At Yale-NUS College in Singapore, my students are international—roughly sixty percent are Singaporean, and forty percent come from all around the world, hailing from every continent save Antarctica. In their first year, we introduce them to Chinese and Indian philosophers along with ancient Greek and Roman thinkers and some of the commonly-taught European thinkers, through the two-semester course, “Philosophy and Political Thought.” That means that, despite the heterogeneity of the student population, they are forming a shared intellectual culture. And it also means that, by the time they wind up in my introductory Classical Indian Philosophy course, they’ve already read the entire Bhagavad Gītā along with sections of the Milindapañha, the Nyāyasūtra, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, and the Tarkasaṃgraha. With this background, my students are already hip to the idea that there are many ways to do philosophy around the world, including poetry, epic narratives, and dialogue.
This theme—that philosophy can be done with a range of genres—is one which I emphasize in Classical Indian Philosophy. The goal of the course is to give students an introduction to the so-called “classical” period of thought in the Indian subcontinent (ranging over the geographical territory of modern-day India as well as modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan). While the period begins, by some historiographers, roughly 200 CE, I begin students with seminal texts preceding that era (Upaniṣads and the Mahābhārata). We work our way up to a 12th century text, the Khaṇdanakhaṇdakhādya of Śrīharṣa.
Throughout the course, we think about the different methods for advancing arguments by genre. How does an argument move forward in a dialogue? In poetry? In commentary? In prose? And we focus on specific problems that arise in these contexts: metaphysical, epistemological, linguistic, and ethical.
Covering one-thousand-plus years of history at an introductory level is a not easy. On top of that, this semester I am teaching the course remotely from the United States to students in Singapore, across a 13-hour time difference through Zoom. To alleviate some of the “Zoom fatigue” students feel, I have assigned optional podcasts from the History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps). Just about every week, students can listen to a podcast to get additional background information. Also, my lectures for the class are limited to 15 minutes maximum, and I upload them in audio-only form so students can just listen and not have to watch a screen.
As it’s an introductory course, students focus on reading primary source material, paired with select introductory secondary sources. I suggest optional secondary material for students wishing to dig a little deeper, but the course does not focus on the skills of how to integrate secondary materials with primary. Instead, each week students are given a set of questions they can answer in a page: an interpretive question, an evaluative question, and an application question. They must do three (one of each) and they can pick the weeks they want to do. This may also help with student pressures, as they can arrange their schedules—they can do up to six papers and drop the lowest, if they are feeling adventurous. We also use Perusall, an annotation platform I’ve found extremely useful for online community-building.
At the end of the course, students hopefully will be prepared to pursue narrower interests in Indian philosophy, or simply to take other electives with an appreciation of the different methods one can employ doing philosophy.
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Malcolm Keating
Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Indian philosophy of language and epistemology in Sanskrit. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).
