go on to take a Sanskrit course with confidence, challenge yourself with an existing introductory textbook, or simply rest content with more knowledge of one of the world’s oldest and most influential languages.
Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well (Oxford University Press)
Later in August, I’ll be sending another draft to a publisher for editing and production. If you’ve listened to Season Two of Sutras & Stuff, you’ll have a sense of this book’s topic: how Nyāya philosophers thought about debate and reasoning in relationship to a life well lived. The book is written for ordinary people, not expert philosophers—and unlike many introductory books of Indian philosophy, you don’t need to understand “Western” philosophy to understand its ideas. I am presenting early Nyāya philosophy, specifically its theories of reasoning and interpersonal debate using modern examples but not relying on comparison with figures in analytic philosophy or logic.
Modern people are reaching back in time for self-help guides—often looking to Stoicism or yoga or Buddhist meditation—but often popular presentations of these ancient ideas focus only on personal satisfication, and not facing problems of interpersonal disagreement or evaluating competing claims. For that, people look to critical thinking guides. But Nyāya philosophers are interested in both thinking and living well, both personally and in society. That’s what this book aims to show.
Sabbatical and Beyond
Once these summer projects are complete and I can get back to some kind of podcasting schedule, I’ll begin work on my post-tenure book project, which has been slow-moving since COVID hit in 2019. While I’m in the US on sabbatical (August to December 2023), I am working on Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s understanding of comparison. Kumārila is a Mīmāṃsā philosopher—a Vedic hermeneuticist—who thinks about comparison philosophically and ritually. This book project is big, since I’m translating not only his chapter on comparison (the upamānapariccheda of the Ślokavārttika) but the three major early commentaries we have on this text, which are philosophically rich.
Why comparison? Well, comparison is a very basic way that we navigate the world. We see and think about similarities all the time. But what makes two or more things similar? And how do we know that things are similar (do we really see similarity)? Lawyers use similarity to established cases for legal reasoning, scientists use model animals to draw inferences about how medicine might work in humans by comparison, and so on. Kumārila is interested in comparison for some specifically Vedic ritual reasons—analogy is one way to know how to perform a ritual based on a paradigmatic model ritual. He’s also interested in it for philosophical reasons, which include the ritual but go beyond them to his debates with Buddhist philosophers.
The comparison chapter brings together many strands of Kumārila’s thought, too: epistemology of perception, inference, testimony; metaphysics of universals; analogical reasoning, etc. So, I hope this book will be useful as a microcosm of some broader themes, beyond comparison.
I hope to share bits and pieces of these three projects on the Substack, which replaces my blog and Twitter presence. I’m still committed to sharing my research with a wide audience: I’d like philosophers who don’t know about Indian philosophy to have access to Indian philosophical ideas, as well as ordinary thinking people!
So, do share your thoughts on the Substack, share the newsletter link, and let me know what you might want to hear more of. I doubt Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā philosophy will ever be as popular as the version of Stoic philosophy currently trending among tech-bros, but I wouldn’t mind if it became a little popular.