Provocations
Each session takes a single question and one or two readings. The list is built with the group — propose a topic by email.
This term
Fortnightly in term
Thursdays, 6pm
Scheduled
- 01MT · Wk 2
Historicization
Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life" · John Nemec, "Translation and the Study of Indian Religions" - 02MT · Wk 4
Modern philological tools
"Is a Gemini Edition Okay?" — machine assistance and the limits of the editor's hand - 03MT · Wk 6
The fetishisation of the critical edition
Olivelle, "Unfaithful Transmitters" · read against the Gemini question - 04MT · Wk 8
The classics funnel & the future funnel
Who arrives in the field, who is kept, and what the pipeline selects for
On the table
Waiting for a term.
Proposed
- 05Proposed
Why do philologists and philosophers hate each other?
The oldest quarrel in the faculty, taken seriously for once - 06Proposed
Hindutva and the scholarly public
Rajiv Malhotra · Wendy Doniger — reading the controversy rather than restaging it - 07Proposed
Translation
Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" · Patrick Olivelle on translating the Upaniṣads - 08Proposed
Hermeneutics of spiritual experience
The hermeneutic stance toward a living claim; comparative spiritual hermeneutics - 09Proposed
The scholar-practitioner
What the field does with people who are inside the tradition they edit - 10Proposed
Cultural appropriation
Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga · the McMindfulness literature - 11Proposed
What is Indology?
McGetchin on the German invention of the field - 12Proposed
The philological patriarchy
Who has held the editor's pen, and what that has cost the archive
Propose a provocation
Email a proposalA word or a question, one reading, and two lines on what it puts in question. Offering to open the discussion helps.