Global Philosophy at UofT

I ask students on the first class on Sanskrit philosophy how many texts do they think were composed in Sanskrit philosophy if compared to Greek philosophy and they are ridiculously wrong, guessing anything between 30 and 300 texts.
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For instance, I (Elisa Freschi) am routinely asked to answer questions about, e.g., the Zhaungzi, as if my expertise should extent to the whole of "non-Western thought", because it is implicitly assumed to be very limited.
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The result is often implicitly suggesting that there is a single world of "non-Western" thought and that everyone can teach it, because it does not go very deep.
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More in general, many Philosophy departments think that diversifying means adding a single class on anything that is not Euro-American mainstream philosophy (it can be Maori political thought, ubuntu ethics, Confucianism, Sanskrit epistemology…). 1/

Thanks for the honest answer. Do you think you would have an idea of Euro-American philosophy as very diverse and interesting if you had studied, say, Sanskrit philosophy for decades, and had taken a single class on French existentialism and German phenomenology?

Resisting School AI Mania Help Sheet Help Sheet: Resisting AI Mania in Schools K-12 educators are under increasing pressure to use—and have students use—a wide range of AI tools. (The term “AI” is used loosely here, just as it is by man...

I've updated my document that tackles four of the common arguments used to encourage teachers to use AI.

I hope this will be helpful to those educators wanting to push back on AI mania.

Non-polemical Q: What did you read within what you call "non-Western thought"? If the list is extremely short compared to what you know of Euro-American philosophy (eg less than 100 titles), or if it focuses on a special field (eg Confucian ethics) then it's easy to have a less diverse impression

Yes. This! I attended an AI in Education conference as a skeptic who needs to understand implications on my job a few years ago. One of the speakers emphasized that our time is the thing that has value and using AI for something is a sign you don’t value it.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

To be read. #OtherMinds

(e.g. 3 genders*7 case endings*3 numbers= 63 forms, parts of which homonyms). Pāṇini only divides into tiṅanta and subanta, without adjectives. [EF: But then also pronouns would not be a separate class. AK: yes, they are not.]
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Now listening to Artemij Keidan on "genderlessness in a gendered language" (that is, why Pāṇini did not discuss gender). Part of the problem is whether adjectives are a separate class in Sanskrit. Is there a separate pattern for adjectives
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Now Raffaele Torella on Vāmanadatta, explaining about the ekāyanaveda, the shadow-Veda behind the historical Vedas and the weird puzzle that Vāmanadatta, a Vaiṣṇava author, is only cited by Śaiva authors (but by no Pañcarātra treatises).

Just read that prof. Gerhard Oberhammer passed away yesterday. He was 96 and has greatly contributed especially to interreligious theology and to the study of the development of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta.

Now Alessandro Graheli on Kumārila's opponent discussing that there is no distinction between correct and incorrect words. All words are correct insofar as they express a meaning.

Now Marco Ferrante is explaining Bhartṛhari, with some truly new insights about Bh's acceptance of external objects, even though naïve realism does not explain the way language works.
#Philsky #Philosophy #SanskritPhilosophy

14th CBC 2025. Reading Sanskrit Texts Deep Reading as an Analytical Method for Written, Oral, and Performative Texts Date and Venue 22–23 December 2025 Sapienza University of Rome — Italian Institute of Oriental Studies Building: &#822…

Currently here: asiaticacoffeebreak.wordpress.com/14th-cbc-2025/

"cite your sources" is not just an externally-imposed mandate but a personal discipline on thought itself. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself in contact with reality. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself from shadowboxing your own imagination."

Reminder that the deadline for this is next month (actually, I'm going to double-check this is still when it is, but in the meantime let's just go with what's on the website):

Why doing research at all? Why not just stating what our "gut instinct" tells us is the right answer?

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Are such short reviews really a thing (asking also to @tah-shi.com here below)? I have never written any, nor received any (nor has any student of mine ever shown me one such review they would have received). Perhaps only in the STEM?

"We welcome PhDs to a round table table discussion from assistant professors who were recently on the job market"

There is modern Sanskrit literature about everything. There is also a Sanskrit epic poem about Jesus Christ, titled Kristubhāgavatam, published by P.C. Devassia in 1977, which won the main Sanskrit literary prize in 1980 😁

Yet one more reason we cannot allow LLMs to serve as epistemic grounding is that we cannot triangulate among them the way you can among reasonable independent sources. They bullshit in the same way and end up agreeing with one other about things that are completely false.

Professor's pro-tip for anyone with college-age kids: Tell your kids go to class. It's really that simple. If you show up, you'll do okay. You don't have to be smart, you just have to be there. Maybe stay off your phones for 50 minutes. Just listen. You'll absorb something. I have data to prove it.

If you have to train students to recognize when a *university provided* resource is lying to them, maybe the university should not provide that resource.

Screenshot of Youtube livestream page with a photo of Dan McQuillan and the talk title, 'Resisting AI', and timing, 12 EST / 5 GMT,

"Our conversation with Dan McQuillan will examine the political stakes of AI, asking what can and should be done". Livestreamed Friday 12 EST/5 GMT on YouTube with audience Q&A. www.youtube.com/live/wi0u3Hs...

—Graduate students workshop on Kumārila (3--4 Dec 2025)
—Probably @rezahadisi.bsky.social can list equivalent workshops on philosophy in the Islamic world
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—Reading workshop on Periyavāccaṉ Piḷḷai (2--3 days per month each month between September and December)
—Reading workshop on Sudarśana Sūri (28--29 Nov 2025)
—Reading workshop on Maṇḍana Miśra (4--7 and 12 Dec 2025)
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