Photographer: Heather Lo | Source: Unsplash Configurations India has a renewed government with a few new faces, the most unusual of whom is the new minister for external affairs, Subramanyam Jaishankar, a career diplomat who is now in the Cabinet Committee…
Photographer: Aashish R Gautam | Source: Unsplash Buyer beware: this essay has a higher than usual ratio of speculation to explanation. I am playing with two central ideas (illustrated in the flowchart below): What? The modern system — with the state and the…
Photographer: v2osk | Source: Unsplash There’s no greater tyranny in my world than that of experience, by which I mean the ever more sophisticated versions of the claim “seeing is believing.” We are skeptical by nature, demanding evidence and proof and…
Photographer: Markus Spiske | Source: Unsplash In my previous essay, I arrived at an unoriginal idea: that the computer is a mental telescope through which we can view the world. I didn’t say the universe is a computer because that would…
This is the first article on a series about how to do Indian philosophy today. It’s impossible to do philosophy without a sense of history, for philosophy always engages with texts and traditions that came before the current crop of…
Aren’t straight lines boring? I have been zagging about climate change, animal rights and other planetary calamities for several months. It’s getting to be burdensome. Time to zig. Or rather, it’s time to zigback to a topic I continue to…
I love and hate philosophy in equal measure; love it for its sustained engagement with abstract concepts and universal arguments and hate it for its parochialism. How can something be universal and parochial at the same time? I too am…
If you don’t want to read any further, here’s the one sentence summary: The moral is material and the material is moral. Morality is considered to be the domain of religion; an aspect of human nature impervious to empirical reality,…
Introducing Quantemplation I find it fascinating that religion and philosophy arose at about the same time. Except for the last hundred years or so when philosophy became professionalized, the two subjects have gone hand in hand; indeed for much of…
One slice of nonhumanity These thoughts are prompted by a puzzle I have been considering for quite a while. The puzzle can be expressed in several ways, but here’s a brief, stark version: Why has human power gone hand in…
