KATZAV AND THE INDIANS [Guest Post by Mohan Matthen]

[This is an invited guest post by Mohan Matthen, who went from Delhi to Stanford University for his doctoral studies; he is currently Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Perception at the University of Toronto.*--ES]

Recently, Joel Katzav has been writing about the inclusion of Indian philosophers in what he takes to be the top three journals in Anglo-American philosophy [recall here, here, and here--ES]. Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, “modern Indian philosophy” stopped being published in their pages. Why?

I grew up in India, and was educated at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi University. Having taken a degree in Physics in 1968, I switched to Philosophy. I can’t say I know a great deal about the academic zeitgeist in India in those days; my knowledge didn’t spread beyond Delhi University, and students rarely know very much about their teachers anyway. And of course memory is unreliable. Still, I know a little bit about academic life in India around 1970, when I got my MA.

There are two stories here.

The first has to do with the buoyancy felt in academic philosophy in the UK, North America, Australia, and Scandinavia. There are, as everybody knows, two threads of this narrative: there was ordinary language philosophy, which was influenced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. (I remember Keith Thomas telling me the feeling of the new in Oxford around 1960—“finally something new in philosophy!) And there was analytic philosophy, descended from Russell and the Vienna Circle, which by 1950 had been reincarnated at Harvard, UCLA, and other prominent schools in the US. Both of these movements believed that they were changing everything. The “top three” journals were as much caught up in this fervour as any other organization.

The second, more depressing, story has to do with Indian academic life. Mid-century India suffered, first of all, from the colonial malaise of timidity and deep insecurity. (I remember feeling the same about Canada when I first arrived in 1976.) The English had made us feel that we couldn’t, and for the most part we didn’t. Secondly, this was a period during which Indians were not allowed to buy foreign currency and for this reason they could not travel abroad. This had a tremendously isolating effect on every part of society, and very acutely felt in academia. Thirdly, Universities were not research institutions. Research was carried out at dedicated establishments such as the Indian Institute of Science, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, and Indian Statistical Institute (established as late as 1959). These establishments were devoted to scientific research; there was no equivalent for the humanities. Finally, the libraries were not adequate for research. In those days, we relied on print, of course, and Delhi University might have subscribed to a dozen philosophy journals. St. Stephen’s subscribed to four, as I recall.

Katzav writes: “Modern Indian philosophers once had a substantial presence in two of the most prominent English-language philosophy journals of the 20^th century,” and laments its disappearance. He attributes this development to a decline of pluralism in these top journals, and a sinister “use of marginalization as a way of gaining advantage over other approaches to philosophy.” This presumptive narrative has, to me anyway, very little plausibility.

If you glance at my two sketches above, I think it will be evident that there is room for another kind of story. Indians didn’t generally feel intellectually equal to white people, and they didn’t have the resources to compete. Some isolated figures had the confidence and courage to produce work that could be internationally published. But they and their successors did not have the connections to the mid-century ferment to enable them to continue to sneak into these venues. They didn’t know anybody; they didn’t receive the journals; they had no way of learning logic or the other tools of the new philosophy. They didn’t even have other Indians to talk to; for the most part, they were alone. People like Daya Krishnan, P. T. Raju, and Margaret Chaterjee (an Englishwoman who married an Indian civil servant and became Head of Department in Delhi) sat in positions of authority, but no collegiality. Could these individuals make a sustained contribution to research as it was being conducted in Oxbridge and London, Cambridge MA and California? How?

The “top three” journals for their part were publishing what they took to be contributions to the advancing edge of philosophical research. Very few Indians working in India contributed. Tell me where the mystery lies.

I want to leave it there. I am not a scholar of these developments, and I don’t want to sketch a narrative I cannot rigorously support. But let me say this. My suggestions would be refuted by a “substantial presence” of Indian philosophers in the early part of the 20^th century, but I see little evidence of this. Katzav cites 18 papers published in Mind and Philosophical Review between 1894 and 1947. But there was nothing like sustained research output from a connected network of scholars. At no time in the 20^th century was there a professional philosophical research community in India.

I had two teachers, Mrinal Miri (PhD, Cambridge, 1970) and Ramachandran Gandhi (DPhil, Oxford, 1968), who tried to change this. These men brimmed with a new Indian confidence. There were others. I believe that the efforts of these and other pioneers have borne some fruit in recent years. But if you ask: Why did the work of mid-century Indians not find its way into the “top three” journals? . . . Well if you were there, you wouldn’t find it surprising.

 

 

[*Full disclosure: Mohan and I used to blog at NewAPPS.]

Comments

[George Gale]

For various reasons, I ended up talking quite intimately with Chandra about his first years in the UK doing advanced work. He told me that there was exactly one main-line scholar who treated him as an equal: Milne.Indeed, their correspondence shows the strong mentorship Milne provided. After finally succeeding--even against the opposition of Eddington--he decided that it was time to leave that unhealthy environment and go the the US, which he did. He was still quite bitter about how he was treated.
So even in the case of an observably brilliant scientist, prejudice against him qua Indian, and qua colonial, was still rampant in the 30s. Yet another barrier.

[Chris Stephens]

Thanks for this Mohan. Maybe I should post this below Katzav's post, but I was struck by this: Katzav remarks, about philosophy by Indian philosophers in JPhil "It did not, however, engage with the millennia old tradition of philosophy that had its origins on the Indian Subcontinent."

Currently, one difference between a journal like Journal of Philosophy and Phil Review is that JPhil explicitly says it won't consider articles that are primarily historical. Phil Review, of course, does (and has).

Maybe someone can answer a question I'm curious about: was there a certain point at which JPhil decided not to publish any work that was primarily history of philosophy? Or has it always been that way? (and was it that way in the 50s and 60s?) If so, that seems like a relevant fact for Katzav's JPhil narrative.

Of course, a further question could be asked about the extent to which ordinary language philosophy and more formal analytic philosophy at that time was still rooted in a certain historical tradition.

Still: there are at least two separate questions here, one about Indian philosophers publishing in these journals, and a separate one about the Indian historical tradition, and its relevance and connection to people working elsewhere in the World.

[Joel Katzav]

The short answer to Chris is that JoP did publish full-length papers in the history of philosophy in the 1960s, though it did not publish many such papers. Also, when modern Indian philosophers engaged with the history of philosophy it was often not primarily historically, e.g., they might do so in order to bring out a neglected point in logic.

[plus.google.com/114527471475176681943]

Hi Chris, JPhil does occasionally publish historical articles, but one can discern some non-historical interest in them. M. R. Ayers' famous article on Locke vs Aristotle on natural kinds was published there, for instance, and a number of papers by Robert Adams, some on unlikely topics like divine necessity. There is plenty in the Indian philosophical tradition that could be discussed in the context of similar contributions to logic and metaphysics. And I wish more of it did find its way into non-historical discussions.

Of course, as you realize, my point is that there were very few people in India in the mid-twentieth century who had the network or the resources to produce anything of Adams-like relevance to contemporary questions.

[Joel Katzav]

Thanks for your post Mohan. I will just briefly register my disagreement. I am aware of much of what you say, but don’t think it explains the changes I’ve been discussing, including the disappearance of modern Indian philosophy from JoP in the late 1950s; it is the kind of explanation that might seem good in the absence of familiarity with the details. The reasons for my disagreement are partly the continued publication of work by some of the authors I discuss in Western journals in the 1960s, partly the fact that venues they continue to publish in match the venues other ‘philosophical refugees’ turned to, partly the precise timing of the changes in JoP, partly that I don’t (as a result of reading their work) share your view of the limitations of some of the relevant authors and for other reasons. More constructively, you raise a number of other important issues that are worth further discussion. One such issue is how the sense of inferiority you refer to affected what second-generation academic Indian philosophers were writing. Another issue is the institutional setup of modern Indian philosophy. An interesting, relevant fact is that the Philosophical Quarterly (the original Philosophical Quarterly, that is) ceased publishing work in 1966 (after 41 years in print). Perhaps I will blog about these topics.

[plus.google.com/114527471475176681943]

One more observation. My daughter, who has a Masters in Economics, was surprised by the very existence of foreign exchange controls when she read this post. This was one reason why ordinary Indians were isolated back in the fifties and sixties. My mother, a worldly and sophisticated woman, travelled outside India only once. I left India for the first time when I went to graduate school. Travel was, for economic and also technological reasons, a rare luxury. Foreign goods, including books and journals, were restricted.

In response to Joel's point at 10:49, I don't think that the "second generation" was able to keep up with the developments of the sixties. P. T. Raju's paper, "Actuality," in JPhil 1958, which I read when I was preparing to write this post, illustrates the point. It's an elegantly written piece, and certainly meets the standards of the journal. And, by the way, it cannot be said to lie completely outside the analytic province. But it takes a view of logic and modality that was already twenty years out of date, and completely out of fashion ten years later. Raju had travelled to the US and maintained a correspondence with philosophers of his own age. He would have been taken by surprise by the sudden emergence of modal semantics in the sixties, and he would have had no way of coming to appreciate its importance. (Don't forget that analytic philosophers of that generation treated possible worlds with Quinean disdain.) My teachers were in the same boat. I had to wait until I got to Stanford to hear the words "modal logic."

Mohan

[Joel Katzav]

First, a correction about P. T. Raju; he was a first-generation modern Indian philosopher (he was born in 1904 and was publishing in the 1930s). And, yes, his paper makes substantial concessions to Western, and analytic, philosophy. Raju knew how to adapt his writing to his readers and found value in diverse philosophical traditions. In addition, Raju is a nice example of an interesting philosopher who was forced to migrate from journal to journal because of the intolerance of analytic philosophers. He continues to publish articles and books well after JoP’s doors are closed to him, and publishes in JoP after PR’s doors are closed to him.

As for the supposed technical challenges of 1960s analytic philosophy, this is a bit of a (for analytic philosophy) self-serving myth. Yes, there were parts of analytic philosophy that could be quite technical, but we shouldn’t exaggerate how demanding the techniques were – the technical side of analytic philosophy wasn’t like, say, chemistry, engineering or physics, which required years of formal training – or exaggerate the extent to which these techniques were required. JoP was itself hardly a technical journal. The bulk of the work that appears in it in, e.g., 1964, isn’t very demanding. On the contrary, many papers within it demand relatively little: familiarity with a narrow range of authors, familiarity with no more than one approach to philosophy, little or no knowledge of areas outside of philosophy, no knowledge of formal methods, etc. The relatively undemanding nature of much of analytic philosophy did not, of course, harm its popularity in later years.

You also assume a narrative of progress in your story, along with criteria for what matters in philosophy. You claim that Raju and others couldn’t contribute to a certain line of inquiry. But these writers had their own approaches to philosophy and their own views about what mattered in philosophy. Moreover, part of what the takeovers in Mind, PR and JoP (and other journals!) did is feed a certain narrative of progress. They legitimated, without real argument, certain views about how to do philosophy, about what is of value in philosophy and about whether progress has occurred. Alternatives came to seem (to some) old fashioned or pointless as a result of the takeovers and, indeed, were not allowed to develop properly. The narrative of progress is thus partly explained, and partly undermined, by my story; trusting this narrative in order to explain what actually happened seems, to me, to be suspect.

[plus.google.com/114527471475176681943]

I am saying, very simply, that there are ways of dealing with necessity that Raju did not know of. I do indeed think that discovering these ways constituted progress, but let's not argue about this. My more general point is that content matters in philosophy. Philosophy cannot be described as a series of formal or content-disregarding institutional decision points. A narrative that abstracts away from content can't capture what happened. You may be right that analytic philosophy demands knowledge of only certain techniques. But formal technique isn't what's important to the application of modal semantics to necessity; rather, it's understanding (say) how Hintikka comes at that technique differently from Marcus, or Follesdal, or Kripke. That's not mathematics; it's philosophy. I think you are neglecting my first narrative here, that of the buoyancy of analytic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. It is more central here than that of post-colonial exclusion. The kinds of philosopher Raju met on his US tour—I wonder if it was Fulbright sponsored—and later corresponded with were equally excluded from JPhil. (He mentions W. F. Goodwin of the University of Wisconsin. JSTOR doesn't record any publications by Goodwin in the "top three" journals, but perhaps this is not the name under which he published.) Which makes me wonder: why do you think Raju's most natural venue was these three journals. It's as if I tried to publish in Deleuze Studies and complained of post-colonial exclusion when I got rejected.

Mohan

[Joel Katzav]

And I am saying, very simply, that your appeal to the challenge of keeping up with 1960s philosophy is based on a false presupposition and is irrelevant; it was not in general hard to do (I say this without accepting any alleged limitations of Raju or the absence of a philosophical community in India) and, further, part of what needs to be explained is why there was a requirement that people do philosophy in the prescribed way. Content does matter, as I have argued; it was partly an intolerant commitment to a narrow version of critical philosophy that explains what was going on in JoP. The details of the history of modal logic you cite are not important to what went on in JoP at the time. As for the buoyancy of analytic philosophy in the 1950s, it is partly explained by philosophical partisanship of the kind I have been discussing. Finally, Mind, PR and JoP played a central role in shaping mid-century twentieth academic philosophy, so being excluded from these journals would be a legitimate complaint from philosophers at the time even if it is not one that I have voiced in my posts. But perhaps we have said enough on this topic for now. Feel free to conclude.

[Chris Stephens]

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the response.

I don't know that this is relevant to your historical claims, but I found it interesting. Currently, in its memo to authors, JPHIL says "The Journal of Philosophy does not publish papers that are primarily historical or expository, nor does it accept unsolicited book reviews."

I was curious when this started, it seems to be around 1967. I think that's when the first inserted the following under "Note to Contributors" "Since there exist reputable journals specializing in the history of philosophy and of ideas, the editors, though willing to consider, are not likely to accept articles primarily expository in character."

They then add "The editors continue to be particularly interested in papers that explore the borderline between philosophy and the special disciplines."

Again, this first remark seems like an important difference between PHIL Review and JPHIL, and it also seems connected to the rise of analytic philosophy.

[Joel Katzav]

Thanks for looking this up Chris; I probably should have said more in response to your previous post. Anyway, I think you are correct that it is only in 1967 that the policy regarding history is explicitly put in place, and 1967 is too late to be relevant to the question why there was no engagement with traditional Indian philosophy in 1950s JoP. Further, early to mid-1960s JoP still includes enough primarily expository/historical work for me to hesitate to project what was going on in the late 1960s back in time; the journal can still be thought of as being open to historical/expository work, as long as it is of the right people (A. W Levi’s ‘Wittgenstein as Dialectician’ comes to mind as an example as does, among others, E. W. Van Steenburgh’s ‘Berkeley revisited’). In any case, while there was some modern Indian philosophy published in Mind and PR that was purely/primarily historical (The last of Radhakrishnan’s Mind papers comes to mind here – sorry can’t remember its name), the philosophers in question were not really primarily focused on publishing expository or historical work, and were certainly able to drop any explicit reference to Indian philosophy when needed or to engage with it in a way that was not primarily of historical interest. So while there may be something to your proposal, it is not something I would feel particularly confident in endorsing. I’m inclined to emphasize more that engagement with non-Western philosophy was excluded by JoP than that it was the history of philosophy/purely expository work which was the issue.

[Bharath Vallabha]

Matthen seems to be ignoring what struck me as Katzav's most salient point: that there were more publications by Indian authors before 1950 in the "top three" journals because the idealist, pragmatist and process enabled a natural connection in philosophical content to themes and ideas being pursued by many Indian philosophers even in colonial times. Once brought to light as Katzav does, this strikes me as important and true.

The myth that Katsav is questioning, which is central to analytic philosophy, is that only it is cosmopolitan and inclusive, whereas the idealist philosophers Russell and Moore were reacting against, and the idealist and process philosophy Quine and Sellers were reacting against, were unscientific and so also uncosmopolitan and uninclusive. Analytic phil has obviously enabled a great deal of inclusion, as it is global. But acknowledging this doesn't require the myth that pre-analytic philosophies in Europe and America were incapable of engaging or fostering cross cultural philosophy. The data Katsav points out brings this out to some extent.

This all is a matter of content of philosophy, of how now to foster greater engagement of philosophical traditions, and not only about self confidence or resources, and lack thereof. In some obvious ways Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Rawls, Lewis enabled greater global interaction philosophically. But equally importantly, in some ways they and the traditions they were a part of also made global interaction harder and discarded earlier histories of such interactions. If current philosophy is to be more inclusive, in content, surely thinking about the latter is of great importance.