Review of "Quick and Concise: Philosophy" Vaishali Gahlyan Guest Faculty, Miranda House College, Delhi University Book Review # Jul 24, 2025 Book review of Shamik Chakravarty's Quick and Concise: Philosophy (Hachette India, 2025). Shamik Chakravarty’s A Quick and Concise Introduction to Philosophy is a refreshing and intellectually sincere attempt to bring philosophical reflection into accessible terrain. If one had to recommend a single text to ignite philosophical curiosity without intimidation, this would be it. I suggest, ‘A must-read for minds that wonder and wander’. While most beginner-level philosophy books shy away from topics like the philosophy of art and Skepticism, Chakravarti boldly includes them and this choice alone elevates the book above typical primers. Structured into accessible, argument-driven chapters, the book journeys through serious philosophical questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, always grounding abstractions in vivid thought experiments—from Descartes’ Evil Demon, the Brain-in-a-Vat to Gettier cases, Swampman, and Ship of Theseus. The author made a bold attempt to draw strong cross-cultural comparisons: Dharmakīrti and Gangesa are placed alongside Putnam, while Nāṭyaśāstra’s rasa theory dialogues with Beardsley’s aesthetic intention. Author’s style is conversational yet not condescending; technical without being arcane, prose is elegant without jargon, philosophical without pedantry. He invites readers not into dogma, but dialogue—an approach invaluable for pedagogy. And because of this approach, the book is equally useful for undergraduate classrooms, civil services preparation, high school students or general readers hungry for clarity without compromise. And yet, it does not oversimplify; each chapter ends with open questions, gently nudging the reader toward deeper reflection. That said, some limitations remain. The Indian perspectives, though sincerely integrated, often appear in passing—more like philosophical footnotes than equal interlocutors. Similarly, some dense conceptual debates (e.g., skepticism or personal identity) are outlined with brevity that may leave curious readers wanting more. The book’s analytic focus also leaves limited room for continental traditions, feminist ethics, or existential urgency. Nonetheless, as a pedagogical tool, it is a powerful asset: precise in exposition, economical in length, and dialogical in tone. The book doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive—but in what it does cover, it teaches philosophy as both a method and Praxis, which is the need of hour as so much work is going globally in Philosophical Praxis, also the book offers a blend of theory and practical examples evident in almost all the chapters. Chapter 1 is a well-crafted entry point, presenting philosophy as a rigorous discipline rooted in argumentation, logical clarity, and the courage to scrutinize our most basic assumptions. In rejecting the popular image of philosophers as mystics or self-help sages, the chapter reclaims philosophy as an intellectual craft—one that thrives on both deductive and inductive reasoning, and demands precision in thought. It offers a panoramic view of philosophy’s major domains—ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, mind-body theory, and even aesthetics— making it an ideal outset for the book. Ethical debates like abortion or capital punishment ground philosophy in real-world dilemmas, while metaphysics and epistemology confront timeless puzzles about reality, knowledge, and truth. The discussion of Sellars’s “manifest image” versus the “scientific image” is a highlight, dramatizing the tension between our lived, human experience and cold scientific reductionism. Yet despite its strengths, the chapter suffers from what might be called analytic parochialism . It offers a “constricted portrait” that privileges logical rigor over ethical seriousness, spiritual depth, or phenomenological insight. There is little room here for the Socratic imperative to “know thyself,” the existential urgency of Camus (who declared suicide the only serious philosophical question), or Foucault’s vision of philosophy as “a practice of self, of freedom, and of critique.” In its precision, the chapter excels. Chapter 2 succeeds in presenting a panoramic and intellectually rigorous account of how different philosophical traditions have addressed the meaning of life. Chakrabarti charts a philosophically ambitious journey through the terrain of life’s meaning—without ever pretending that there’s a single, satisfying destination. With admirable clarity, he juxtaposes the mythic defiance of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus with the sober skepticism of Thomas Nagel ( The Absurd ), who sees absurdity not in cosmic indifference but in our very ability to reflect.Chakrabarti balances metaphysical rebellion with grounded responses—like Richard Taylor’s Good and Evil , where meaning stems from inner desire, and Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters , which offers a hybrid view: meaning lies in passionately engaging with “projects of worth.” Chakrabarti insightfully connects this to Aristotelian eudaimonia and Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of narrative unity. However, it also raises unanswered questions: Can meaning be fully subjective? What is the standard for “worth”? Is cosmic purpose necessary or dispensable? In attempting to reconcile these views, the chapter not only educates but also invites readers into philosophy’s deepest and most personal question. As Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’” (Frankl, 1946/2006). The chapter does not give us that ‘why’—but it does illuminate the many paths by which it might be found. Chapter 3 is a philosophically alive, critically engaged, and pedagogically effective treatment of morality and normative ethics. Chakrabarti does not simply explain theories; he animates them, juxtaposes them, and tests their limits. The chapter’s strength lies in its refusal to offer easy answers. Instead, it leaves the reader with better questions—and a sharpened moral imagination. The chapter begins with Cultural Relativism, using Ruth Benedict to challenge moral universalism, while critics like Bernard Williams and Mary Midgley raise tough questions about ethical paralysis and judgment across cultures. Psychological Egoism is dissected through the Lincoln piglet anecdote, exposing the fallacy of reducing all kindness to self-interest. With Utilitarianism, Chakrabarti tackles the ethical arithmetic of Mill and Singer, showing both its appeal and its dangers—especially when happiness outweighs justice. Kantian ethics then shifts the focus to duty, dignity, and the Categorical Imperative, with Onora O’Neill’s famine ethics offering a striking real-world application. Chakrabarti skillfully presents Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics as a character-centered approach to morality, weaving in Hursthouse’s nuanced take on abortion and the concept of phronesis . He enriches this non-western ethical tapestry by integrating Buddhist mindfulness too and later through Greene’s neuroscientific dual-process theory offers cognitive depth. The chapter avoids moral dogma, leaving us not with answers, but better tools—and deeper questions. One might wish for more engagement with feminist or care ethics, or with contemporary debates in metaethics, but given the scope and purpose of the book, these omissions are understandable. Chapter 4, plunges into one of philosophy’s most tantalizing riddles: Are we truly free, or just well-dressed puppets of causality? Beginning with the bold moral act of whistleblower Dinesh Thakur, Chakrabarti raises the stakes—our legal systems, moral responsibility, and self-respect hinge on the assumption of free will. But determinism quickly enters like a philosophical wrecking ball: if every action is causally determined, could we ever have done otherwise? Libertarianism is explored through the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), then refined via Robert Kane’s “self-forming actions” that emerge from internal moral conflict. Agent causation theorists like O’Connor and Kevin Mitchell offer naturalized views preserving responsibility within a scientific worldview. Chakrabarti presents compatibilism— especially Frankfurt’s model of second-order volitions—as a powerful alternative, showing how one can be morally responsible even without alternative options. Yet, through Susan Wolf’s “JoJo” case, he questions whether internal coherence suffices for freedom when autonomy itself is shaped by corrupt contexts. Libet’s neuroscience experiments raise empirical challenges, but Chakrabarti resists reductionism, referencing critiques and newer studies that uphold deliberation in complex decisions. The tension between determinism and moral accountability is not resolved here (nor could it be), but readers come away better equipped to understand the stakes and structure of the problem. And though the chapter could have further engaged with existential and Eastern views,still it stands as a philosophically rich and accessible map of one of philosophy’s most enduring dilemmas: Do we choose, or are we chosen by cause? In Chapter 5, Chakrabarti undertakes the most classical and intense epistemological question—what is knowledge?—with philosophical precision and pedagogical finesse. Beginning with the tripartite model of Justified True Belief (JTB), Chakrabarti clarifies the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions, illustrating with sharp analogies and conditional logic. Yet the chapter’s intellectual pivot comes with Edmund Gettier’s 1963 challenge, which shattered JTB’s sufficiency through clever counterexamples, revealing how epistemic luck can satisfy all conditions yet still fall short of genuine knowledge. He then moves systematically through responses: the No False Lemmas approach fails under Feldman’s variation; Goldman’s Causal Theory is tested by the Fake Barn case, thus leading to discussions on externalism, this also reflects Williamson’s “safety” condition. Nozick’s Tracking Theory offers an elegant model but stumbles under Kripke’s red-green barn puzzle. The No Defeaters theory introduces a regress problem—how many defeaters can be defeated before knowledge collapses? Chakrabarti critically engages BonJour’s Clairvoyant Norman, challenging Reliabilism, and introduces Zagzebski’s “inescapability of Gettier problems”, which undermines all definitions separating justification and truth. A comparative turn brings in Dharmottara’s mirage and the Nyāya theory of pramāṇa, revealing striking parallels with modern causal and reliabilist accounts. The chapter closes with experimental philosophy, the figure of the Ideal Knower, raising doubts about whether knowledge can ever be fully defined. While the chapter masterfully unpacks epistemology but its structure mirrors the very fragmentation it critiques—layer after layer of fixes that never quite resolve the problem. Through examples, Eastern and Western traditions, and sharp critiques, Chakrabarti suggests that the real task may not be to define knowledge, but to understand why it resists final analysis. Chapter 6, confronts one of philosophy’s most enduring anxieties: How do we know anything about the external world? Through Descartes’ Evil Demon and the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment, he illustrates how epistemic closure—if you know p, and p entails q, you must know q—is turned against us. Timothy Williamson, however, rejects this fragility by treating knowledge as a fundamental mental state, immune to decomposition. The chapter surveys a rich tapestry of responses. G.E. Moore’s “Here is a hand” reverses the skeptic’s premise through modus tollens, asserting that if I know I have hands, I can’t be a BIV. Contextualists like Keith DeRose, David Lewis, and Stewart Cohen rescue knowledge claims by showing how epistemic standards shift with context. Meanwhile, Putnam’s semantic externalism collapses the skeptical scenario under its own logic—if you’ve always been a BIV, you can’t meaningfully assert it. Vogel’s Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) refutes skepticism abductively: the Real-World Hypothesis explains our experience more simply than the Minimal Skeptical Hypothesis, invoking Occam’s Razor. Still, skeptics persist. Relevant Alternatives Theory (RAT), pioneered by Fred Dretske, narrows knowledge requirements— we need not rule out every fantastical alternative, only relevant ones. Chakrabarti draws brilliant parallels to Nyāya philosophers like Uddyotakara and Gangeśa, who also reject radical doubt unless specific defeating conditions ( bādhaka ) are present. Even Experimental Philosophy (x-phi) gets a voice, showing that lay intuitions often resist full-blown skepticism. While the chapter strikes a fine balance between analytic rigor and accessibility, it occasionally skims over unresolved tensions—especially around abductive reasoning and its philosophical limits. The chapter’s greatest strength lies in its intellectual restraint—it resists the temptation to offer premature closure—but this very openness leaves the reader wondering: is realism just the best story we can tell, or is it epistemically secure? Chapter 7, this expansive and provocative chapter examines the metaphysical enigma of personal identity. From Locke’s memory-based theory to Parfit’s psychological continuity and the soul theory’s spiritual roots, the chapter maps philosophical attempts to understand what makes us the same person over time. Through the iconic Teletransporter thought experiment, the reader confronts the clash between qualitative and numerical identity. Locke’s “Prince and Cobbler” case, Reid’s memory-gap objection, and Parfit’s q-memory innovation all test the viability of memory-based accounts. Shoemaker, Schechtman, and Butler deepen the debate with concerns over circularity and personality. Chakrabarti then surveys bodily and brain-based theories, presenting Bernard Williams’s torture cases and Olson’s animalism , while engaging the ethical dilemmas of Dissociative Identity Disorder. The split-brain studies of Sperry and Gazzaniga support the radical No-Self View , echoing Hume’s Bundle Theory and the Buddhist Nāgasena dialogue. Chakrabarti even includes the Soul Theory , but ultimately dismisses it as empirically vacuous. With references to MPD, feminist critiques, and metaphysical puzzles, the chapter leaves readers with a disquieting insight: perhaps identity is not a fixed entity—but a fluid, fragmented construction resisting neat philosophical closure. While most textbooks stop at ethics, knowledge, and metaphysics, Chakrabarti dares to ask: What is art? And more importantly— why does it matter? Chapter 8 is a masterful culmination of the book’s intellectual arc, taking the deceptively simple question on art and unfolding it into a profound philosophical investigation. From Plato’s suspicion of art as illusion to Aristotle’s rehabilitation of mimesis, the chapter begins by grounding readers in classical debates, different kinds of theories of art with their fundamental questions, only to subvert them with modern provocations. Opening with provocative examples like John Cage’s 4'33" and Duchamp’s infamous urinal ( Fountain ), Chakrabarti unsettles the reader immediately. What counts as art when silence or plumbing fixtures are exalted in galleries? Can a banana duct-taped to a wall (Cattelan’s Comedian ) command millions because of its context rather than content? From here, Chakrabarti traverses the aesthetic terrain with both classical insight and contemporary savvy. Beardsley’s definition—anchoring art in aesthetic experience—meets its match in Duchamp, who exposes the paradox of anti-aesthetic masterpieces, then moving fluidly from Bell’s formalism and Collingwood’s expressive theory. Danto’s conceptual theory picks up this thread: art isn’t just what we see, but the context and interpretation we attach to it. Dickie’s Institutional Theory follows suit, arguing that the “artworld” confers status. But what, then, of outsider art—like the haunting works collected by Hans Prinzhorn from psychiatric patients? Each theory is critically examined through vivid examples—Bruegel’s narrative art, Rothko’s abstraction, Duchamp’s urinal—and juxtaposed with cross-cultural insights like the Rasa theory of Indian aesthetics, the devotional art of India, which flourishes outside institutional validation? Crucially, this is a book with a conscience. It resists the temptation to offer easy Philosophical answers, and instead offers better questions and a mirror to thought itself: fallible, contested, and always in motion. Whether one is encountering philosophy for the first time or returning to its terrain anew, Chakrabarti’s work is both a reliable compass and a bold provocation. References Beardsley, M. C. (1958). Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism . Harcourt, Brace. Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning (I. Lasch, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946) Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 8 (4), 529–566. Nagel, T. (1971). The absurd. The Journal of Philosophy , 68 (20), 716–727. Nāṭyaśāstra. (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE). Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata . (See A. Rangacharya or M. Ghosh editions for scholarly citations). Philosophy Now. (n.d.). A magazine of ideas – covering beginner-friendly articles on ethics, art, and identity . https://philosophynow.org/ Putnam, H. (1981). Brains in a vat. In Reason, Truth and History (pp. 1–21). Cambridge University Press. Reid, T. (1785). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man . (Reprint editions available from MIT Press and Liberty Fund). Sellars, W. (1963). Science, Perception and Reality . Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Plato, Aristotle, Aesthetics, Knowledge, etc. https://plato.stanford.edu/ Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits . Oxford University Press. Wolf, S. (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters . Princeton University Press. Yale University. (n.d.). Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 181) by Shelly Kagan. Open Yale Courses. https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181 Zagzebski, L. T. (1994). The inescapability of Gettier problems. The Philosophical Quarterly , 44 (174), 65–73.

Srajana Kaikini In conversation with Sahana Rajan (Lecturer, Jindal Global Business School) February 2022 Dr Srajana Kaikini's work spans across curatorial, artistic and philosophical domains. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Manipal Centre for Humanities, and has a Masters in Arts and Aesthetic from JNU. She was at de Appel Art Centre’s Curatorial Programme in 2012-13, is the recipient of 2013 FICA Research Fellowship and was Curator at KK Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre (2015-2019) at Manipal. Some of her recent curatorial projects include Searching for the Present, Where? Being-Becoming in Akbar Padamsee’s Figurations (1995 – 2006) at the Guild, Mumbai (2021), Backstage of Biology (2019), at Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, Mukhaputa (2017) at the KK Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre and Vectors of Kinship (2016) at the 11th Shanghai Biennale. She has been resident artist-curator at the Delfina Foundation, London and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and is a regular contributor to writing platforms on philosophy, arts and aesthetics. Her academic writing has been published in journals such as Ethical Perspectives, Voices in Bioethics, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Kunstlicht, Journal for Cancer Research and Therapeutics amidst others. She is on the Editorial Boards of SciPhiWeb Repository of Reflections on Science, Philosophy and Gaming and Barefoot Philosophers and member of the Bioethics Forum - Collaborative for Palliative Care at Columbia University. She is currently working on her forthcoming book Philosophy of Curation (Routledge) and teaches as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences at Krea University, India. Sahana: Lets start this conversation by knowing your research interests Srajana : I am interested in philosophy as a creative practice. As an artist-philosopher, it is extremely exciting to dive into the work of philosophy through practice, be it in my curatorial work, in my studio practice or by way of writing and teaching. This also means having a keen commitment to being inconspicuously soaked in philosophy while engaging with the world. Implicit and the ineffable registers of experience haunt my philosophical enquiry. I am curious about the ways in which relationalities emerge. The disciplinary probes then develop in service of this keenness. Aesthetics and Metaphysics are my core areas if one looks for #keywords . Philosophy for me is my practice. For more details on my work, one may find sufficient information on internet repositories. Please provide a brief biography of yourself I grew up in Bombay, a city that shapes my childhood and later in Bangalore. For the past decade, I have been mostly nomadic - from New Delhi to Amsterdam to London to Manipal to Bangalore and now to Pulicat - each place has given me so much. Two places that hold a special place for me are Suriname and Japan. A moment I recall in recent past, is when I touched a viking rune etched on a parapet of Hagia Sophia. For this context, I’d like to stick to this sparsed out geo-biography. What has been your experience of studying and being part of academic philosophy in India? I came to philosophy out of a personal necessity - to engage with certain concepts that haunted me - these were questions about my practice that I wanted to think through and wanted to learn from my teacher. The term academia does not hold much of an importance to me in qualifying my philosophical belonging. I was first introduced to philosophy during my Masters in JNU through my teachers who were scholars as well as artists. Art has always been part of the lived atmosphere at home. The experience of studying philosophy is mostly one of auto-didactism - even when one is taught by a teacher, the teacher’s success is in teaching the student how to teach herself. I was grateful for all my teachers who have made philosophy meaningful and lovable for me. I am grateful to continue learning from my teachers and peers, the barefoot philosophers. I consider this an ongoing process. I prefer not to dwell too much on what I am part of and what I am not. Could you share your reflections on philosophy as a discipline in India? How do you foresee the development of the discipline? The discipline of philosophy in India needs more affirmative attention - keeping in mind the place of philosophy for its people. There is a necessity for a way of engaging with concepts, contexts and their ideas, and to have meaningful dialogues, discussions and debates addressing questions that matter to you, me, the various kinds of ‘us’ that we inhabit or long for. As with any other discipline, when philosophers concern themselves with the work that can be done by philosophy, the discipline becomes self-sustainable. What kind of career path in philosophy are you interested in, or you think are available in philosophy in India? As an artist-philosopher I consider myself as a creative practitioner of philosophy. I curate, I sing, I make art, I write, I teach, I walk by way of doing philosophy. Philosophers are potentially everywhere around us. They are the policy-makers, the advisors, the mediators, the listeners, the poets, the storytellers, the caregivers, the gardeners, the carpenters, the bus drivers. I resist becoming a salesperson for the discipline, precisely because it does not need selling.

Modernity and its Futures Past Nishad Patnaik Faculty, IIIT Delhi Book Excerpt # Jan 8, 2025 An excerpt from Nishad Patnaik's book Modernity and its Futures Past: Recovering Unalienated Life (2023, Palgrave Macmillan, India). The basic claim of the book is that the contemporary figuration of modernity, in the positivistic understanding of nature, and capitalist form of society (as two sides of the same coin), constitutes the reification of the original universal, critical-rational impulse of the Enlightenment. Such reification sets up a tension between the universalizing and particularizing tendencies of reason, reflected, for instance, in the current dominance of the de-territorializing forces of globalized capitalism, on the one hand, and the simultaneous reemergence of xenophobic forms of nationalism, based on narrow, territorially bounded identifications along religious, ethnic or linguistic lines on the other. The tension between the universal and the particular, symptomatic of this deeper structural tendency towards reification, leads to a series of impasses in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, which come to constitute our sense of alienation. The book responds to this problematic by attempting to reconcile this tension in dialectical fashion, and thereby articulate an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . Thus, instead of understanding the tension between the universal and the particular, the one and the many, the same and the other etc., as representing a mutually exclusive either-or choice, the book approaches these issues by elaborating their mutually constitutive co-dependence. As a corollary, it shows that the series of impasses to which modernity succumbs in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, stem from the attempt to reduce the ‘universal’ to the ‘particular’ or vice versa. The work argues that if we resist this tendency towards reduction, we can still renew the emancipatory promise that Enlightenment modernity once held, for providing a rational-universal self-foundation for humanity, while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of a reified form of universality. As we know, (and as Husserl elaborates with his evocation of the sense of ‘crisis’ in what he calls the ‘European Sciences’) the early optimism and ‘naïve faith’ in ‘universal reason’ has long since given way to skeptical resignation in the face of the positivistic form of reason that comes to dominate. The ‘positivistic reduction’ of reason has resulted in a morass of ‘posts’—'post-modernism’, ‘post-truth’, post-structuralism, post-Marxism etc., at the level of theory, which indicate a tendency towards the ‘empiricization’ of reason. The effects of such empiricization are felt in the intertwined ethical, political, and economic domains. And yet, at the level of socio-political and economic history, as the long, sordid past of the contemporary capitalist figuration of modernity, marked by the violence of colonialism, slavery etc., shows, any straightforward positing of the universal dimension of reason, in the face of such skepticism and resulting empiricization, is no longer possible. For, it is precisely in the name of ‘universal reason’, mediated through the inherent expansionary economic logic of capitalism, that colonial subjugation and exploitation (primary/‘primitive accumulation of capital’ in Marx’s terminology) unfolded (and I argue, continues to unfold in a transformed modality under the current neoliberal regime, which imposes its own neo-imperialist tendencies). Indeed, the skeptical reaction to the universal claims of ‘enlightened’ reason, leading to their empiricization (positivistic reduction), stems, in large measure, from these effects of an uncritical, reified universalism, which (qua concrete or determinate universal’ in the Hegelian sense) tend to exclude certain cultures, peoples (and their interests), and modes of thought. This is because, as many thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Judith Butler etc. have pointed out, any determinate universal, qua determinate, must necessarily be limited in its scope. The scope of the universal has historically determined, and continues to determine, the constitution of identity and difference, the ‘same’ and the ‘other’, that is, those that are included in, and excluded from, its scope. In modernity, as the scope of the universal is extended, at least in principle, to include all human beings (and now increasingly non-human species), it can set up a movement where the excluded can come to ‘haunt’ the universal, forcing its expansion (but also possible contraction). This also indicates the possibility of modernist ethics as an ethics without specific content, or a negative ethics, that is committed only to the ‘gap’ between any concretization of the universal—the ethically invested content/normative order of any political discourse, and the empty universal it represents—its indeterminate ‘horizonal beyond’ by which it is necessarily oriented, such that the former is always subject to critique and revision in light of the latter. Explicating this movement (‘hauntology’) Butler, for instance, writes, modern “democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated upon their absence. That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and re-articulation of the basic premise of democracy itself” (Butler, 2000, 11) . These considerations make visible, the basic dialectic between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, in its enmeshed ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ aspects. That is, they make visible both the constitutive interrelation and dependence between the universal and the particular, as well as the tendency towards reduction/reification of this interrelation to one of its poles (dialectical ‘one-sidedness’) that gives rise to the tensions or impasses inherent in our contemporary (alienated) modernity. It follows that the ultimately ethical task of renewing the emancipatory potential inherent in the critical-rational and universal dimension of reason that constituted the original impetus of Enlightenment modernity, in the face of its contemporary reified ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ configuration, calls for a revised, non-reified conception of universality. The latter, I argue, can be nothing but a negative universality—a universality in constant ‘becoming’, (therefore, in its processive movement, nothing but a negative dialectic). Further, as I noted, the rearticulation of universality in this transformed, negative sense, in the face of reified (positivist and capitalist) modernity, amounts to the (re)articulation of an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . For, as we know, the critical thrust of enlightened reason lies in the disenchantment of the world—stripping it of ‘meaning’ and ‘purposiveness’, which come to be seen as merely anthropomorphic projections. The disenchanted world, particularly in its capitalistic figuration, alienates human beings from nature and from each other. Thus, to rearticulate human emancipatory possibilities calls for the rearticulation of a non-alienated conception of both nature and society. However, the disenchantment wrought by the critical-reflective rationality of the Enlightenment cannot simply be undone in a return to pre-modern ‘enchantment’ —to a sacralised conception of the world, and to some posited ‘original’ unity with it in unalienated ‘immediacy’. For, on the one hand, the historically emergent critical-reflective experience of disenchantment (as an expression of reflective distance, transcendence vis-a-vis ‘immediacy’, inescapable mediation, or universality in a negative sense etc.), constitutive of our modernist form of consciousness and society, cannot simply be obliterated, in what would amount to ‘collective amnesia’ (although the dangers of such amnesia are always present, and become exacerbated in times of socio-economic and political crises). On the other, the earlier ‘enchanted’ conceptions of the world, with their naturalized/sacralised order and hierarchy, where the source of power and legitimacy lay in a transcendent ‘beyond’, were subject to their own modes of (unthematized) reification, and therefore, (implicit forms of) alienation. Thus, the rearticulation of human emancipatory possibilities, which can accommodate irreversible disenchantment, (or the negativity inherent in critical-reflective distance), must take the form of the recovery/renewal of an unalienated mode of existence, from within a non-reified modernity. The study begins by posing a question regarding our contemporary situation—why are we witnessing the resurgence of various forms of xenophobic nationalism, and the re-emergence of narrow, pre-modern solidarities along religious or ethnic lines, precisely when globalized, finance-driven capital is purportedly breaking down the traditional territorial and cultural boundaries of the nation-state? It elaborates this tension inherent in the present, by taking into consideration aspects of the arguments presented by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), as well as by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983), while critiquing both. Whereas Hardt and Negri emphasize the supra-national tendencies of capital (captured in the de-territorialized sovereignty of ‘empire’), Anderson emphasizes the continued existence of nations and territorial boundaries. Yet, the present juncture is marked by both these tendencies, that is, both universalism (in the economic and juridical-normative domains) and particularism (nationalist parochialism). I argue that thinking of these tendencies as mutually opposed and exclusive, leads to an impasse both on the economic and political front, constitutive of contemporary capitalist modernity. More broadly, it results in a reified conception of modernity, which is the source of contemporary alienation. The latter then manifests itself in the regression to various pre-modern, parochial forms of identification and identity. This calls for a revised understanding of the present—one which does not merely emphasize one set of processes (universalistic tendencies), to the exclusion of the other (particularistic tendencies), but can account for their simultaneous co-existence. I account for this co-existence by arguing for their mutually constitutive co-dependence. By showing how the nation-state is essential to the wide-spread implementation of neo-liberal economic policies, I introduce the notion of hegemony (of the latter), as a possible, initial explication of this co-dependence. I take up this problematic in a concrete sense, through an analysis of the historical emergence of nationalist consciousness, and the ‘nation’, as a new, specifically modernist form of identity and political formation. It seems obvious that the modalities of nationalist consciousness and the conception of the nation itself, must differ depending on the historical and geographical contexts of their birth. That is, the birth of the nation state in the West, usually traced to the Westphalian peace treaties (1648) in Europe, and its emergence through the colonial encounter and anti-colonial struggle in Asia and Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries, cannot be exactly the ‘same’ in their form, and certainly not, in their ‘content’. Yet, they do share certain continuities of form, arising from the universalizing tendencies inherent in capitalism, that give rise to colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggles, and the affirmation of nationalist consciousness/identities, on the part of the colonized. I elaborate these claims through an examination of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), to compare and critique their analyses concerning the emergence of the ‘nation’. I show that Gellner does not take the ‘universal’ (both in its ‘structural’ and ‘normative’) dimension, inherent in capitalism too seriously. Thus, he does not see the close interconnection between the emergence of capitalist modernity, the rise of modern ‘nation-state’ (in Europe) and colonialism, preferring instead to restrict his analysis to an empirical level. Anderson in contrast, does take the normative dimension of ‘universality’ into account in his idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, only to rigidly fix its structural aspect in a ‘modular’ form that first arises in Europe, and is then transplanted to other parts of the world, through the colonial encounter. I discuss Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Anderson’s ‘modularity thesis’, in relation to the emergence of nationalist consciousness in post-colonial ‘imaginations’, in his The Nation and its Fragments (1993). I argue that the colonial encounter cannot be understood either on the ‘modular’ conception, or on Chatterjee’s ‘inner-spiritual’ and ‘outer-material scientific’ divide and the communitarian alternative that, he thinks, flows from it. Rather, its processive movement (which Chatterjee captures, but interprets differently) reveals the ‘inner dialectic’ (where Chatterjee’s conception of the inner-outer can be accommodated terms of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ phase that emergent self-consciousness goes through) constitutive of the nationalist consciousness that emerges in colonized subjects, in and through the struggle for independence. This incremental critique of Gellner’s, Anderson’s, and Chatterjee’s positions clears the decks for rethinking the possibility of unalienated forms of co-existence under conditions of modernity. That is, without taking recourse to various, ultimately pre-modern, sacralized conceptions of ‘community’, understood as modernity’s suppressed ‘other’. One such articulation of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of an unalienated form of life, which attempts to accommodate modernist disenchantment, is represented by Akeel Bilgrami’s work. Bilgrami shows how the tension between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, running through the Enlightenment, becomes the defining feature of modern liberal-democratic (and capitalistic) societies and cannot be resolved within it. This sets up the basic coordinates within which an unalienated form of society, in a modern, desacralized sense, must be thought. For, such a society must be able to reconcile the tension between ‘liberty’ and equality, which hitherto have always been thought in an oppositional sense, that is, as an opposition between individual liberty and collective equality. In his essay, Gandhi (and Marx) (2014), Bilgrami, in a two-step argument, first prepares the ground for an alternative, modernist form of unalienated life by bringing to light the contingent ‘hegemony’ of late capitalism. By tracing the historical and intellectual genealogy of capitalist modernity, and how it impinged on emergent nationalist consciousness in India under colonial rule, Bilgrami underscores both the historically, and rationally contingent character of the capitalist form that modernity takes. Yet, its contingency is not seen as such. That is, capitalism appears not as one possible configuration of modernity (that was ‘in fact’ realized) among other, equally historically and rationally viable possibilities (that, it so happened, were not realized), but as ‘objective’ (universal, rational) ‘reality’. Yet, I argue that on the one hand, the historically extant alternative visions that Bilgrami invokes (Levelers and Diggers, Gandhi), involve a sacralized conception of nature and of the human (and are therefore, not really ‘modernist’, but invoke a certain nostalgia for the pre-modern past). On the other, insofar as his rational, counterfactual argument, based on ‘opportunity costs’ remains a primarily negative critique of the rational argument (based on social contract) for capitalism (the rational justification of the privatization of the commons), it does not sufficiently account for the skeptical consequences inherent in the notion of ‘contingent hegemony’. In other words, it does not address the possibility that these skeptical consequences end up undercutting not only the claim to the (rational) universality of capitalist social organization, but also that of any alternative conception of modernity based on universal reason, understood in its positive institutional-social configuration. Bilgrami’s argument ends up affecting a split between reason and history that is in keeping with the tendency towards empiricization, where the movement of history, and specifically the socio-political domain, becomes nothing but an endless series of contestations and provisional victories (in the form of a temporary hegemonic consensus). To mitigate these skeptical effects of empiricization/particularism, I turn to the dialectical model of thought which emphasizes the movement of history through the movement of determinate negation, which is itself based on the processive character of reification. Through the latter, the universal dimension of rationality inherent in the historical emergence of modernity comes to be ‘reduced’ to the capitalist form of society on the one hand, and inseparable from it, the techno-scientific understanding of nature on the other. Such reduction, constitutes the source of our alienation in relation to others, and to ‘nature’. I trace this sense of alienation and its basis in reified modernity, via the ‘disenchantment’ of nature and of human relations, brought about through the historical trajectory and shape that modernity comes to take in the Enlightenment. I elaborate the imbricated historicities of the techno-scientifically mediated conception of ‘nature’ (as disenchanted), and the capitalist form of social organization (which permits the fullest manipulation and exploitation of ‘disenchanted’, quantified nature), through a discussion of Hegel’s Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s writings. Once this idea of a reified modernity determined by the capitalistic and techno-scientific framework, is established, it brings to the fore the question of the possibility of an ‘alternative unalienated form of modernity’. Yet, on the one hand, as I noted, such a recovery cannot mean a return to a pre-modern, sacralized conception of community and nature, since these forms of existence involve their own unreflective modes of reification, (in terms of deified, hence, ‘naturalized’ social hierarchies etc.), and therefore, unthematized modes of alienated existence. On the other, it cannot entail an orientation which, either in the present or in the future, attempts to restore or realize the immediacy of the ‘real’ (a ‘metaphysics of presence’) in the objective-universal sense (conceived either as ‘material’ or ideal-rational reality), specific to reified modernity. From an epistemological perspective, such immediacy (presence) is ruled out in principle—as varied philosophical traditions, from transcendental idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction etc. have argued. But, in a related sense, it is also critiqued from a political-normative perspective, insofar as the attempt to realize the impossible ideal/telos of a ‘society without antagonisms’, leads to a totalizing conception, which can have totalitarian consequences—a charge often brought against communist societies, which are said to exemplify a reified, distinctly modernist form of totalitarianism. Thus, the task of articulating an ‘alternative conception of modernity’, in and through the articulation of unalienated existence, calls for a ‘non-reified’ account of modernity. More precisely, as I elaborate in my reading of Marx, since the process of reification is inevitable (due to our spatio-temporal finitude, as Kant had already shown) it calls for an account where this process is reflectively and institutionally acknowledged, and thus rendered ‘harmless’ (echoing the Kantian sense of the term in the Transcendental Dialectic ) that is, where the institutionalized modes of such reflective acknowledgment circumvent the deleterious consequences of reification. Insofar as this task is explicitly political, it gives rise to further issues concerning the very possibility and scope of political-emancipatory projects. I trace these issues to universalistic and particularistic tendencies in the political domain. I noted how, when seen merely as contradictory, or mutually exclusive, the universalistic and particularistic orientations result in the reification of modernity, and in the economic and political impasses that flow from such reification. On the political front, the impasse manifests itself in the perpetual back and forth movement between politics conceived as merely empirical, that is, as an endless game of conflicts and provisional hegemonic formations in the name of the universal; and as making genuinely universal claims based on ‘justice’, or as the historical struggle/‘progress’ towards the realization of a ‘universally’ just, non-hierarchical, equal society. In contrast, I show that these particularistic and universalistic tendencies are mutually constitutive in a dialectical sense. How the mutual dependence and interconnection between the ‘particular’ and the universal in the political sphere, and therefore, the notion of dialectics itself, is to be understood, is the subject of debate between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in their book— Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). I analyze this debate, and focus on Butler’s notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, as an elaboration of the constitutive relation between the particular and universal within the political, and thus, of the recovery and articulation of a non-reified modernity. The notion of a ‘universal in becoming’ raises further conceptual and ‘practical’ issues. Are appeals to ‘universality’ (the appeals to justice, rights etc.) that articulate contemporary politics, appeals to a ‘ contingent universality’ (as Laclau contends), constituted by projecting particular claims as apparently universal, but which come to acquire legitimacy only by acquiring hegemony ? Or can political claims and struggles be articulated by a universality that remains explicitly empty—devoid of determinate content, hence a processive universal always in becoming, and it is this very emptiness that constitutes its normative legitimacy, as both Butler and Žižek argue, although in different ways? I address this problem through a return to the writings of Marx and Hegel, which form the background of this debate. In returning to Marx and Hegel, I underscore the centrality of the dialectic for explicating how the notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, plays out in the in the domain of political economy. However, with this return, the dialectic is no longer restricted to the present—to the oscillation between the particular and the universal constitutive of the impasse of the political in contemporary, reified modernity. Rather, I take up the notion of the dialectic in its historical movement, in order to provide a revised interpretation of both Marx’s (and Hegel’s) positions. This revision shows how Hegel’s theoretical conception of ‘absolute knowing’, and Marx’s political-normative project of overcoming (capitalist) alienation (and the realization of unalienated existence), does not culminate in the dead-end of absolute self-presence. That is, it does not entail the ‘end of history’, where the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history finally come together in reflective self-coincidence, in a society fully transparent to itself—without antagonisms, difference etc. Instead, I argue that since reification is inevitable, (Hegel’s and) Marx’s position cannot amount to the overcoming of reification (in reflective self-coincidence or transparency) but to its reflective acknowledgement, an acknowledgement that is institutionally realized in post-capitalist, unalienated society. In other words, I show how the post-Marxist, post-modern critique of Marx, based on the claim that he succumbs to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ conflates the processes of reification and alienation. Marx’s aim is to overcome capitalist alienation, but this does not entail overcoming (structural) reification. This interpretation provides fresh impetus to the ‘universalistic’ dimension of the political, thus, to the possibility of universal political-emancipatory projects, in the face of the hegemony of the capitalist form of reified modernity. In the final part of the study, I further explicate this universalist dimension, qua ‘universal in becoming’, by turning to Adorno’s notion of ‘ negative dialectics ’. Through a discussion of this idea, against the background of the Hegelian (and Marxian) conception of dialectics in our revised sense (not merely as ‘determinate negation’, as Adorno insists), I bring to light points of continuity (despite Adorno’s critique of Hegelian dialectics), between the two conceptions. The negative element of the dialectic (movement of thought), that is, a dialectic that does not culminate, each time, in a determinate negation, or assert ‘the identity of identity and non-identity’, but stays in the moment of negativity, that is ‘points beyond its own identifying movement’, amounts to a reflective awareness of our own finitude. It indicates the ‘non-closure’ of the social, from within the social, and not as (empirical) contingency etc. In other words, as Adorno, explicating the ‘double bind’ in relation to social, argues, Marx’s critique of ‘identity’ qua equivalent exchange under capitalism, does not aim at abolishing that equivalence as a ‘matter of fact’. For, not only is form/identity inescapable in principle, but a return to earlier ‘forms’ of non-equivalence/non-identity would reinstate the injustice inherent in those earlier societies. Rather, as Adorno asserts, it aims at making the “inequality within equality” visible, and thus, “aims at equality too”. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal yet unequal—our critique of inequality within equality aims at equality too […]. If no man had part of his labour withheld from him anymore rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. (Adorno, 2003, 147) Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. This, Adorno writes, “comes close enough to Hegel”. The difference with respect to Hegel lies in the direction of ‘intent’ of negative dialectics. The latter does not, theoretically or in practice, maintain the primacy of identity—claim that identity is ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’ in a final reconciliation (of identity and difference, universality and particularity etc.) that constitutes the telos of the dialectical unfolding of reason. Rather, for negative dialectics, “[…] identity is the universal coercive mechanism, which we, too, finally need , to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature””. (Adorno 2003, 147) In the book my endeavor also has been to open up the space of non-identity within identity, in order to (re)imagine a different world, a world where freedom (in noncoercive identity/equality) becomes a “matter of fact”. By reaffirming the possibility of the political in this specific sense of a ‘universal in becoming’ that is, one which involves neither a return to some pre-modern sacralized conception, nor to a reified modernist conception of universality qua ‘presence’, I bring to light the possibility and scope of an unalienated mode of existence from within the modernist tradition. The central claim that I make is that the recovery of unalienated existence in this modernist sense, implies an acknowledgement of our finitude and dependence, with respect to nature and to each other. This reflective realization of our finitude is nothing but the acknowledgement of the ‘double bind’ (oscillation between relative and absolute difference, negativity etc.) in which we are always caught. I attempt to show, how Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist society amounts to an institutional acknowledgement our finitude in this specific sense of the ‘double bind’, to which the movement of thought/reason is subject. It is in this sense therefore, that the recovery of an alternative, non-reified conception of modernity, covered over in the course of the historical emergence of contemporary modernity and the reified form it takes, must be understood. References Adorno, T. W. (2003). Negative Dialectics . New York, London: Continuum. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities . New York, London: Verso. Bilgrami, A. (2014). Secularism, Identity and Enchantment . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2000) “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism”. In, Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zižek, S., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left . New York, London: Verso Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories . New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism . Ithaca: Cornell University Press Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy . Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Response and Reply: Liberty, Secrecy, and the Right of Assessment Sania Ismailee; Daniele Santoro; Manohar Kumar Paper Review # Apr 17, 2026 This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors. Response from Sania Ismailee (Assistant Professor, School of Law, BML Munjal University) Daniele Santoro and Manohar Kumar's " Liberty, Secrecy, and the Right of Assessment " argues that government secrecy is a form of interference with individuals' rights. Their argument is twofold. First, under ideal conditions, individuals should be aware of obstacles preventing the exercise of their rights; this is the "epistemic entitlement" of rights. Second, under non-ideal conditions where secrecy is justified, the government must provide ex-post justifications for any limitations placed on fundamental freedoms. This "Right of Assessment" serves to prevent unrestrained secrecy. There are three points of critical engagement: the definition of secrecy as interference, the valuation of individual autonomy, and the Right of Assessment as an ex-post justification. The authors argue that hiding information interferes with life planning. For example, if the government secretly cancels a scholarship you count on, they interfere with your life plan before you even know it. However, not knowing is not always the same as being stopped. If the government keeps a secret regarding a project in a city you never visit, your freedom has not actually changed. By treating almost all secrecy as a violation, the definition of interference becomes too broad. The authors contend that the state wrongs you by hiding facts, treating you like a child. For example, hiding a minor health risk to prevent panic is seen as an insult to adult dignity. Yet, secrecy can be helpful; citizens might prefer the state to manage a complex crisis quietly to maintain daily peace. The authors prioritize the process of choosing, but safety or stability may sometimes be more important than knowing everything. Courts often defer to national security claims. A strong right requires independent oversight. Imagine a teacher punishing a student for a secret reason. If the student's Right of Assessment only allows the teacher to review the evidence, the teacher is essentially grading their own homework. Because the state holds all secret information, the Right of Assessment relies entirely on the state's honesty. Reply from Daniele Santoro and Manohar Kumar (Director, Centre for Ethics, Politics, and Society, University of Minho; Assistant Professor, Department of SSH, IIIT Delhi) We thank Sania for her thoughtful review of our paper and raising some critical concerns with our arguments or the implications of it. We have tried to address it one by one below. Response to (1): It is correct to state that not all kinds of secrecy qualify for a violation. For instance the first case you mention in your response does but not the second one. The second example would qualify, if for instance, my plan has been thwarted due to an interference by the state. It may also qualify for the doyens of that city if the nature of the information is such that has any bearing on the rights. Restrictions of liberty we argue in the paper, unless justified, amounts to threat to the overall structure of rights and would constitute an arbitrary intervention. Response to (2): Our contention is that the state may on reasons of safety and security hide some information (say to not cause panic). It is perfectly legitimate under our account. What we though claim is that when extenuating circumstances of emergency are over then it is the right of the citizens' to assess whether those circumstances demanded such a withdrawal absent which the rights of the citizens have been violated. Here the right of assessment has both forward looking and backward looking function. Response to (3): Right of Assessment is a normative claim that provides citizens with reasons to demand accountability from the state when their rights have been curtailed. We agree that it is not a sufficient guarantee and would require constant vigilance from the courts and the citizens, including skepticism towards judicial deference on matters of state security. It would require that judicial deference cross a high threshold for it to be justified and be subjected to timely reviews (as is the case with classified documents) to ensure proper oversight.

Response and Reply: Conciliation without command Mayank Bora; Tushar Chaturvedi; Abhishek Kashyap Paper Review # Jun 2, 2026 This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors. Response from Mayank Bora (Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal) Fabienne Peter thinks cases of peer disagreement demonstrate irreducibly second-personal imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in relations of mutual accountability. Chaturvedi and Kashyap (C&K) argue instead that a purely first/third-personal model of the nature of reasons to revise in such cases is explanatory superior to the second-personal model. I find a few things problematic with their critique: Firstly, C&K assume that the first/third-personal model being explanatorily superior only first/third-personal reasons to revise obtain in peer disagreement. But, as it goes for reasons, we can have different kinds of reasons for something and first/third-personal reasons and second-personal reasons can coexist. Secondly, C&K are against any second-personal and/or procedural value in peer disagreement cases. But, if heeding a peer's claims purely out of respect for their epistemic authority leads to a greater accrual of truth, than not following it, as aggregated over multiple instances in the long run, then this just is imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in a second-personal procedure. However, Peter is still wrong because such value is not irreducibly second-personal but a matter of the instrumentality of the procedure in leading to more truth, just not in each instance, but in the long run. Thirdly, C&K think that irreducibly second-personal epistemic value may obtain with the right conception of epistemic peerhood. With the accuracy conception Peter employs the second-personalist case fails, but if being an epistemic peer is a matter of entering into a collaborative epistemic practice then irreducibly second-personal epistemic obligations and values may indeed obtain. However, notions of peerhood do not seem to offer much help in understanding how second-personal procedures may derive value from truth without it being reducible to the value of truth. The irreducibly second-personal obligations that obtain with the enhanced notion of peerhood are best seen as promissory/contractual, and therefore moral, obligations. Reply from Tushar Chaturvedi and Abhishek Kashyap (PhD Scholar, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati; Assistant Professor, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati) We sincerely thank Mayank (Bora henceforth) for these probing responses. Here is our reply to the points raised by Bora: On the first, we grant that reasons can coexist and explanatory sufficiency does not entail non-existence. Our claim was only the weaker parsimony one that a second-personal reason is idle wherever the same evidential fact already explains the requirement. If two descriptions track identical procedural value via identical reliability facts then it leaves not two grounded reasons but one reason and a redundant relational redescription. On the second, we agree and the concession helps us. If imperfect procedural value is long-run instrumental value defeated the moment the procedure becomes unreliable then it reduces to truth-conduciveness. That is the swamping result we defend that procedural value is superfluous because it bottoms out in reliability. We never denied that the value exists only that it is irreducible and on this Bora is our ally against Peter. On the third, we accept that the obligations are not merely moral but neither are they irreducibly second-personal. On Fleisher's demarcation a norm is epistemic if it is the internal rule of a practice that reliably promotes truth (amongst others), so the norms of uptake and answerability qualify as epistemic. Yet their ground is instrumental. What a practice institutes is a reducibly grounded but operatively second-personal register (or so we would argue), that is, a rule to treat a peer's objection as a claim owed an answer, grounded in the practice's truth-promotion. Since truth being the sole fundamental epistemic value is third-personal, no enrichment of peerhood can manufacture irreducibility. We are developing this practice-based conception of peerhood (and to signal the departure, we might label it cognitive or social epistemic or scientific peerhood).

What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility? Bhaskarjit Neog Associate Professor, Centre for Philosophy, JNU Book Excerpt # Feb 7, 2024 An excerpt from Bhaskarjit Neog's book What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility: Intention, Agency and Emotions of Collective Entities (2024, Routledge, India). Published with permission from Routledge (India). Examples of collective wrongdoings abound across societies. The moral history of human society is full of such cases – the bloody wars, mob violence, racism, communal and ethnic riots, oppression by colonial powers, exploitation in the name of caste and class, and numerous incidents of coups, gang wars, corporate frauds, and terrorist activities. Their impacts on the moral community are so startling that we do not know how to reconcile ourselves to any punitive measures offered by any existing arrangements of a society. We go out in public and argue why the activities of such groups or collectives are reprehensible, and why we must excoriate them. In most cases, however, public rage dies down over a period of time without receiving much moral attention or condemnation. One of the reasons behind the disappearance of moral resentment from public memory is the fact that we do not always have a clear understanding of the simple question – who is responsible when a group or collective is held responsible? We do not seem to know much about the idea of moral responsibility for collective wrongdoings as much as we know about moral responsibility of individual wrongdoings. Although collective wrongdoings of this kind are ultimately carried out by individuals, it seems quite appropriate to first talk about the moral culpability of the whole organization or entity of which they are part. On the face of it, this idea of attributing moral properties to groups or collectives is uncomplicated and a matter of our everyday moral vocabulary. We can easily comprehend why a group or community deserves to be condemned for any action or omission, just the way any individual does. Non-philosophically speaking, the fact that, say, Nazi Germans are collectively blamed for their cruelty against the Jews is no more complex a matter to understand than it is to understand why Hitler is blamed for the same cruelty. As far as the normal comprehension of the meaning of blame is concerned, it hardly makes any difference whether the concept of blame is used in a collective or an individual context. The collective/individual contrast seems immaterial to the semantics of "blame" or other responsibility-bearing moral notions. But, to view it more analytically, there appears a serious conceptual problem. The idea of collective responsibility tends to become somewhat slippery and eludes our understanding when we try to understand it by following our easy grasp of the concept of individual moral responsibility. That Hitler is blamed for inhuman actions is easy enough to understand, because there is, or was, an individual human person in space and time that constituted the determinate target of our attitude of blame. In other words, there is a clear answer to the question: “Who is to be blamed?” or “Who experiences the feeling of guilt?” In contrast, there is no distinct identifiable target through which the idea of collective responsibility can be made sense of. Thus, when we talk about collective responsibility, one might bluntly respond with questions: What responsibility? And whose responsibility are you talking about? A collective – whether with a structure or without it – unlike its constituent individuals, does not seem to have any clear responsibility-bearing make-up. For it is not an embodied entity with its own consciousness and rationality required for being a moral agent. To track down its blameworthy character we need to know how and in what sense their actions and inactions are intentional or purposeful. Given that intentions and other responsibility-making psychological states are paradigmatically understood as a matter of minded entities, groups and collectives being non-minded, cannot be said to have such conscious states. Similarly, unlike their individual members, they cannot have or experience any moral emotions when they are made aware of their reprehensilizable behaviours. Neither can they sympathize or empathize with the victims of their actions in the way required of them. Nevertheless, it is a hard normative fact that we do talk about the moral responsibility of collectives, and we do hold them seriously morally accountable for many things. Many a time our responsibility statements about individuals are in fact grounded in a language of the responsibility of groups or collectives to which they belong. So, the questions that linger in our deliberative mind are: Is the phenomenon of collective responsibility really real, or is it metaphorical – a mere façon de parler , as many would like to call it? If it is real, is it a summation or incorporation of the moral responsibility of individuals, or is it something different from them – both in terms of its contents and meaning? And what gets added or obliterated in our standard understanding of responsibility when we see it through the prism of a collective framework? Besides, normatively speaking, how do we evaluate the moral status of individuals who stand up and raise their voice against the things that are done in the name of their group? For instance, how do we make sense of the moral status of those protestors who hit the streets with slogans such as NotInOurName or NotInMyName? This book offers a modest ground for judiciously responding to some of these questions. It aims to redeem collective responsibility by defending the consistency and legitimacy of collective intentions, collective agency, and collective emotions. It talks of collective moral responsibility as the responsibility of collectives without either reducing it to the moral responsibility of the collective members or making it a case where their exact moral positions are effectively made blurred. The ground for defending this account is thus a non-individualist or quasi-collectivist ground – a ground located in the contested space between two prominent approaches – collectivism and individualism. Three components may be considered for a standard justification of moral responsibility – intention, agency, and affective or reactive attitudes of the subject concerned. These components show why, how, and on what ground a subject may be taken to be an appropriate candidate of our moral evaluations. Intentions refer to the psychological state of a subject with which the action concerned is performed. Agency is the capacity that the subject has for being able perform a morally considerable action or omission. And affective or reactive attitudes are humane reactions of the relevant subject’s putative moral agency that is amenable for the attribution of moral responsibility. These components are important not just for the justification of moral responsibility of structured collectives but also for the less-structured collectives. To proceed on this path, I draw on the latest resources of two theoretically interconnected areas of analytic philosophy – first, collective intentionality, a newly developed area in the intersection of philosophy of action and mind, and the second, somewhat old but now a freshly rejuvenated field called social ontology with perspectives from psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences and other disciplines. Both these areas investigate the nature and functions of variety of cognitive and non-cognitive properties such as beliefs, desires, intentions, guilt, remorse, and others that underly the constitutions of collective affairs. While the justification of a substantive account of collective responsibility along this line has been in the know for quite some time, there has not been a systematic effort of bringing together two equally compelling approaches, namely the cognitivist and emotivist ways. I explore the possibility of combining them in a way that would elevate the debate of collective responsibility from the narrow confines of both individualism and collectivism. This is a book on morality of groups with a special focus on the concept of collective responsibility. So, naturally it is a book that can be catalogued under moral philosophy. But since it is a product of weaving and stitching resources of multiple areas of philosophy and other allied disciplines, its significance may also be seen in other fields of humanities and social sciences where the issue of collectivity is discussed and debated. The prospective audience of the book thus includes, but not restricted to, moral philosophers, political theorists, legal theorists, just war theorists, business ethicists, policy makers, and others who take interest in the general question of moral responsibility in collective contexts.

Academic writing support for philosophers in India IPN Writing Centre An important aspect of philosophers’ work is writing and publishing. It is also one of the areas that doctoral scholars and young researchers often find the hardest and have the least support for. IPN Writing Centre aims to address this gap through Writing Mentorship and Writing Rooms . Writing Mentorship This initiative is aimed at supporting researchers who would like to receive the guidance and feedback of peers on drafts of their written work (such as a research article or a thesis chapter). While many of us get feedback on our written work from our supervisors, advisory committee members and other senior faculty, it might be useful to have peers read and comment on them. For one, this provides a less ‘formal’ and freer environment, where Ph.D. scholars and others may feel more comfortable discussing their concerns and asking for feedback. How it works Interested people, who would like to have their work reviewed, will have to register and indicate the area in which their written work is situated. Based on the area of their work, each registrant will be assigned a mentor by the IPN coordinators. This would take approximately 1-2 weeks. The registrant will be introduced to the mentor, and can share their work with them.The mentor will read the registrant’s work and provide them written feedback within 3 weeks. Depending on the preference of the mentor and the registrant, they may want to meet and discuss the feedback and comments. The first round of feedback will be coordinated by the IPN coordinator. The registrant and mentor can have further rounds of discussion and feedback based on their requirement and preference. Who can apply : Philosophers in India (Ph.D. scholars and above) can apply. Even M.A. scholars who wish to work towards publication of their papers can also apply. Membership of IPN is not necessary. How to apply: Those who would like to receive feedback on their work, please register here . Coordinators : Siddharth S (siddharth.nias[at]gmail.com) and Varun Bhatta (varunsbhatta[at]gmail.com) IPN Writing Rooms This initiative aims at creating virtual meeting rooms for researchers who wish to write on a regular basis but haven't been able to execute it properly. IPN Writing Rooms will provide a shared space and would be of particular interest to those who like to have company while they are writing. Who can apply : Philosophers in India (Ph.D. scholars and above) can apply. Membership of IPN is not necessary. How to apply: Interested candidates, please register here . Coordinators : Jinesh Sheth (jineshrsheth13[at]gmail.com) and Siddharth S (siddharth.nias[at]gmail.com)

Academic writing support for philosophers in India IPN Colloquium This is a bimonthly colloquium, held every Saturday, 10.30-1200 PM, where a philosophy scholar (faculty or research scholar) will present their work, published or work-in-progress. Through this colloquium, we aim to build a platform through which philosophers become familiar with the works of their colleagues, and create a space where researchers can share early drafts of their work for comments and suggestions. The colloquium will be open to all philosophy scholars. If you would like to attend the colloquium, please write to colloquiumipn@gmail.com . If you would like to present at the colloquium, please fill this form and we will get back to you. The current moderators of IPN Colloquium are: R. Krishnaswamy (Jindal Global University), Shinod K (University of Hyderabad), Shruti Bhat (Thapar University), Siddharth S (Sai University), Sushruth Ravish (IIT Kanpur), Varun Bhatta (IISER Bhopal) and Vivek Radhakrishnan (Krea University). The below sheet lists the talks in IPN colloquium till now. (Click here to view the google-sheet.)

Reading groups in IPN Reading Groups IPN enables focused philosophy reading and research groups. The details of currently active groups are given below. Please get in touch with the respective moderators to join a specific group. Metaethics Reading Group Themes : moral epistemology, moral motivation, moral reasoning, moral judgement, moral normativity, moral realism/irrealism and history of metaethics Moderators : Sushruth Ravish (PhD Student, IIT-Bombay) and Vivek Kumar Radhakrishnan (PhD Student, Manipal Academy of Higher Education) Contacts: sushruth.ravish[AT]gmail.com or vivek.logos[AT]gmail.com Realism/Anti-realism and Philosophy of Mind Reading Group Themes : epistemological and metaphysical realism/anti-realism; scientific realism/anti-realism; Kantian transcendental idealism; epistemic humility; mind-body problem; mental causation; self-awareness. Moderators: Siddharth S (Sai University, Chennai) and Nishant Kumar (PhD Scholar, IIT Madras) Contacts: siddharth.nias[AT]g mail.com or nishant.iitmadras[AT]g mail.com

Muzaffar Ali In conversation with Varun S Bhatta (Assistant Professor, HSS, IISER Bhopal) July - August 2021 Muzaffar Ali (mamalla[AT]unipune.ac.in | younusmalla[AT]gmail.com) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India. He received M.Phil and PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to joining Savitribai Phule Pune University, he taught philosophy at Hindu College, University of Delhi. He specializes in social and political philosophy and contemporary Indian philosophy with an emphasis on the idea of the public sphere and its normative implications in the Indian context. He is a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholar and has published in prestigious journals such as JICPR, Sophia, Culture and Dialogue, and Journal of World Philosophies. A co-edited volume, The Imbecile's Guide to Public Philosophy (2021) is published by Routledge. Varun : Muzaffar, let us start this interview by knowing a bit about your personal history. Can you please tell us where are you from? What about your earlier education and interests? Muzaffar : I am from Kashmir and studied there till my Bachelors in 2008. While my education (up to HSC) took place around my village, I moved to Srinagar city for Bachelors in 2006. My primary education took place at a school next door of which ours was the first batch. I need to mention that we were lucky to get quality education at our primary stage in education and much of the credit goes to the then collective of teachers at this school. Quite interestingly, it was my failure to secure a seat in the State MBBS entrance examination which marked my shift to Social Sciences for my Bachelors; more specifically to Psychology! The shift was initiated through advice from some close friends who were of the view that I can do better with human psychology than human physiology! Interesting to hear about the rural educational experiment. Probably, if we have time, would like to know more about this initiative and how it is doing at present. Also, fascinated to know about the twist of fate: from physiology to psychology! How was your Bachelors’? Curious to know how and why you transited from psychology to philosophy. The school was a community initiative within our village to provide quality education as an alternative to the State-run schools. However, within a matter of two decades, the shift in primary education was more towards a neo-liberal one, one where paradoxically entrepreneurship and education are supposed to share the plate! Gradually my school had a strange death as it could not withstand the shift. At the college, the social science stream (as it was then called) was offered in clubbed subjects and one had to choose one such club. With an eye on psychology, I happened to choose a club that had philosophy in it. And you won’t believe within the first year itself when I studied Greek Philosophy, I was fascinated to the core. I straight away decided that philosophy is what I am going to pursue. At the college, we hardly had teachers who could teach philosophy and I struggled to finish my undergraduate studies. I got help from a few friends who had either studied philosophy or were interested in it. A gentleman who had retired as a Govt officer but had done post-graduation in philosophy in the 70s helped a lot. The boat somehow sailed through. Once my undergraduation was over, I did not apply to any other subject as I knew philosophy awaits me somewhere. Can you tell us what aspects of philosophy caught your attention during the first encounter? In my first encounter with philosophy at college, I was handed W T Stace’s introductory book on Greek Philosophy. The moment I started going through it, the metaphysical questions raised by the early Greek philosophers captivated me. It was as if these philosophers (Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximenes, Heraclitus etc) were eager at capturing the ‘ultimate reality’ at a conceptual level. The evolution of Greek philosophy with Plato and Aristotle talking about a kind of moral nature of politics was not only interesting but refreshing as well. Unfortunately, the syllabus during those days was based on the Indian-Western binary (and it still carries much of that baggage). The binary-based curriculum did not allow us to move to the specifics of any particular tradition at the college level. Before we move on, do you remember the name of this retired government officer and any information about him? Want to imagine this person...who does post-graduation in philosophy (in the 1970s), joins a government job and at the same time assists students! As far as I remember, he was a retired horticulture officer who had done his MA at Aligarh Muslim University during the early 1970s. After his MA, he had even got an opportunity to move abroad for further studies in philosophy after securing a fellowship. However, he decided to move back to Kashmir and do a government job instead. Actually, since there were few or no teachers of philosophy available, colleges used to hire him after his retirement to teach and assist students. At times, he would not even be paid, but he would still continue to assist students like me at an informal level. I can’t remember his exact name as of now, though we fondly called him Malik Sahab. Wonder why the person did not pursue higher studies. Coming back to you, what happened after your undergraduate degree? Looks like you were clear about pursuing a Master's in philosophy. How did that go? I applied to two universities for my Master’s: Panjab University Chandigarh (PU) and Hyderabad Central University (HCU). However, as fate would have it I had to join Panjab University as the selection letter from HCU wouldn’t reach me on time due to the 2009 agitation in Kashmir following the Asia-Neelofar rape case. Interestingly the Dept at PU was imbibed with a sense of openness and seriousness for philosophy. It had a charged and vibrant atmosphere with weekly seminars, discussion groups and Professors took a keen interest in offering pedagogical clarity during and after lectures. That training gradually played its part in shaping my research interests. Dr Lallan Baghel who currently heads the Dept prodded us to submit abstracts to attend seminars and conferences at the national level. Informal discussions on concepts related to classical Indian philosophy and other subjects were a routine exercise. I fondly call the Dept as being my stepping stone as it became a platform for me to have a glimpse of global philosophy. From Habermas to Daya Krishna, Dharmakirti to Jayanta Bhatta, Husserl to Deleuze, Foucault to Chantal Mouffe, I got acquainted with a diverse range of philosophers and concepts. In essence, the groundwork for my research interests was done and the imperative need was to shape and cultivate it further. With this ground set, how did you proceed further? I secured admission to the integrated M.Phil-Ph.D programme at the Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University. The Centre was small at that time and I completed my M.Phil in 2013 with my focus on the concept of sovereignty within the “Deterritorial Empire”; a concept put forward by the Political Philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. It was during my M.Phil that I figured out that not much work is being done in the realm of political philosophy from the perspective of the Indian context. The trigger was an essay by Bhiku Parekh, “The Poverty of Indian Political Theory.” It occurred to me that the philosophical domain is overwhelmed by a kind of Western captivity which if I borrow from K. C. Bhattacharya can be considered as a part of ‘cultural subjugation.’ I was not thinking of closing myself to the West and becoming a nativist. Rather I seriously started to interrogate into the blind deployment of notions and theories that have origins in the West. The lament was that even Indian political theory is not able to offer anything beyond a certain point. After a lot of reading and discussions with faculty at JNU and outside, I was sure that my PhD research topic has to focus on this often neglected problem. Muzaffar (far left) along with his friends in Mumbai University, attending the Afro-Asian Philosophy conference (2010). I can relate to the tension between the west and Indian that one encounters while practising philosophy in India. I want to delve more into the points you mention and hear in detail. Before that, let us complete the current strand of conversation. Please tell us about your PhD research. Since I had a bit of clarity about the wider context of my research problem, I chose to understand the imagined Indian public sphere in normative terms by evaluating the Habermasian conceptualization(s) of the public sphere. The title is, “Understanding Indian Public Sphere through a Critique of Jurgen Habermas.” In my research, I didn’t evaluate or inquire into the Indian situation from the vantage point of Habermas’s normative idealization of the public sphere. Rather I employed the contemporary Indian situation as my standard measure of evaluation and inquiry into Habermas. The methodological insight for this inquiry is based on Samvada as propounded by two contemporary Indian philosophers, Daya Krishna and M. P. Rege. Among other issues, a major issue that I argue about is that the concept of rationality -- be it the enlightenment one or the communicative rationality, which shoulder the shifts and evolution of the Habermasian public sphere -- is inherently insufficient to be deployed for the understanding of Indian public sphere. As an alternative, I propose the concept of contextual rationality, as propounded by B. K. Matilal and others can be ‘finetuned’ and used for understanding and envisioning the normative conceptualization of the Indian public sphere. The fine-tuning involves the possibility of replacing the ‘illustrational’ component in the classical model of contextual rationality with the notion of ‘lived experience’ as a viable vector of meaning for a shared discourse within the public sphere. I may add that the project is still a work in progress even after I have completed my PhD and I look forward to putting it in the public domain soon. I can see how you in the PhD research successfully attempted to come up with a novel Indian political theory by making the existing concepts/theories have a conversation with the Western ones. As a person who has not delved into political philosophy, I want some clarification about your research domain and the project. (i) In what ways do you think the Indian public sphere differs from the Harbemasian one? (ii) And, even though you have clarified that you are not a nativist, but do you think concepts developed in the Indian context (like Matilal’s contextual rationality) have better conceptual compatibility to explain Indian phenomena (like the Indian public sphere)? To put it briefly, I can say that a public sphere’s publicness is to be theoretically gauged by the in-principle access it offers to individuals who intend to participate in it. The overemphasis on the concept of rationality by Habermas, (as I M Young, Nancy Fraser, and others charge) becomes an obstacle for that in-principle accessibility itself. The reason being that Habermas creates a procedural format to conduct the critical-rational debates within the public sphere. A simple way of putting this point is this. Think of a situation where matters of caste discrimination are to be discussed by everyone apart from the one’s who suffer it, primarily because they are not able to speak in the language and format as demanded by the Habermasian public sphere. The Indian public sphere, if we can imagine and theorize one, cannot simply rely on or overemphasize procedural rationality alone. While on one hand, the Indian public sphere needs to resolve the problem of accessibility and operationalize it through an alternative format and procedure for debate within it. On the other hand, such operationalization should not dilute its normative potential which may otherwise end up making it redundant. Coming to your second question, the notion of contextual rationality looks promising on these fronts if reworked and employed in an appropriate way. Matilal himself draws on the Nyaya conception of debate and makes sure that contextual rationality as an operative within debates satisfies the needs and demands of participants. While doing that, the in-principle accessibility option for the general public who can become participants is kept intact by making illustrations and examples a necessary ingredient of contextual rationality. So while the arguments cater to the debaters’ demands, the parallel woven examples and illustrations cater to the general public who are potential (not actual) participants in the debate. I play with this illustrational component to make it more tenable for an imagined Indian public sphere so that contestations present within our society can be properly responded to, at least at a theoretical level. I do not strictly adhere to the compatibility issue in my research. But at the same time, I am of the opinion that concepts developed within a certain context do share a kind of fetal relation with the context itself. And it is necessary that we as doers of philosophy underline the existence of such relation. I like the way you put it - “fetal relation”. Are there any works (published, forthcoming, work-in-progress) on the above topic that one can read? Please do also introduce us to your other research works. Yes, there are a few. Up to now, I have been more concerned about the Contemporary Indian philosophical strand of my research. In 2017, as part of a collaboration, “Rethinking Classical Dialectical Traditions: Daya Krishna on Counterposition and Dialogue ” was published in the journal Culture and Dialogue. I took it a bit further in 2018 with “ Indian Philosophy and Ethics: Dialogical Method as a Fresh Possibility” published in Sophia. The first treatment of the Social and political arena within my research is part of an upcoming co-edited volume, The Imbecile’s Guide to Public Philosophy published by Routledge. The volume is going to be out by September 2021. Apart from this, I have written a few articles on Contemporary Indian philosophers such as Margaret Chatterjee and Feminist Philosophy. Apart from the publications, I have been occupied with the malestream nature of philosophy as a discipline. I did a project under the UGC’s University with Potential for Excellence grant at my university so that the relationship between patriarchy and philosophy can be studied. The findings of the study are available as an occasional paper published by the University. Taking the focus on this question forward, I and a few colleagues from Universities in India founded the Collective for Women Philosophers in India last year. The CWPI is a voluntary effort to study the gender gap within Indian philosophical academia from multiple methodological perspectives. To begin with, we have started interviewing Women philosophers based in India to understand their perspectives on the nature and extent of the gender gap in Philosophy. We look forward to taking it further with collaborations and projects on national as well as international levels. Given that you have been through the various stages of academic philosophy, and have dabbled not only with regular academic activities (like teaching and research) but also proactively attempting to address some of the problems of the discipline, what has been your experience of doing philosophy in India? Let us (for the moment) separate doing philosophy in India into two categories; studying philosophy and practising philosophy. As far as studying philosophy is concerned, we get exposed to a lot of non-Indian philosophies, thanks to the evolution of Indian academics post-colonial influence. Unfortunately, this exposure is not symmetry-based and deep down the Indian-Western binary is inherent to it. In other words, it seems that colonial authority has paved the way to a kind of epistemic authority within philosophical discourses. If this exposure was founded on a principle of epistemic symmetry then the condition of philosophy as a discipline may have been altogether different. The asymmetry is bound to shape the practice of philosophy as well. It leaves the practitioners of philosophy with a conundrum of being faithful to both traditions simultaneously. Most of us, I think, remain entangled with solving this conundrum throughout our careers, and my experience is of similar nature. I find it difficult to strike a balance between the two traditions given the fact that the Indian-Western binary has been foundational to my career as well. J. L. Mehta, Daya Krishna, J. N. Mohanty, Ramchandra Gandhi, Margaret Chatterjee are examples of India based philosophers who have suffered this conundrum and attempted to find a way (whether successfully or unsuccessfully is a different question altogether) out of it. Honestly speaking, I am inquisitively searching this forest to look for a way out of it. Another characteristic problem within our philosophical circles is the lack of dialogue within. Much of the communication is limited to friendly circles and senior fellows. Young scholars and researchers hardly get opportunities to interact with each other. With regard to the last point you mentioned, what are the critical difficulties and concerns you think that the community of young philosophy scholars in India encounters? And what initiatives and steps we can proactively take to tackle these? One of the major predicaments that we face is to prove that philosophy is (still) relevant. I think a young philosophy professional is used to facing questions and doubts regarding the relevance and use of philosophy every now and then. The doubts do not emerge from a vacuum. Rather the general atmosphere, academic as well as non-academic, is bulldozed by a technocratic and positivist invasion which leaves very little scope for a sustained train of thought. Further, the instrumental nature of education plays a role in sidelining criticality and inquisitiveness. It falls on us to either submit to the onslaught or to keep up the ante. Our predecessors have not witnessed a difficulty of such magnitude, I believe. There are a few administrative and academic hardships as well. Administratively, there is hardly any scope for a young professional to receive focused impetus from the national councils such as the ICPR or ICSSR to sponsor research stays in acclaimed institutions. ICPR has senior fellowships among others, but I hardly find it offering a special young faculty program. Academically, it becomes difficult for any young scholar in India to share and have a conversation on his/her work. The reason is the attitude that “senior is better” which I think needs to be revisited. It is quite easy for anyone to get a senior professor’s inputs on research and teaching, but very hard (almost impossible) to get a shared or even contested view from peers. We have to figure out alternatives, such as having platforms and collectives like IPN, CWPI, etc., to communicate with each other and share works of interest. While the academic part of this difficulty has to be resolved by us and the senior colleagues in philosophy academia, the administrative one has to be sorted elsewhere. One of the challenges that I constantly encounter as an academic philosopher is the guilt of doing philosophy only in English and not doing enough of it in my mother tongue (Kannada). Even though this question resonates with the India-vs-West problem that we discussed above, they are different. Working in one’s provincial language is a way the philosopher connects to his/her immediate locale. Thought of asking your thoughts on this as I want to know what does asking this question in the context of Kashmir entail? The question is both important and interesting. The vernacular medium definitely offers a lived way of doing philosophy (or for that matter any discipline which is articulation and argumentation centric). I would have preferred to get schooled in the Kashmiri language. But alas, English as a “language of power” has so permeated our being that during my schooling Kashmiri was not even a subject in the curriculum. Even now, after being introduced, it is taken quite casually. The result of sheer neglect towards the vernacular languages has been quite drastic. We are more like hybrids. Now that I am based in Pune, a cursory comparison makes me feel that English is more commonly deployed in the northern states. States like Maharashtra, Bengal have (to a good extent) managed to preserve their vernacular languages. On a different note, while English distances me from my immediate locale, it simultaneously brings the outer world closer to me. It (as if through its sheer power) throws the world open to me, and that needs to be underlined. Somehow, we forgot to strike a balance between the openness that English offers and the belongingness that the vernacular bestows. Thanks for pointing out how vernacular and cosmopolitan languages can complement each other. Having discussed the various hurdles and characteristics of Indian academics, I want to know how all of these have come to shape your pedagogy. How do you think philosophy should be taught in India? My pedagogy has indeed been shaped by this tumultuous-yet-interesting experience. I have made it a point to rid the courses (that I teach) from the sweeping Indian-Western binaries. The courses now have a mix of Indian and non-Indian philosophers without any underlined segregation. I hope that helps free the caged bird. Second, since philosophy is a vast discipline and in India, it has been more involved with the history of philosophy, I make sure that contemporary scholars across the wider social sciences get their place (at least) in my teaching. Coming to your second question, I am of the view that we need to teach ‘philosophy as philosophy’ without reducing it to spiritual enterprise, religious conservatism or other comprehensive doctrines. The argumentative value inherent to philosophy, its inquisitiveness to interrogate, its inclination to offer and sustain critique need to be the vectors of teaching and doing philosophy.

Navigating Philosophy Olympiad: Interview with Sarthak Dhole Sarthak Dhole and Rupesh Singh Interview # Aug 22, 2026 Interview of Sarthak Dhole (winner of Bronze Medal at International Philosophy Olympiad 2026) by Rupesh Singh on preparing for the philosophy competitions and the importance of philosophy in school education. Sarthak Kamalkishor Dhole is a high school senior at the Jayshree Periwal International School in Jaipur. He has ranked 1st nationally and been on Team India at the International Philosophy Olympiad (IPO) for 3 consecutive years, winning an honourable mention as the youngest awardee (Helsinki, 2024) and a bronze as India’s first medal since 2019 (Warsaw, 2026). The IPO, now in its 34th year, is supported by UNESCO and draws students from 57 countries. He has also won 2 honorary mentions for India at the Baltic Sea Philosophy Essay Event (BSPEE). More about him can be found at his website www.sarthakdhole.com . Rupesh Singh is a senior doctoral scholar in Philosophy in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Bhopal. His research is situated in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, with a focus on the measurement problem, theory identity, and the interpretation of quantum theory. Rupesh : Hello, Sarthak. Thank you once again for agreeing to this interview. To begin, could you share a brief account of your background, including where you are from, your academic journey so far, and the interests that currently engage you most? Sarthak : Hello, Rupesh – thank you for having me; always happy to talk philosophy! I come from the town of Akola in Maharashtra. I studied there till 8th grade at a small CBSE school, then moved to a somewhat larger one in Nagpur for 9th and 10th grade, taking several online courses and participating in competitions to keep up with my interests in science and math. Those competitions are how I ended up on a scholarship for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme at Jayshree Periwal International School (JPIS) in Jaipur, where I am now finishing the last year of my high school. My interests are varied, but they tend to cluster around the disciplines of physics and philosophy. I love to think about things in action and to follow through with abstract reasoning. The disciplines of economics, ethology, synthetic biology, and anthropology, as well as linguistics and robotics, have given me great company. I find the concept of complex systems – in a manner that somewhat represents the Deleuzian concept of the Rhizome – quite fascinating. Employing learnings from one sphere of academia to another and discovering key insights is a very appealing prospect for me, which makes me a big fan of interdisciplinarity. Right now, my thinking is mostly going into Prof. Weatherall’s “ puzzleball model ” for scientific explanations as I undertake an individual exploration of the discipline under his mentorship, into discovering “new” post-punk music from the 80s, and into my Extended Essay in physics at school. It's really fascinating to hear about the wide range of experiences you've had and your interdisciplinary interests. I, too, am interested in the interaction between Physics and Philosophy. I was wondering: how did you first come across philosophy, especially since it isn't usually part of formal school curricula? Could you also talk a little about your engagement with it? Glad we share the interest, and I’m glad Varun sir put us in touch. I must say philosophy of science enthusiasts are few and far between, though over three years, I’ve collected enough of them to run a small reading group on Feyerabend’s Against Method . Coming to my introduction to the subject, I have always had a general fascination with the questions of bioethics right from the get-go. And when I heard of the Indian nationals for the International Philosophy Olympiad (IPO) 2024, I signed up, knowing very little about what I was getting myself into. Looking back, I think that openness to take on the challenges these thinkers were going to throw at me was quite central to my success at the competition. I started off by reading What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel, Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, and Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn, and some combination of these 3 books is what I recommend for most trying to get into the subject. Although having read it much later, I have also found that the novel Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder could be just as good, if not better, as an introduction to the subject, as it takes you on a journey through time with all the great thinkers. I’ve been made aware that there exists a graphic novel version of the same, so middle school children may make use of that. Philosophy for Children by Prof. Sundar Sarukkai is also a book I will suggest to the younger enthusiasts. He’s a great author who conveys complex thoughts simply, and someone whom I’ve had the pleasure of talking to over email. Once I had read these introductory books and a selection of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles, and had practised the basics of formal logic and philosophical writing, I appeared for the selections. After qualifying for the training camp, I was inspired to read and write a lot more, especially within epistemology and ethics – disciplines concerning "what is?" and “what should be?" and their connections to each other, especially through intersections such as virtue epistemology. I also read up on topics ranging from philosophy of language and semiotics to philosophy of law and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and started to notice an increasing number of fields that all related back to philosophy. I also credit philosophy with introducing me to social theorists like Mark Fisher, sociologists like Herbert Spencer, legal thinkers like H. L. A. Hart, literary figures like Voltaire, and even AI alignment and scientific pluralism, all of which have influenced me incredibly. To be able to have engaging conversations about any of these fields, I sought to build a network of like-minded peers. I wanted to do it online because even Nagpur felt like a small city. Together with friends from the Olympiad, I founded Philosium to do just that. It started as a selfish attempt to meet like-minded people but has since transformed into a movement promoting access to quality philosophy education in 60+ countries. Over the last 2 years, I have also been working with the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) and the American Philosophical Association (APA) – the U.S. analogue of IPN – to help frame what philosophy education looks like at a pre-university level. Having run several symposia (in Kleszczów, Budapest, Makarska, etc.), roundtables, lectures, and a podcast and journal, alongside crafting the curriculum for our chapters, I have been fortunate to meet interesting people, collaborate on projects, and have conversations around my topics of passion. After getting feedback from the symposium at the technical school, I noticed the need to expose hardcore STEM students to philosophy as a gateway to discover interdisciplinary problems they can contribute to solving. With that end in mind, I’ve been working, for some time now, under Dr. Debi Talukdar (PLATO & University of Washington) on designing a curriculum (code-named ‘ The Snickers Bar Model ’) to teach philosophy and science not as disparate fields but as intertwined aspects: philosophy to better conduct and understand science, to see interdisciplinary connections and use these analogies to solve problems, and to identify and deal with the ethical aspects. We hope to pilot the curriculum this fall at experimental pedagogy schools in Pune and the Bay Area. It's really fascinating to hear about the evolution of your engagement with philosophy, Philosium, and your pedagogy research. Your effort to build a network around philosophical learning is a remarkable initiative in itself. Building on this, for readers who may not be familiar with it, could you explain what the International Philosophy Olympiad (IPO) is, how the Indian national selection process works, and what the overall structure of the Olympiad looks like? Until the IPO, I had never before experienced such a high density of intellectually stimulating conversations over a period of 4 days. I want you to imagine how it must've felt to first discover the vocabulary through which I was able to think more deeply about all the things I had thought of as a kid – Is my red the same as yours? How do I know everyone else is just as sensitive to pain as me? – and then, meet a cohort of more than 100 people from 50+ countries who have diverse ideas and arguments about the same questions. It is an extremely grounding yet motivating experience. The Olympiad has been running for 34 years now and is supported by UNESCO and FISP , the highest non-governmental body in philosophy internationally. It brings together competitors from around the world in a philosophical essay writing competition, where one must write a structured essay in four hours on one of the four prompts provided, without access to any materials or sources other than a bilingual dictionary. The Olympiad is usually hosted at a large public university in the capital of the host country, and the essays are to be typed on a computer, with rough sheets provided for effective outlining. Each country selects and sends its two best students for the Olympiad through a national selection process. India has been participating in the Olympiad since 2008. In Warsaw (2026) , I ranked 10th for my essay, which employed tools from the philosophy of language to critically analyse an Aristotelian quote on determinism and the ethics of action. I discussed theories from ethology and economics about actions, and, accounting for cases of moral luck, I proposed an alternate ethical system which also had an epistemic component. As you can tell, it helps to be able to make these cross-disciplinary connections in advancing your case within that time constraint. The national selections also follow the same structure as the IPO, but the essay contest is 2 hours instead. The national selections also involve a short-answer portion, which is to be used as a tie-breaker from this year onwards, in keeping with the spirit to value philosophical argumentation and writing more than sheer knowledge. The national selections are planned with the idea that one can gain the necessary knowledge of the discipline later, and what must be tested is their command of argumentation, structure, and logic. Much of how I write these essays, I picked up at the national training camp, from Meera ma'am and from the seniors who had been through it before me. [ Editor’s note: Students who are interested in participating the subsequent national-level Philosophy Olympiad examinations, please reach out to Dr Meera Baindur ( meera.teaches@gmail.com ) and Sarthak ( dholesarthak11@gmail.com ). ] At the International Olympiad, the contest is just a small part of the event, as there are workshops, discussions, gala dinners and, best of all, excursions planned. I hiked for the first time in my life near Suomenlinna at IPO Helsinki and have cultivated a love for hiking, which led me to hike 2,557 metres high at the Big Almaty Lake after the International Zhautykov Olympiad this January, and later again in Stoos and Niederurnen at the International Young Physicists’ Tournament just last month, which I consider personal achievements like no other. That's incredible to hear. I'd love to understand more about the preparation behind it. What did your preparation for the national selections and the IPO look like? What kind of guidance or support did you seek along the way? Additionally, could you speak a bit about the nature of the selection process itself, and who is considered a strong candidate? I understand that I might seem to be downplaying my preparation for the nationals, but I am being honest when I say that I came in having read fairly little formal philosophy outside of reading the 3 introductory texts and engaging a little more in depth with topics that interested me as I worked through those texts. Back then, I had limited support and just read about those themes that interested me online or occasionally emailed a professor. But now, if I wanted to learn about a specific subfield, I would start by discussing, or rather, philosophising with friends to get insights and then use my responses to their arguments as the initial action potential to read further. To be a strong candidate at the nationals, I'd say the key thing is to be open. You might have prepared a specific line of argumentation that you tend to follow and stick to (e.g., epistemology-ethics-implications in language/science); however, when you see the prompts, it's best if you forget these pre-prepared notions and start from scratch with just the initial reaction that each of the 4 prompts brings about in you. It's best to write on the prompt to which you have the strongest reaction, and there's absolutely no need to feel pressure to disagree with the quote and find fallacies where there are none to appear to be the 'stronger' thinker. You may just as well agree with the quote, analyzing and perhaps improving on its framing, clarifying its definitions/scope (some quotes may overgeneralize a principle and you can bring them back to size!), and bringing in original insights from other schools of thought by utilizing the tools I talked about earlier, and pinning your insights against the idea in the quote to show which framing is the strongest. This variety in approaches to the prompt is something that is best developed by working through a lot of prompts, and 'through' is definitely a key word because you should ideally take the quote to be a guide that leads you on this journey – not only of analysing arguments but also your own values. All in all: Be open to all the quotes. Note your initial reaction to each quote and write it down as a single sentence. Pick the one you feel the strongest about. Use it as a seed for your thesis. Plan which domain(s) you wish to address the prompt from, which tools you wish to use, which arguments you want to make, and which implications seem the most interesting. It will be helpful to make an argument tree based on the prompt and to spot any hidden assumptions it makes so that you can attack/support them with your arguments. Having a rough outline will help you score points on coherence. Consider counter-arguments. Make it a fair fight! Don’t strawman the opposition. A general method to form good counter-arguments is as follows: a. Frame the best argument you can to advance your case. b. Write down each step in that argument’s reasoning. c. Find the weakest link amongst those steps. d. Make a counterargument that attacks this link. e. Respond and defend your thesis against this counter. Bring in novel analogies/implications in other fields or contemporary lived experience: addiction, technocracy, social media as echochambers, demagogues, etc. Provide thought experiments in the beginning to set the stage for the specific aspects of the prompt you wish to analyse. Do effective signposting throughout. Make it clear what you are arguing for, what your burdens of proof are, what tools you are using, etc., early in the essay. Re-read your essay at the end as if you are reading it for the first time to make sure there are no logical jumps, and that ideas are well illustrated and well prioritised. You should note that the criteria of evaluation for essays at the Olympiad, as well as the nationals, are: relevance to the topic, philosophical understanding of the topic, persuasive power of argumentation, coherence, and originality. These are weighted roughly equally except for “relevance to the topic,” which is more important because the lack of it will hurt the other scores as well. It may be important to note that neither the Olympiad nor the national selections have a defined syllabus. However, it may still be helpful to refer to the IB/A-levels Philosophy textbook to get a general overview of the content that might be helpful to know. You would, however, also be in an advantageous position if you are well versed in one or more broader domains – epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics – and can use them and thinkers from them to weigh in on the essay prompts in front of you. I also find it a good strategy to stress more on learning to spot fallacies and use the tools from these domains. Once you have broken down the argument(s) that the prompt posits, you might find it useful to check it for any fallacies and to then subject it to certain tools such as de dicto/de re (that which is said/that which is real) in cases of a linguistic analysis, Hegelian dialectic or Marxist class critique in political analysis, and Nietzschean genealogy for ethics. Of course, you can apply the tools outside the domains they originated in, and their versatility is what makes them good to have in your belt so that you can philosophically analyse arguments whose content is new to you. It also helps to know some formal logic for this end. A good resource for this would be the book The Philosopher’s Toolkit by Julian Baggini. I’ve also compiled some additional resources and past prompts here . Building on that, since philosophy can still feel relatively inaccessible in India, especially for school students, what role do you think the academic philosophy community here can play in better supporting young people interested in philosophy and opportunities like the IPO? More specifically, what kinds of mentorship, resources, or support do you feel could make the biggest difference? I agree with you greatly that philosophy, especially at a high school level, feels inaccessible in India; and even outside of the academic system, if one tries bookstores, the philosophy sections at most establishments are hardly ever different from a range of self-help, devotional, and psychological books – great reads in their own right, but not really what scratches the itch for argumentative philosophy. This is the precise reason why I co-founded Philosium with 2 friends from the IPO 2024. At our recent conference in Kleszczów, I was pleasantly surprised to see ~450 people – about 10% of the town’s population – show up, as many even came from nearby villages! For our Budapest event, we hosted several roundtables and panels, but the highlight definitely was Prof. John D. Norton’s lecture. Having the chance to listen to a philosopher I had only read about, and actually connecting with them, felt unreal to me. Outside India, I've started and promoted Philosium ventures by partnering with the university philosophy clubs at places like KU Leuven, ELTE University, etc. This is why I believe promoting philosophy clubs at academic institutions, and perhaps giving them a target of outreach for younger students, could be the way to go. Like Philosium, the IPN too can do a lot to promote philosophy amongst Indian students. There are philosophers across the country who would happily give a school an hour of their time to talk passionately about the problems they have spent years thinking about. Connecting these thinkers with local literature societies, high school clubs, and online reading groups would go a long way. I also find that several universities abroad, such as the University of Toronto, organize competitions such as the Aristotle Philosophy Essay Contest , bringing together a lot of high school philosophy enthusiasts. I believe Indian universities can adopt a similar approach to the matter – after all, a lot of science and entrepreneurship competitions run by the IITs exist for high schoolers; why not for philosophy? I also like the PLATO program Philosopher-in-Residence and, although I find it a bit hard to implement, I’m sure that given the enthusiastic academic philosophy community in India, doing symposia like the ones Philosium regularly organizes shouldn't be too difficult. Some techniques we’ve adopted to make these symposia appealing to young students are providing rebates for public transport costs, organizing mini competitions like scavenger hunts and meme contests (as I run a semi-popular philosophy memes page!), and giving journal submitters a chance to give a talk at the symposium. This has helped us gain quite a lot of traction, especially because we partner with local institutions in those regions. Finally, I would like to see the academic philosophy institutions in my country orchestrate some bootcamps before the IPO nationals such that the training isn’t limited only to the two who qualify to represent the country, and the others can still get exposure to this vastly interesting field. After this introduction, ideally, they should be recommended several paths to guide them along as they go deeper into the discipline – Philosium chapters around the world can help in this matter! If anyone reading this wants to help run one, register interest on www.Philosium.com , and we will share with you our curriculum, access to our network, and more! I also think having philosophy clubs and outreach programs across schools and institutions could be a meaningful way to promote greater engagement with the subject. The IPN could be a great platform for facilitating such connections. On a related note, your own journey reflects how philosophy can extend beyond disciplinary boundaries. As a final question, I'd be curious to hear more about this broader influence: how has philosophy shaped the way you approach or engage with other academic fields? Additionally, how have experiences such as participating in the International Philosophy Olympiad and related events influenced you, both intellectually and personally? I have been lucky to have witnessed many ways of teaching – from my CBSE school in Akola to the IB at JPIS and research fellowships like Non-Trivial to Olympiad training camps. And it was my introduction to philosophy, and especially that of education through thinkers like Paulo Freire and Kurt Hahn, that has made me interested in how I’ve been able to learn things in the academic fields that I, for the most part, discovered independent of the traditional school. I was thus inspired to work with Dr. Debi Talukdar on the curriculum I mentioned earlier – to expose more students to ideas and fields that are unknown to them. It was also because of my fascination with the works of philosophers, especially those working in environmental ethics – including our Olympiad delegation leader Dr. Meera Baindur herself – that I undertook a project to survey folklore relating to conservation in forest communities, in an attempt to not just study but preserve the folkethics that silently conserves our ecosystems. I got to do fieldwork onsite, practice the method of probing in semi-structured interviews, and learn to analyze qualitative data alongside getting to hear a plethora of interesting stories. I believe philosophy, and reflecting on the nature of learning itself, has enabled me to see these projects as ways of getting exposure to new disciplines and learning new skills, instead of merely reading or competing in competitions! My philosophy experience has certainly helped me beyond these projects as well. At iGEM , the world’s largest synthetic biology research competition, one of the parts I enjoyed most was ideating ways to minimize the biosafety risk for our innovation. Philosophy has also helped me see connections between fields like economics and ethology, or poker and information theory, and exposed me to the field of complex systems at large, resulting in several hours of intellectually stimulating conversation and perhaps getting ever so slightly better at making sense of how all the different academic fields fit in well with each other. The Olympiad circles have been instrumental in getting me many opportunities which would otherwise be out of the reach of a young boy from Akola. I was chosen to lead LingHacks – a computational linguistics hackathon – because an IPO alumnus put in a good word. This is probably what led to my deeper interest in semiotics, which formed the basis for my IPO 2025 essay. I was also chosen for scholarships for the IB, at least in my understanding, because of my engagements in these circles. I am also beyond grateful to these communities for helping sustain the projects I started, such as Philosium and BetterTGT . Other than these learning aspects and opportunities, the Olympiad communities have been the source of some of the most memorable experiences of my life. I feel that when I am old, I will still periodically look back on the film pictures from a dozen of these events and be able to see how each of those amazing people, beautiful conversations, fierce intellectual debates, gruelling hikes, tiring physics fights , exciting scavenger hunts, funny memes, and laid-back karaoke sessions shaped me into the person I will be then. I will probably also thank these communities in my PhD thesis in the future, just like my mentor Dr. Abhishek Dedhe (IPO 2014-15) did. As we come to the end of the interview, this feels like the right moment to recognize the thinkers and mentors behind India's medal at the IPO this year. I’d especially like to thank Dr. Meera Baindur and Dr. Mani Sachdev, for leading the nationals and for all the reading recommendations; Dr. Souhardya De, Dr. Abhishek Dedhe, Dimitrije Golubović, and Arth Gupta, for their guidance on academic writing and introducing me to research areas I never knew existed; and Ayesha Malik, Neil Tripathi, and Gauri Gupta – my teammates from the last 3 years – for being a constant source of inspiration and fresh ideas. I’d also like to express my gratitude to UNESCO, FISP, the executive and organizing committees of the 32nd-34th IPOs, and the hundreds of volunteers whose efforts culminated in the organization of this wonderful event. I hope to return and contribute to the Olympiad community. Thank you to the IPN for the opportunity to reflect on these moments and for its work in promoting philosophy in India.

Indian Philosophy Network (IPN) is a platform for academic philosophers in India. Indian Philosophy Network (IPN) is a network for professional philosophers in India, both within and outside academia. Currently, IPN comprises more than six hundred members from various avenues -- M.Phil/Ph.D students and faculty from various institutes, college teachers, and philosophy professionals working in non-academic spaces. Join IPN The current moderators of IPN are Siddharth S (Assistant Professor, Sai University) and Varun S Bhatta (Assistant Professor, IISER Bhopal) Home: Welcome IPN aims to build an equitable eco-system for philosophers in India to provide crucial peer support for research, teaching and other professional activities. The network enables better awareness of scholars working in specific areas, thereby facilitating interactions and collaborations. With members from institutes across India, IPN serves as a common platform to share information and resources pertaining to philosophy. Home: About