Jonardon Ganeri


Jonardon Ganeri, FBA, is a philosopher, specialising in philosophy of mind and in South Asian and Buddhist philosophical traditions. From 2020 he will hold the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has been Global Network Professor in the College of Arts and Science, New York University since 2014, previously having taught at several universities in Britain. Ganeri graduated from Churchill College, Cambridge, with his undergraduate degree in mathematics, before completing a DPhil in philosophy at University and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford. He has published eight monographs, and is the editor of the . He is on the editorial board of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Analysis, and other journals and monograph series. His research interests are in consciousness, self, attention, the epistemology of inquiry, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literature. He works on the history of ideas in early modern South Asia, intellectual affinities between India and Greece, and Buddhist philosophy of mind, teaches courses in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, Buddhist philosophy, the history of Indian philosophical traditions, and supervises graduate students on South Asian philosophical texts in a cross-cultural context. He is a prominent advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies in philosophical research, and for enhanced cultural diversity in the philosophical curriculum.

Philosophical Work

In the philosophy of mind, Jonardon Ganeri advances the view, in his book The Self, that our concept of self is constitutively grounded in the fact that subjects are beings who own their ideas, emotions, wishes, and feelings. He argues that the self is a unity of three strands of ownedness: normative, phenomenological, and subpersonal. In a different book, Attention, Not Self, he argues that when early Buddhists deny that there is a self, what they are rejecting is the conception of self as the willing agent, an inner origin of willed directives. For early Buddhists like Buddhaghosa the real nature of mental activity is in the ways we pay attention. So the relation between the two books is that Attention, Not Self clears the ground for the sort of conception of self defended in The Self. His earlier book, The Concealed Art of the Soul, explores thinking about selfhood in a range of Upaniṣadic, Vedāntic, Yogācāra and Mādhyamika philosophers, under the rubric of the idea that the self is something that conceals itself from itself.
In the history of philosophy, Ganeri argues that modernity is not a uniquely European achievement. In The Lost Age of Reason, he shows how there emerges in 17th century India a distinctive version of modernity in the work of the so-called “new reason” philosophers of Bengal, Mithilā, and Benares. These thinkers confronted the past and thought of themselves as doing something very new, as intellectual innovators. The innovativeness of this group of philosophers is also the subject of his earlier book, Semantic Powers, revised and restructured for the second edition entitled Artha, which aims to demonstrate that they made discoveries in linguistics and the philosophy of language which were not seen in Europe until the late 20th century. These include discoveries about the meaning of proper names, pronominal anaphora, testimony, and the relationship between epistemology and meaning theory.

Honours and Awards

In 2015, Ganeri was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Also in 2015, Ganeri won the Infosys Science Foundation's prize in the category of humanities, the first philosopher to do so.. Ganeri delivered the 2009 Pranab. K. Sen Memorial Lecture at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, the 2016 at the University of New Mexico, and the 2017 Daya Krishna Memorial Lecture at the University of Rajasthan. In 2019, Ganeri delivered a convocation address at Ashoka University, Delhi. He is delivering the keynote address to the 12th East/West Philosophers Conference in Hawaii, 2020.

Writings

Ganeri is the author of some in philosophy. He also co-authored with philosophy professor Peter Adamson 62 episodes of the History of Philosophy podcast on the history of indian philosophy.