Philosophy East and West

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 (1460–1540), 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” (p. 246). The purpose is to have your own insights. Such an approach when packaged nowadays makes us expect positions on the topics addressed, a particular point of view, and indeed an agenda. Ganeri has given us several outstanding engagements with texts of classical Indian philosophy, and has made us think with and beyond the texts perhaps better than anyone of his or even the preceding generation or two. But this book is different. It is first and foremost intellectual history, not philosophy, and so is unlike most of his previous work. Still, it has an agenda, one that in my judgment is pretty convincingly carried through, although I have some reservations partly because the genre of intellectual history makes one suspicious of any and all agendas. I think I share a common assumption that a historian should be super-cautious about imposing whatever “narrative” on the complexities of facts and events. Of course, one has to be selective and, at a minimum, develop “themes.” But Ganeri is writing history with perhaps sometimes too sharp an edge, in my opinion, and I will air misgivings with a few interpretations, especially of earlier Nyāya.

However, put aside these all-told minor complaints. What an accomplishment is this elegantly written monograph, making about two centuries of philosophy in Northeastern India—sophisticated philosophy, informed as it is by the best of preceding centuries—come to life! Ganeri’s scholarship is breathtaking, broad and deep, and he is able to step nimbly across a range of issues in contemporary philosophy, all the while making everything perfectly clear with whatever view or school [End Page 1020] of classical thought and not only Nyāya. This is a book I should like every philosopher to read, as well as every India specialist.

One has to wonder nevertheless why Ganeri, who is so good at philosophic engagement with classical Indian texts, should take on this highly ambitious and difficult project of placing networks of philosophers in a social and political context and not only in one, the history of ideas. The answer has to do with the contextualist Quentin Skinner, whom Ganeri takes very seriously, although criticizing Skinner’s view of context as too narrow but trying as best he can to meet his conditions for thoroughgoing contextualization. A chapter is devoted to Skinner’s methods and arguments, and Ganeri uses Skinner’s idea of text as “intervention,” not only to frame his own commentary but as central to understanding later Naiyāyikas and their speech acts in relation to their scholastic inheritance. Skinner draws on the linguistic performative theory of J. L. Austin to understand the production of texts, including texts distant in time and culture, as linguistic acts with illocutionary force (they were made for a purpose) and perlocutionary effects. That is, they should be seen as insertions in a historical conversation made for a purpose and having certain concrete effects in the conversation or non-linguistic behavior of the participants, that is, the contemporary audience. For example, many early Indian philosophic texts are written to make one want to attain liberation, and a perlocutionary effect would be at least some being provoked to do yoga, meditation, et cetera, to achieve the summum bonum. Such purposes and effects, Skinner...