Seattle Worldcon 2025: Robots, Rights, and More!

 

Summer is almost over for me (school starts next week), but I have one more trip planned: I'm thrilled to be going to Seattle tomorrow to attend the 2025 Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention)! Worldcon will take place at the Seattle Convention Center Aug. 13-17, 2025.

I will be on one panel Wednesday evening and giving one talk on Saturday afternoon, both in part through my role as President of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. Both are also in honor of my late friend and colleague Anand Vaidya, especially his work on artificial intelligence and moral standing. I'm hoping to someday teach a course on AI in science fiction and philosophy, so Worldcon will be a good step into that process.

My friend and cofounder of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, science fiction author Manjula Menon, will be on the first panel with me. She's also on a whole bunch of other panels, including one on "Artificial Honesty," South Asian speculative fiction, and more! See the full schedule for details.

More specific information on my panels can be found below. Maybe I will see you in Seattle!

Review of Reviews, May 2025: Andor, Sinners, and Books by Okorafor, Maas, King, Harvey, Hannah-Jones, Pargin, and Stanley

 

I have gotten behind on posting book reviews lately (I did get one last month), so I thought I should get around to that now that the spring semester is over and grades are entered.

And today just happens to be May the 4th, aka Star Wars Day (as observed recently based on the pun on the date), so I figured I would add a little bit about the latest season of the Star Wars show, Andor. Also, like many other people, I saw and had a lot of thoughts about Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

Books reviewed here: She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, The Waste Lands by Stephen King, The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannh-Jones, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, John Dies at The End by Jason Pargin, and How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.

There is also a super secret Star Wars day review hidden in here...

Let the reviews commence!

Academic Cats and Dogs: Does Academia Need to Get Weirder to Survive?

I’ve never been entirely comfortable in academia. Don’t get me wrong. I love reading and writing. I enjoy teaching and interacting with students. I’m fond of conversation about subjects most people don’t understand or care to understand. 

But in recent years—especially with the convergence of the pandemic, my tenure, and feeling middle age—I find myself caring less and less about academia as an abstract system of disciplines. I care about my friends, my colleagues, and my students. I care about philosophy as a global human endeavor. But I don’t care about being a Very Serious Academic. I’m not sure how much I ever really did. 

Chattacon 2024!

 

I'm excited to be attending Chattacon once again this year! Chattacon 49 will take place this weekend (Jan. 12-14, 2024) at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee!

New Article: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Cross-posted from the Indian Philosophy Blog)

Depiction of a debate between Maṇḍana Miśra and Śaṅkara with judge Ubhaya Bhāratī

 

I haven't cross-posted anything from the Indian Philosophy Blog in a long time, so here you go! This is about a great article from my colleague Dr. Amy Donahue. There's also some information about an upcoming conference panel where she and I will be presenting with Dr. Arindam Chakrabarti. Check it out! 

PS: You can find the original post on the Indian Philosophy Blog here.

Readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog may be interested to learn about a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of World Philosophies: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University). The journal is open-access, and you can download the article here.

Here’s the abstract:

There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such as the Sanskritic traditions of pramāṇavāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramāṇavāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism.

I enjoyed reading the article, and I found it extremely thought-provoking. I hope readers of this blog will check it out. Also, be sure to look for the forthcoming online debate platform that Donahue mentions on p. 5! Maybe we’ll make an announcement on the blog when it’s ready. Or reach out to Dr. Donahue if you’re interested in collaborating.

Here are a few of my questions for further discussion:

1. Since pramāṇavāda was an elite discourse in historical South Asian societies and it requires some educational training (as Donahue notes on p. 4 and p. 5), can it do the work Donahue asks it to do?
2. Are jalpa and vitaṇḍā so bad? While most Naiyāyikas have denigrated them as illegitimate as Donahue notes (p. 6), a few have distinguished “tricky” and “honest” forms of vitaṇḍā (Matilal 1998, 3). And then there’s Śrī Harṣa’s debate at the beginning of the Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya with a Naiyāyika opponent about whether one must accept the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) in order to enter into a debate about the pramāṇas (he mentions that one understands the discourse of the Madhyamakas and Cārvākas, perhaps thinking of Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi; I will have more to say about the Cārvākas in an upcoming conference presentation—see information below). Matilal has also argued that vitaṇḍā can make sense as resulting in a “commitmentless denial” similar to an “illocutionary negation” (Matilal 1998, 50-56). In terms of a modern public sphere, could vitaṇḍā be a useful tactic for, say, pointing out the inherent contradictions of various harmful dogmatisms? Or maybe the deepest benefit of the vāda-jalpa-vitaṇḍā framework is a bit of self-awareness about which form of debate one is using?
3. Is vāda necessarily more prone to discrediting false beliefs than a Habermasian public sphere or the type of marketplace of ideas in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty? (p. 11) My point is most definitely not that we have nothing to learn from Indian logic and debate. Far from it! But I wonder how effective vāda can be. After all, you don’t find much philosophical agreement in the classical Indian tradition, which is precisely why I find it so interesting!
4. Is the archive (p. 12) essentially part of vāda, or is it a cultural artifact of the Indian and Tibetan tradition of commentaries? Was there something similar in Hellenistic, Roman, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions, which were also heavily commentarial?

My questions here are meant to be taken in the spirit of vāda to keep the conversation going. I hope others will read Donahue’s thought-provoking article and join this worthwhile conversation.

Also, if you will be attending the upcoming Central APA Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on Feb. 22, 2023, you will have the chance to discuss these and other issues in person! 

Wed. Feb. 22, 2023, 1-4pm

2022 Invited Symposium: Vāda: Indian Logic and Public Debate 

Chair: Jarrod Brown (Berea College)

Speakers: 

Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University) “Vāda Project: A Non-Centric Method for Countering Disinformation”

Arindam Chakrabarti (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) “Does the Question Arise? Questioning the Meaning of Questions and the Definability of Doubt”

Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)  “Cārvāka Skepticism about Inference: Historical and Contemporary Examples” 

(More information about the conference here, including a draft program that includes several other panels on Indian philosophy.)

Works Cited

Donahue, Amy. 2022. “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Public Sphere.” Journal of World Philosophies 7 (Winter 2022): 1-14.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna.  1998.  The Character of Logic in India.  Edited by Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari.  Albany: SUNY Press.

Think for yourself, Forget your Self: Ancient Buddhist advice for modern uncertainties (Video of a talk on April 8, 2021)

I gave a talk (on Zoom) on April 8, 2021 as part of a Living Philosophically series for my academic department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Check out the video below, which includes the discussion after the talk as well. More information, including the abstract for the talk, can be found after that.

Pandemic Journal, Part 17: Memes for the Holidays

2020 brought us many things: a pandemic, elections, upheavals, and... my pandemic journal, which continues here with my entries from December 2020 (and one from January 2021). I have also been collecting memes that amused me for the last month or so. Maybe some of them will amuse you, too. In any case, let's hope 2021 will be a better year!

Le Guin's Earthsea on Worlds of Speculative Fiction

I'm excited to be a guest for Dr. Greg Sadler's Worlds of Speculative Fiction tomorrow (Sat. Dec. 19, 2020). We'll be discussing Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series.

Here's the Facebook event, video link, and Zoom link. This is free and open to the public, so feel free to attend virtually.

Are We All Obnoxious Know-It-Alls?: Know-It-All Society by Michael Patrick Lynch

As a person on the internet I have come to dread the fact that everybody seems to have become an insufferable know-it-all, at least in their online interactions (I am not entirely immune to this tendency myself). In Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, Michael Patrick Lynch does a great job diagnosing the problem and some of its causes. Like Lynch, I find this problem to be pervasive on both the political right and left. Although it takes different forms at opposing ends of the political spectrum, the phenomenon is annoying in both forms (although I think far more dangerous on the right these days).

Philosophical Methods and This Blog!

A bit of meta-blogging news!

Yesterday I Skyped with a Philosophical Methods class at the University of North Florida taught by my friend and colleague Dr. Aaron Creller. Dr. Creller had his students read some selected posts and a few more of the students' choice as an assignment exploring different ways to engage in public philosophy.

During our Skype session, I gave a bit of an overview of how I started the blog (you can get some idea about that by reading my first post). Students and Dr. Creller asked a lot of really great questions on topics such as similarities between philosophy and science fiction, why I like subtle humor, and how I see the relation between traditional academic philosophy and the type of thing I do here.

It was fun and humbling to have this blog serve as a point of discussion in a Philosophical Methods course!

Unfortunately I forgot to get photographic evidence, which I realize is an unforgivable offense in this digital age, but hopefully this report offers some small consolation.

Short Story Coming Soon to Big Echo!

Source: http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=6,11668,0,0,1,0#.XEfAYC3Mwcg

I'm pleased to announce that my short story "Famous as the Moon" will be appearing in the next issue of Big Echo. If a story about a Buddhist university in another solar system 1000 years in the future with cyborg debaters and an AI insurrection based on Yogācāra metaphysics (plus jokes and a bit on personal identity) sounds like something you'd enjoy, check it out! The next issue of Big Echo should be available in the next few weeks.  It's also a neat online journal that publishes a lot of cool, experimental stuff.

Some Interesting TV of 2017

I was originally planning to write a "Best of" list for my favorite TV shows of 2017, but I've gotten a little tired of the genre of "Best of" lists.  There's a mind-boggling amount of TV content available these days, so it seems a bit presumptuous to claim that the best of it can only come from the measly percentage that I've seen.  Also, these shows are all different enough that it seems unfair (impossible?) to rank them against each other.  Besides, it's mid-Februrary 2018, so it seems a bit late to march in the "Best of 2017" parade.

Instead I give you: Some Interesting TV of 2017!

(Note also that I'm limiting myself to science fiction and fantasy broadly construed.  I'm also only talking about shows that came out in 2017.  And I'm leaving out a few I did watch, like The Orville and The Mist.  I'll wait for a future post to tackle the latest episodes of The X-Files and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, which were released in the US in 2018).

Report on Chattacon 43

Skeletor costume at the Chattacon Vintage Halloween costume display, Jan. 2018

Last weekend I attended Chattacon, a nice little speculative fiction convention here in Chattanooga, TN, USA.  As I've written about before, cons are vital for the community of science fiction/fantasy/horror fandom as a place to meet other fans and let your geek flag fly proudly.

Here are a few highlights from my experience at Chattacon 43.

Chattacon 43!

This weekend I'll be attending Chattacon 43, a nice little speculative fiction convention here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.  Last year I said I might volunteer in the future.  The future is here!  I volunteered to serve on some panels, and the Chattacon folks put me on the following.

• There is No Singing in Space Opera (Fri. 5:00)
• Negan, Lucille, and Other Things That Made Me Stop Watching My Favorite Shows (Fri. 9:00)
• Philosophy, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (Sat. 3:00)  [As you might have guessed, this is the one I suggested, so hopefully it will bring something interesting to the con.]
• More Than Swords: The Military and Fantasy (Sat. 6:00)

You can see the whole programming schedule here.  I even have a bio on the list of panelists!  

There's also lots of other fun stuff to do.  Just check out the website.  Mostly I'm looking forward to spending some time with my people (i.e., SF/F fandom).  

Maybe I will see you there this year ... or in the future!