Apropos of some of the conversations we’ve been having here lately, there is a discussion between Jay Garfield and Jonardon Ganeri in the latest issue of The Philosophical Quarterly, on the question of modernity and Indian philosophy. The context is Garfield’s review of Ganeri’s newest book, The Lost Age of Reason. A few passages speak directly to our concerns:

Ganeri takes modernity to consist not in a rejection of a classical tradition but ‘in a profound reorientation to it. The ancient texts are now not thought of as authorities to which one must defer, but regarded as the source of insight in the company of which one pursues the quest for truth’ (p. 1). He illustrates the explicit endorsement of such an attitude by at least some Indian philosophers of this period in this passage quoted from Raghunātha:

The demonstration of these matters which I have carefully explained is contrary to the conclusions reached by all the other disciplines. These matters spoken of should not be cast aside without reflection just because they are contrary to accepted opinion; scholars should consider them carefully … (p. 4)

Now there are different ways to develop the idea of modernity. Depending on how one chooses to characterise modernity, one will either see the thought of Indian philosophers in the period Ganeri investigates as of a piece with that of early modern Europe or not. Ganeri is aware of this and asks us to take the relevant intellectual kind to involve simply a commitment to a non-deferential stance with respect to the authority of the classics. We can take this as a stipulative definition for the purposes of this investigation. But to do so not only elides many important questions about the connections between the phenomena often associated with modernity. . . .

If we were to attend not to this period but to philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we do see the very cluster of tropes often associated with European modernity co-present, suggesting that this later period might be more characteristically modern than that to which Ganeri directs our attention, and that the period he addresses is more properly conceived as one of a late scholasticism.