Abstract

Engagement with texts however distant from us in culture and history—distant, that is, from contemporary anglophone philosophy—tries to make them part of an ongoing conversation, focusing on topics and arguments as opposed to context or history. And, as Jonardon Ganeri reports of the innovative Nyāya philosopher Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, who emerges as the hero of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700, this can take the form of “asides and marginal notes, of the sort one makes not when one is trying to interpret the text so much as when one is thinking with it and beyond it”. The purpose is to have your own insights. Such an approach when packaged nowadays makes us...