Belief and Meaning is a philosophical treatment of intentionality. It offers an original, logical and convincing account of intentional content which is local and contextual and which takes issues with standard theories of meaning.

In Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Akeel Bilgrami argues that self-knowledge of our intentional states is special among all the knowledges we have because it is not an epistemological notion in the standard sense of that term, but instead is a fallout of the radically normative nature of thought and agency. Four themes or questions are brought together into an integrated philosophical position: What makes self-knowledge different from other forms of knowledge? What makes for freedom and agency in a deterministic universe? What (...) makes intentional states of a subject irreducible to its physical and functional states? And what makes values irreducible to the states of nature as the natural sciences study them? This integration of themes into a single and systematic picture of thought, value, agency, and self-knowledge is essential to the book's aspiration and argument. Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper considers the populist surges of our times in three countries: Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, and Modi’s India, distinguishing the special features of each, and philosophically and politically analyzing the relations that populism bears to both liberalism and the capitalist political economies of liberal-democratic societies.

In a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as conflicting concepts in the modern world, Akeel Bilgrami elaborates a notion of secular enchantment with a view to finding in secular modernity a locus of meaning and value, while addressing squarely the anxiety that all such notions are exercises in nostalgia.

This paper looks at standard arguments for freedom in the academy that go back to John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes and finds them to be poor arguments for their conclusion. It then elaborates what are the most subtle and the most entrenched forms of threat to freedom in the academy, and concludes with an argument for imbalance rather than balance in the extra-mural sphere.

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, (...) such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.". (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.

Mill’s famous meta-inductive argument for freedom of speech claims that the adoption of norms of freedom and tolerance exposes our convictions to dissent and falsification and thus makes progress towards truth possible. It also claims that this is an argument accessible to any person capable of inductive rationality, while not appealing to any substantive value. The paper will question both these claims and show that the argument is much weaker than generally thought. The argument turns on exposing an incompatibility between (...) an implicit assumption of Mill’s argument that truth is a goal of inquiry that is worth pursuing and his explicit fallibilist claim that we can never be sure that we have achieved the truth in our inquiry. (shrink)

This essay provided a summary of my book, _Belief and Meaning, showing how I thought that it was possible to combine a view of intentional content that was externalist as well as one which keeps faith with Frege's constraint raised by his puzzle about identity and Kripke's puzzle about belief. The account criticizes current externalist accounts owing to Putnam, Burge, McDowell and Davidson. A great deal turns on meaning and intentional content being contextual in a way that the book elaborates.

Based on presentations at a conference in Varanasi, 2008.

Gandhi expressed opposition to the Enlightenment and even to science. His view is best understood in the context of a radical critique of a certain orthodoxy that emerged after the Enlightenment. That orthodoxy insists that we take a detached, impersonal standpoint in relation to nature. By contrast, Gandhi and his forebears in the radical enlightenment see nature as suffused with value, and allow us to approach nature from the first-person point of view.

This short essay analyzes the deception and self-deception in talk of ‘the clash of civilizations’ and proceeds to diagnose what is wrong in the standard understanding of Islam in the Western media today by looking to the abiding history of colonial relations with Islam down to this day and also looking to the relation between ideals of democracy and the formation of religious identities. The essay closes with some remarks about the nature of identity and the importance to one's own (...) agency of the distinction between the first and the third person point of view in Muslim self-understanding. (shrink)

This book brings together essays that individually and as a whole present a detailed and rigorous multidisciplinary exploration of the concept of nature and its wider ethical and political implications. The essays together present a revaluation of the natural world with a view to addressing some of the fundamental concerns of our time.