People

Jonardon Ganeri

Jonardon Ganeri

Professor of Philosophy, Arts, and Humanities, New York University

Biography

Jonardon Ganeri is a Global Network Professor of Philosophy, New York University, Visiting Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London, and Professorial Research Associate, SOAS London. His research interests are in consciousness, self, attention, the epistemology of inquiry, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literary form, case-based reasoning, multiple-category ontologies, non-classical logics, realism in the theory of meaning, the history of ideas in early modern South Asia, the polycentricity of modernity, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural hermeneutics, intellectual affinities between India, Greece and China, and early Buddhist philosophy of mind. I teach courses in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, Buddhist philosophy, the history of Indian philosophical traditions, and supervise PhDs on Indian philosophical texts in classical Sanskrit. My books include Attention, Not Self; The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance; The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700; The Concealed Art of the Soul; and Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. I have published in Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Isis, New Literary History, Philosophy and Literature, Synthese, Analysis, Philosophy, in major Indology journals, and I am on the editorial boards of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, the Journal of Hindu Studies and other journals and monograph series. I am currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, drafting scripts about Indian Philosophy for the podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps, and thinking about philosophy, cosmopolitanism, and anti-coloniality. I advocate an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies in philosophical research, together with enhanced cultural diversity in the philosophical curriculum. I strive to collaborate with philosophers, phenomenologists, cognitive scientists, historians, anthropologists, sinologists, persianists, buddhologists, classicists, and logicians. I am a Fellow of the British Academy, and laureate of the Infosys Prize in the Humanities. I have been named by Open Magazine one of India’s “50 Open Minds” in 2016.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE