Jonardon Ganeri

Jonardon Ganeri is a prominent advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies in philosophical research, and for enhanced cultural diversity in the philosophical curriculum. He is known for promoting the idea of "cosmopolitan philosophy" as a new discipline within philosophy, and for the importance of what he calls "threshold thinking." The cosmopolitan philosopher thinks with past historical figures, and not just about them, and so belongs to a new band of philosophers, philosophers who think deeply and creatively with the historical texts without being trapped by parochial, often Anglophone, presuppositions. They do not permit exegesis to crowd out doing philosophy, and so to postpone indefinitely the hard work of thinking philosophically with the material Arindam Chakrabarti has expressed the idea as being that “instead of preserving, quoting, and juxtaposing [one’s sources], one picks up a concept, a line of reasoning or some, however minor, point arising out of years of imaginative rearrangement and cross-fertilisation of the ideas retrieved from different cultures, periods, texts, and disciplines.” In the philosophy of mind, Jonardon Ganeri has pursued a research programme in a trilogy of books over two decades. Ganeri argues, in The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance, that if we are to avoid Cartesianism in the philosophy of mind then we must be able to demonstrate, in the framework of a liberal naturalism, how subjects of experience come to be part of the natural world, and, in particular, how subjectivity and selfhood emerge from our most fundamental psychological operations. He uses Nyāya, Cārvāka and Buddhist materials to develop the argument. In Attention, Not Self he does this by defending the explanatory priority of attention, the “not self” of the title being a nod towards the Abhidharma Buddhist materials I was drawing on, and a denial of the priority of selves over attention, but not a denial of the existence of selves. Instead, the goal is to present a new "attention-first" philosophy of mind. This book is a detailed examination of the Theravāda Buddhism of Buddhaghosa. The third work in the trilogy is Seeing and Subjectivity. In this book Ganeri aims to foreground perception—perceptual attention and perceptual experience—and the relationships these concepts have with subjectivity and selfhood. Drawing in part on Indian theories about the nature of perceptual consciousness, and in part on insights into aesthetic subjectivity from Sanskrit aesthetics, the book provides a new theory of the role of the subjective in experience. The interlocking interrelationships between the concepts of attention, imagination, perception, subjectivity and selfhood, in an anti-Cartesian and anti-physicalist, but still naturalistic, cosmopolitan philosophy of mind, is the running theme in this project. In the history of philosophy, Jonardon 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” (Navya-nyāya) 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. In metaphysics, Ganeri is the rediscoverer of transformational emergence. He was the first person to propose that Buddhist dharmas are tropes. Ganeri has written two popular introductory textbooks for Indian Philosophy. His Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason defends the central importance of rationality in the Indian tradition, and is aimed at philosophy students and faculty. His Classical Indian Philosophy, co-authored with Peter Adamson, is accompanied by a podcast series. Jonardon Ganeri has also written about the philosophy of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. His book, Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves, is the first English language monograph about Pessoa's philosophy written by a philosopher. Ganeri argues that Pessoa's notion of the heteronym can be used to solve some of the trickiest puzzles in the global history of the philosophy of self. His second book about Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self, locates the notion of heteronymy in many sources in classical Indian philosophy. It focuses on the importance of the imagination in simulating subjectivity and the senses of self. The metaphors and images through which subjectivity and inwardness have been understood around the world is explored in Ganeri's popular book Inwardness: An Outsiders' Guide, which is itself an example of the method of cosmopolitan philosophy. == Honours and awards ==