elisa freschi
banner
elisafreschi.bsky.social
elisa freschi
@elisafreschi.bsky.social

Sanskrit (and) philosophy. Permanently in beta phase. Blogging at http://elisafreschi.com and http://indianphilosophyblog.org. Articles at PhilPapers Here to learn & share

Philosophy 47%
History 21%

I also found it interesting that as an answer to a Q by Libresco, Andrews just said that she (Libresco) could commission a piece by her on that topic, her fees are very reasonable. Why do you accept interviews invitations if you don't want to answer for free (or as part of the interview's fees)?
8/

Department of Medicine

Andrews: "I would not expect to see a catastrophic effect from feminization in veterinary medicine. I don’t know, like, why is that hard to see?"
7/

If it’s that stark in law, I’d expect — if your claim is true — some erosion in veterinary medicine, or pharmacy, which is also dominated by women, and where you can track the failures because people die."
6/

There was a passage that was more interesting, though:

Libresco Sargeant to Andrews "It just seems odd that you’re describing this general dynamic that women,you say, would undermine completely the rule of law, that we’ll lose the rule of law in our lifetimes when women become a majority of lawyers

According to Kumārila, an injunction (the śabdabhāvanā) motivates one to bring about the action (the arthabhāvanā), through which one brings about the result. The whole process is started by the injunction but it only works on addressees that independently desire the action's result, e.g. heaven.

There are many elements in the books that are politically suspicious, if this is what you mean.

c) just not talking even if present (e.g. the "Sichaun woman", Shi's wife…)

The protagonists may be troubled, but they never consider talking to their wives about their problems, as if friendship with women were impossible and they were unable to even give advice
3/

Don't tell me that Moby Dick has no female characters and it is still a masterpiece. These books are mainly about a world that is very close to ours, and still women are
a) ~murderers (Ye, Yamasugi…)
b) stereotypes of a pure woman, to be protected etc. (Zhang Yan)
2/

I recently finished "The dark forest" (by Liu Cixin) and I am back to the same problem I had while reading "The three body problem", namely I like the plot & the nerdy parts (wallbreakers' disclosures!), but the women characters are beyond hope and make me suspicious of the author as human being
1/

I would therefore have emphasised that the word "philosophy" is historically determined and it covered different topics in different centuries. No wonder that Chinese, Sanskrit etc. don't have an equivalently ambiguous word, given that they had different intellectual trajectories.
3/3

As for no. 1, I partly disagree with the example of trees, since one might say that unlike in the case of trees, philosophy qua critical thinking requires self-understanding itself (I derive this argument from W. Halbfass).
2/3

Well, in my case you're preaching to the convert! I find point 4 especially convincing (there is no reason to say that theory of syllogism in Dignāga is not philosophy but Sartre is). I also routinely use your dance-vs-ballet example (every population knows dance, even if they may not know ballet)
1

Sure, let's encourage students to use ChatGPT (after having told them that plagiarism is bad for years…)
“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion”
futurism.com/artificial-i...
OpenAI in Danger After Authors Suing It Gain Access to Its Internal Slack Messages
Authors and publishers, who are suing OpenAI, secured access to internal Slack messages and emails discussing the deletion of pirated books.
futurism.com

I could easily find it through your blog, but just in case:
www.historyofphilosophy.net/philosophy-w...
www.historyofphilosophy.net

Is the link not working for all or just for me?

There is a line (a terrible one) at the end of SK's discussion, on Isaac's future. It shows (if I am interpreting SK correctly) how big the leap of faith by Abraham was.
I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide.

And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft.

What does OpenAI offer the world?
“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion”
futurism.com/artificial-i...
OpenAI in Danger After Authors Suing It Gain Access to Its Internal Slack Messages
Authors and publishers, who are suing OpenAI, secured access to internal Slack messages and emails discussing the deletion of pirated books.
futurism.com

No:-) I think there is more ground research needed before that point. At the moment, imho, new books on "Sanskrit philosophy", "Buddhist philosophy", etc. would not be a major improvement over the ones already available.

In the age of AI, it becomes critical to assess the witness' reliability. Who says that A thinks that B? If it is an unknown "reporter" or anyway not an expert, perhaps we should default into mistrust.
Innocuous in itself, this stupid sentence is a reminder that thanks to AI it'll be harder and harder to know what's true, and some of us might get seriously misrepresented.

Good point!
Abhinavagupta: I think (here I am following R. Torella) that most of his innovations were already in his teacher, Utpaladeva.
Nāgārjuna: Very influential for the development of Buddhist thought outside of India, less so in India itself, also not argumentative enough. (my opinion only)

Reposted by Elisa Freschi

This is why this is a problem for democracy. See my full piece on this here www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

YMMV, but I would say:
Prabhākara, Śālikanātha, Maṇḍana
(Uddyotakara), Jayanta, Gaṅgeśa, (Udayana),
(Vasubandhu), Dignāga, Dharmakīrti,
Utpaladeva,
Veṅkaṭanātha,
(Vyāsatīrtha).

He is an a m a z i n g systematic thinker. Surely in everyone's top ten of Sanskrit philosophers, and very close to the top in my own one.

For Kumārila, language is hierarchically organised. A single word (the finite verbal ending) is connected directly to the results, the others are connected with the verbal ending. A sentence has a single goal.
4/

Kumārila comes to this conclusion through the fact that "[she] cooks" can be paraphrased as "[she] does the cooking", where "cooking" corresponds to the verbal root and "does" corresponds to the verbal ending.
3/3
#SanskritPhilosophy #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage

The verbal ending expresses the number (third person singular), the tense (present) and the agentivity (the fact that an action is at stake). The verbal root only names the action at stake.
2/

Acc. to Kumārila, in each finite verb, bhāvanā ('actualisation', 'bringing into being') is the meaning of the verbal ending & it is distinct from the meaning of the verbal root. In other words, a finite verb like "[she] cooks" is in fact made of 2 separate morphemes & their corresponding meanings
1/

Reposted by Elisa Freschi

I doubt any prospective student is likely to read this, but if your PhD proposal looks like it was written by ChatGPT then I will not want to supervise you. If you can‘t write even a research proposal by yourself then you are not ready to carry out research.

On volunteering our work for publishing houses that then feed it to LLMs. Perhaps we should just stop?

elisafreschi.com/2025/11/08/o...
On LLMs, publishing houses and our volunteer work for them
I will not be able to take part in any new project hosted by publishing houses that are ready to send my work to LLMs (I have a few ongoing and will conclude them). Allow me to explain why. I am deepl...
elisafreschi.com