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Shyam Ranganathan, "Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Well, welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host Dr. Rajpalkar on Mourn. We have a pleasure welcoming back to the podcast Dr. Shyam Ranganathan who is currently at York University right here in Toronto in this little place called Canada. We are diving into a brand new Bloomsbury publication called Moral Philosophy and Decolonialism the Irrationality of Oppression. Sh welcome back to the podcast.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Thanks for having me, Bosch.
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Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
My pleasure. The Rationality of Oppression Talk a little bit about that actually. First, let's let's dive into the backstory. What got you onto this journey?
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Oh, the backstory. Okay, well, the backstory goes back to when I was a student and a graduate student in philosophy. And so as an undergrad I did quite well and I did one thing that my professors loved and I knew I was doing the right thing. And the ballot students of philosophy didn't do, which was I just perfected this skill where I could throw myself at a text and then extract the theory that the authors or the figures were using that would generate their various claims. And then I could even kind of go a step further. And with that theory Deduce what their response to objections could be. And it was content neutral. It didn't matter what tradition or theory. I could use the same approach. I call this now explication. I didn't have a word for it then. I think one of my professors might have called it that. But then my peers, they would do something else. Like the ones that weren't very good at philosophy or the bad at philosophy, they would use their outlook, their beliefs to try to make sense of the text. And so when they're reading Plato, they would project their worldview onto Plato. And of course it wouldn't work. It wouldn't make any sense. And so then they would get frustrated and then kind of blame Plato for their. Their inability to understand him. And, you know, that was fun. But something strange happened when I went on to grad school at MA in philosophy. And so all of this was like Western philosophy, which is fine, I loved philosophy. But I found oddly, that there was an increasing tolerance for exactly what is just bad at bad, bad form in understanding philosophy. My, My peers would be kind of very inclined to talk about their intuitions and their way of as a way to discern whether a position was correct or not. And that struck me as strange for a couple of reasons, that your intuitions or beliefs are just largely a result of your culture and upbringing. There's no magic to that. If you were born in a different circumstance, you would have different beliefs and different intuitions. And so research, I always thought was amazing because it got away from that. Right? We don't have to rely upon our
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
background and our outlook to try to
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
understand questions because we're moving away from that. But I found it very frustrating that this was now normalized. It was also something that my white peers could engage in because, like, there was a rhetorical value to citing commonly held beliefs, because then everybody would not
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
in the room, right?
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
But if your beliefs because your culture or your upbringing is different, it doesn't have the same, it doesn't land in the same way anyways, it was always bad form. But I realized that there was a kind of advantage that my white peers had. So then I decided to do an MA in South Asian Studies. And I got really interested just as a break, you know, I was like, oh, let me go someplace else where there isn't this kind of weird undercurrent of white supremacy. And then I got interested in this question of whether South Asians were interested in moral philosophy. It's actually ridiculous myth. Like the myth was they were interested in every topic except for questions of how to live and get along with each other. Like, so blatantly racist. And of course, exactly the myth that you would propagate if you wanted to
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
normalize colonization and the idea of, like,
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
you know, brown people being the white man's burden, if you could depict them as, like, having never thought about ethical issues, then colonization is like. Is then you know, a gift to people who are, like, otherwise practically inept. And of course, this is ridiculous and silly. And it's ridiculous and silly because there's a word that South Asians used all the time to talk about exactly what we talk about in moral philosophy. Right choice and good outcome. That's Dharma. They talked about that. They, they, they. It was like the thing that they were obsessed with. But what I found was Indologists and South Asianists and everybody did exactly what a bad philosophy student would do. They would use their outlook to try to gauge whether South Asians said things about ethics. And I call this. Do the brown people say things that white people say? Research methodology. So they would assume a kind of. They were not scholarly. They were just going on their intuitions as people in cultural eyes in the Western world. And then they would credit South Asians with, like, having said something about ethics. If they said the kind of thing that they would be inclined to say in English, that's cool.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
And then they would discount everything else.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And then one of. One of the outcomes of this is this story that Dharma has many meanings.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Because if you're going to correlate the word dharma with what you would say, it's going to.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
It's not going to easily map out. And then all of a sudden you're
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
going to multiply meanings of Dharma in proportion to all the things that you would have said.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Then when someone was talking about Dharma
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
and this was like, madness.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
It was like. It just drove me nuts. And it was bizarre that no one else noticed this.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
And so I wrote my MA thesis
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
in South Asian studies. It was called Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy was the first book on. It was published a few years later on by Maltylal Banasi Das. And it was the first book in decades on any moral philosophy. No one had like it. It was, it's just. It was such a neglected topic that, you know, no one had written on it for a while. And. And I think the thing that I found most disturbing was like, the white supremacy was even worse in South Asian studies and Indology. And then it was in, like, a Eurocentric philosophy department. Because in the Eurocentric philosophy department, people weren't trying to gauge the intellectual accomplishments of bipoc on the basis of whether they said things that white people say. But this was just kind of normalized in Indology. And it still is. I think we haven't really moved all that far from it. I think it's a little bit more sophisticated now, but it isn't really much better. And what I argued was, well, look, there's just this one word, dharma. And if you appreciate that it has a philosophical function to debate competing theories of the right choice and good outcome, you can explain why everybody's using it differently and why everybody also wants to use it like that's just what philosophical terms are like, like good, right, Ethical. Everybody wants to use it their way. And the function it's playing is it's a device that articulates a theory. So I kind of left South Asian studies kind of traumatized. It was like an incredibly toxic and gaslighting experience because I was around people who spent so much time devoting themselves to the study of like South Asia. And you would think, oh, they would, they would be actually interested in learning from South Asian intellectuals. But it was just the opposite. They were, they were practicing this, like, filtering whether, you know, so. So the accomplishment of a brown intellectual could only ever be measured against the accomplishments of a white intellectual. But the problem, of course, in the case of moral philosophy is that if this is our standard, we could never entertain a criticism of the Western tradition.
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Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Right?
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Because we would simply filter those out as non accomplishments. So this kind of instituted an academic filter on moral philosophical criticisms of colonization and oppression. And then oddly, the people whose job it is to study bipoc traditions, and this is not just about Indology, it's kind of across the board. They're just not interested in. In moral philosophy, you know, it's about religion and spirituality. That's the kind of dominant paradigm. And so we have this academic system set up where we. We basically have people uninterested in moral philosophy who are in charge of studying bipoc traditions. And they do it by filtering out anything that could possibly be critical of the European tradition. So this was weird. I didn't really understand it. So I went back to philosophy and I did my PhD in analytic philosophy. I also looked at continental authors and translation studies folks, but I was interested. My topic was how do you translate anything successfully? And then how do you translate moral philosophy specifically? How do you go about doing that successfully? So I had to come up with a general account that would work in all cases, and something more Specific. And so what I found to my
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
surprise was that everybody in the Western
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
tradition assumed that this model of thought I call the linguistic account of thought, where thought is just linguistic meaning. And then I started to appreciate it's a ridiculous model of thought because it confuses cultural conformity with the possibilities of thinking. It's the most ridiculous model of thought imaginable, but it's not questioned. So it's controversial in the Chinese tradition. The Daoists criticize it and the Confucians affirm it. No one in ancient South Asia bought this account of thought. But it's the account of thought in the Western tradition, like, no one questions it. So what I realized is that, well, if you operate with this theory of thought as linguistic meaning, and that's a European theory, then as someone who inherits this theory in the Western tradition, you would be kind of propelled to assess whether brown people say things that white people say, because your criterion of whether they said that, whether you're willing to translate what they said has to do with what you're willing to say in your language, because that's your criterion of the thinkable. So that was like a light bulb
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
went off in my head where I
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
started to realize that the things I
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
was seeing in Indology, South Asian studies, was actually a reflection of a very
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
long tradition of thinking about the possibilities of thought in the Western tradition. I also realized that explained why indologies dominated by linguists, like, why. Why so many linguists, like, well, if you think that language is the content of thought, like the content of thought just is language, then you would think that, oh, you have to be a
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
linguist to understand, say, South Asian philosophy.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Now that's just silly.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
As a philosophy professor, my students, they
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
understand English, no problem. It doesn't mean that they understand philosophies.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
The linguistic competence is like, not.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
It's not sufficient. But that was one thing. I started to appreciate that the way that the academy studies South Asia or any bipoc tradition is really reflective of this. Then I started to realize that I
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
could explain the history of Western colonization with this.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Because if you were just simply unable
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
to understand dissent because everybody has to say something you would say in order for you to count them as having said something. Then as you grow, you would simply erase descent, which is what colonization is about.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And then eventually, when I started to appreciate that religion was actually something made up by the Romans, they came up with the idea of religio. And then I started to appreciate that
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
religious identity is also something that's manufactured when traditions come in contact with Western colonization and South Asians should know this.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
This is the way Hinduism, quote, unquote, came about.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Then I started to appreciate that, like
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
I could account for all of this,
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
basically the history of, of humanity colonized
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
by the west, going back to this model of thought. So that, so that took me a lot. It was years of kind of thinking through, through this. So that's an account of how things go wrong. And then in contrast, I was also like, I translated the Yoga Sutra and I started really learning from South Asian philosophers. And then I realized, well, look, there's just another way that you could go about thinking about the challenge of learning.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
So instead of thinking about it in
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
terms of filtering in terms of your
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
perspective, you think in terms of being responsible with information. So there's something like being responsible with information where you can organize them into options and proposals and then you are
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
in a position to like, choose. And so it took a long time for all of this to filter through my head, but I basically realized that, and this is where we get to moral philosophy and decolonialism, that we live in a kind of Orwellian upside down world, right? So the story we get is that white people are the only people who thought about moral philosophy and everybody else is religious and spiritual. But in reality, that's a result of the spread of Western colonization, that indigenous
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
people are actually deeply interested in being rational about possibilities.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And what colonization does Western colonization does
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
is that because it can't tolerate dissent,
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
it redefines subordinated traditions as a religion. I mean, we could talk a little bit more about that later, but the point then is that people lose an ancestral connection to their philosophical heritage and
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
then they interpret their tradition by the West.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So then they start buying the things that, that Western colonizers say about their traditions as a way to represent themselves
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
in a world colonized by the West.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So that's kind of the backstory.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
I haven't really gotten to the main
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
argument, but that kind of set, that kind of set up the book.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
I'm like, oh, I just have to
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
write this in a book. So it's kind of an account of human history, you know, where you'd have this contrast between indigenous approaches to understanding
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
and a colonial approach.
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Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Then why don't you tell us about the main argument? What do you hope folks will take away from this book overall?
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Thanks.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So one of the things that also I found very frustrating as a student is that if you learn logic, if
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
you take a course on introduction to
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
logic or I'm just talking about the most basic logic, nothing fancy, you learn
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
about logic or reasoning as a relationship
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
between reasons and conclusions. And that relationship is about inferential support, not truth. So you can have so in deduction we learn about logical validity. It's the basic criterion of a good deductive argument.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
And it says that, well, an argument
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
is valid just in case if the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
That's not the same as saying that
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
everything that's said is true.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
So I can say, you know, your name is Raj. Premise 1, my name is Shyam.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Premise 2 Therefore we're recording this podcast
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
on a Tuesday and so everything I've said here is true and we believe it, but it's not a rational argument. The premises don't support the conclusion. I could say frogs are eggplants. Premise 1 Eggplants are personal computers. Premise 2 Therefore frogs are personal computers. Everything I say here is false. You and I don't believe it, but that's a logically valid argument.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Okay, so what this should teach us
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
is that truth doesn't doesn't determine whether something is rational or not. And if truth doesn't determine what's rational or not, our beliefs about what's true
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
are even more irrelevant.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
A belief is a propositional attitude. It's an attitude that a thought is true and it just doesn't matter. It's completely irrelevant to whether something is a reasonable proposal or not. However, in the Western tradition, thinking and
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
believing are confused because thought is modeled
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
on the basis of language, and language encodes the formative cultural beliefs that kind of give rise to language. And so when people participate in language, they're basically being rewarded for saying the kinds of things that people believe or they're meant to believe in that social context. Now, these considerations should show you that we have to choose between reasoning and believing. We can't do both at the same time because our beliefs are like just an emotional beliefs, desires, hopes, like there are a whole bunch of propositional attitudes when we're engaging in that activity, we left reason behind. And then if we're engaging in reasoning, we're just doing explication. We're just kind of rendering explicit reasons for conclusions. And then we could take it a step further. We can take a step back and then look at what the various theories that we've explicated or dissenting on. And then we can try to come to the best explanation of the disagreement. It's kind of a South Asian way about going about things like what is it that we're disagreeing about from different perspectives? And then the ultimately correct answer is going to give us an understanding of how it's possible that you can have all these different partial perspectives. And reasoning really helps us do that because we can render explicit all of these perspectives in terms of reasoning and conclusion. So that's the, that's the basic insight.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Now I think this is actually just at the start of the Yoga Sutra
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
where there's this two, two different approaches to information. One where you're being responsible and the, the Sanskrit actually says you're organizing your, your, your, your leading thought to conclusions, which is an argument. And then if you do this enough, then you can understand what the options are. And then, then the epistemic agent abides in there. Like then the seer can know, then the epistemic agent can abide in the resistance. So that's a responsible reason based approach to information. Or we can allow ourselves to be influenced by what we are contemplating. And so that's what it is to engage in believing and desiring, et cetera. So these are incompatible. But if you understand what colonization is, colonization is the imposition of a perspective that victims have to either conform to resist or perish under. And in order to do that, you need to take your, your perspective seriously. And you can only do that if you're in ter. If you're using your beliefs and desires, et cetera, as your method of explanation. And using beliefs as explanation is called interpretation. I just broaden it to include any kind of propositional attitude that you use as an explanation. So this shows you that oppression, you know, oppression is kind of the degree
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
to which you are inconvenienced.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Given a colonial paradigm. The closer you are the colonial paradigm, you probably experience relatively little oppression.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
But the farther you are, the more
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
difficult it will be for you to conform, the more you will either have to resist or perish under. And so what this shows though is that this is actually a result of irrationality. Because in order to generate colonization and oppression, you have to depart from reasoning and use your propositional attitudes, your beliefs, desires, etc. As your method of explanation.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
No one had pointed this out before.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
So usually like in philosophy, there is a tradition of rationalism where people want to say that, you know, the best life is the, is the reason based life. And you can think of injustice as some kind of function of not being reasonable. Plato says things like that, Kant says things like that. But they usually have a very fancy proprietary sense of reason. You know, what I've shown is just introduction to logic. Reason, right, where reasoning is not about having the right view, it's about being able to be responsible with information. And the moment we depart from that, the way you depart from that is
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
by taking your beliefs, desires seriously as explanations. You are now not only anti rational or irrational, but you are also engaging in some type of colonial project where you are imposing yourself on others as your way to understand the possibilities. So that's kind of, you know, so that's where you get the book title from, right? That the question is rational because it requires this deviation from reasoning. And then if we're not going to do that, we basically have to celebrate and protect the public practice of moral philosophy where we use reason to explore practical options. And then each one of us is free to engage in that exploration for ourselves and determine what's important to us. I think that's the way South Asia was. I think South Asia was not this pre colonially. It was not a place where cultural conformity and linguistic practice dominated the day. It was a place where there was a lot of intellectual freedom and people saw life as an opportunity to ask questions about Dharma and to sometimes just kind of do, you know, leave their conventions and go try weird things like the Buddha or Mahagava. There's this long tradition of just deciding that you're not going to buy the conventional approach and you're going to try something else and maybe come up with your own proposal. That's a remarkable exercise of intellectual freedom. But it was always about the basic question was about right choice and good outcome. So these are kind of two incompatible options. We can either engage in colonization oppression and then depart from reasoning, or we could celebrate the public practice of reason. But then we would have to make room for an anti oppressive, decolonized public space.
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Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
So then is the book a call for epistemological clarity or social reform?
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Well, I mean, I think the point, so the point that I think this argument shows that reasoning is just a form of responsible behavior. So there's, there's a long tradition in the west, to think about logic and ethics as these separate activities. And what these considerations show is that this is a mistake, that all reasoning is.
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Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Is a very abstract, responsible approach to information.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And then. And then oppression and irrationality are a failure to be responsible at that very abstract level. So it's not one or the other. It's kind of like you got. You basically you have to choose which you prefer, being reasonable or being irrational. You know, a decolonial free space or an oppressive space.
- [23:47]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Could we zoom in on your drawing on the Yoga Sutras for the overarching theme in particular? In passing, you had equated the drastuhu, the seer, sort of the higher order self, with the clear epistemological agent. Could you say more about that?
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, I mean, the seer, even the Sanskrit, is, you know, it's Swarupi avastanam. I forget there's a few different phases. But like, the seer abides in its own essence. It's like, you know, like it stands or it exists in its own essence as seeing. So that sutra, which is like, I think like Sutra 3 a book 1, describes the seer as someone, once they've kind of. They've done the work of organizing options, they exist in this space of epistemic clarity. But that epistemic clarity is like, is their own essence. So what it is to be an agent, like, when we are really living authentically, is to be someone who understands. And then conversely, when we fail to do that, we become influenced. So either we influence our thinking so we can organize it and be reasonable, or it influences us. And that's like the fourth sutra, where we just end up being kind of a victim of our psychology.
- [25:07]
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- [25:36]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
you would equate what, if I recall correctly, that's. That is the, the. The definition that is, you know, that is talking about yoga as a cessation, the mental rooties. And you would equate that with reasonable.
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Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Right. So I decided to translate the Yoga Sutra while I was writing a dissertation on translation. So that was useful. The thing that most people. So the reason that the linguistic account, one reason that it's such a bad account of thought, is that it leads us to think that translation is about pairing up words and sentences across languages. But on any linguistic criterion, we're never going to get equivalence because there's always going to be semantic and syntactic and pragmatic differences. And so that's just a bad way. So. So we should be suspect about thinking that there's just necessarily one way to translate a sutra accurately. The other interesting thing about sutras was they're devices of compression. So the whole point of a sutra was that you wanted to be able to, you wanted a mnemonic, you wanted something that could be memorized. And the way it was going to do that was it was going to facilitate a compression of a whole bunch of ideas into a sentence. So I think about a sutra like a zip file, and that means that every word has multiple meanings. And you're supposed you should really be taking them all seriously. Like you should not be trying to reduce it to just one, which is what most people do. But that's exactly what interpreters do. They use their perspective as a filter. So if we're really going to allow ourselves to blow up each word and in a sutra, we should see that there are just so many semantic resonances and possibilities and we should feel comfortable, you know, trying to come up with a translation that kind of best captures the average or, you know, enough for you to then go back and expand more. And so I translated that as yoga is the more control of the moral character of thought because a lot of people ignore that.
- [27:33]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Vritti actually also is like an ethical rule.
- [27:36]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Like it's, it's, you can look it up, it's in the money. Money Williams Dictionary. Right. So a vritti is a norm. It's something that like, you should follow. Right. And so yoga's chitta vritti nirodha, you know, one way to think about that is that, well, yoga is really about, you know, constraining the impact or the normative force or, or the direction thought has in our life. And another way I came to appreciate that, that the, the sutra can be translated is that yoga is just really about the chitta vritti nirodha.
- [28:10]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
Another way to look at that is just an argument like the thoughts, the promises are, what you can contemplate is the chittas.
- [28:17]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And the vrittis is like the influence or the entailment, and the nirodha is the conclusion. So I wouldn't want to reduce it to just one way of spelling it out. But I think a lot of these interesting implications are in there. The overarching importance of that sutra to
- [28:32]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
me is about the responsibility we have
- [28:35]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
to take in organizing our mental lives. That seems to me to be the dominant importance because when we fail to do that we end up being a victim of our psychology. So yeah, so now I'm just like, you know, stated simply, I think that that definition about yoga is explication. It's about this idea of just rendering things explicit in an organized way. And then the description of the anti yoga practices is interpretation. Explaining things in terms of your beliefs, your fears, your desires.
- [29:05]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Yeah, certainly it's, it's a fascinating interpretation or blossom yo sutras. And to your point regarding avoiding flattening the sutra into one particular iteration. And the sutras were never ever, ever meant a standalone. They were always meant to be commented upon in Hinduism tradition and expounded upon
- [29:26]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
and unpacked in conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:31]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Meant to be expounded upon. And irrespective of the nuance or intrigue or innovation in your view, I think the vast majority of those who use and study the Iwasutras would agree that crucial to the aims set out in the text are a managing of conditioning. Managing of the ways of habituate. Sort of, sort of availing agency through the managing of habituation.
- [30:06]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, that's why you have to, you have to kind of render explicit your samskaras. So the ways in which you've institutionalized habits of responding to stimulation and stimuli. Yeah, for sure.
- [30:17]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Perhaps you can walk us through the structure.
- [30:20]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, sure. So the first chapter is about what I called academic apartheid. And it's basically, I think if you don't see it for what it is, you don't appreciate the ways in which Western colonization has just been irrationally normalized. And so the apartheid in South Africa is this division of society and then the white folks kind of got to live in the kind of the high status places and then people of color were relegated to subordinate places and depicted as like primitive and, and they were kind of meant to be celebrated as such and then also policed by white folks. And I think something very much like that happens in the academy. So western philosophy is treated as universal and generic. So you could go look up a journal like Ethics and it'll be basically on European derived contributions written by people who are actually qualified to talk about philosophy, who have a PhD in philosophy. And so they've spent time studying it at a very advanced level. And then when you look at non western philosophy it's written and published about an ethnically titled journals. So all of a Sudden here we have a signal that there's something kind of limited in scope and importance. It's not something just philosophically important. So generally Indian philosophy, general Chinese philosophy, things become great ethnic, and then it's largely presided over by people who are not trained in philosophy, who lack the research skills to deal with, to really understand what they're reading. And then they also just kind of, they're also just responsible for peer review. And so what happens then is we have this. And then oddly, right, philosophers and intellectuals from the global south don't play a prominent role in, at least in the upper echelons of these journals. So even though you would think of the Journal of Indian Philosophy is about, Indian philosophy is largely dominated and it's run out of a Western centered world where the leading academics are often themselves trained in Western institutions or of Western descent. And so, uh, and so what this does though, and the reason this happens is because no one in the academy has ever institutionalized or ever thought, I mean, I don't know, aside from my
- [32:59]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
work, anybody saying, hey, we should just not allow interpretation.
- [33:02]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
No one should be allowed to contribute to scholarship by telling you about their opinion. It should simply not be allowed because it's irrational and it's oppressive. No one says that. In part because opinions are just kind of normalized in the Western tradition. Like if you look at standard theories of knowledge, they'll often have a very famous way of formulating knowledge that says a justified true belief. So propositional attitudes just get normalized in the Western tradition. And when you send stuff out for peer review, the way the forms are, the publishers basically structure the referee forms to elicit the opinion of the referees. And so what ends up happening is that we have this peer review system that's lawless, that basically replicates the same dynamic that led historically to colonization. And there's no one to that.
- [33:57]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
There are no institutional constraints on it.
- [33:59]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So then the academic literature just reifies the history of colonization and pressure.
- [34:07]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
But this time in literature, right?
- [34:10]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So then it provides this like perfect mythological cover to the history of oppression, makes it seem like, well, that's just the way things are, right? Because these are academics, they should know better. And then when they go study and talk about brown people, they never have anything interesting or useful to say about practical questions.
- [34:27]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
And they're always like spiritual and religious.
- [34:29]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
And even, you know, the remarkable thing is that people know that the category of religion was invented by Roman colonies. They know that it's spread by colonization, and yet they still make use of it as though Retrospectively, we can use it to understand what these folks were like historically. Right. So there's a kind of like wanton. It's just remarkable.
- [34:50]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
There's a ahistoricality that's built into the
- [34:53]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
academic discourse where the. The outcomes of colonization are then used as like a criterion for understanding the history. It's embarrassing, but this is kind of normal. No one is really reasoning. Everybody's interpreting. And even if you do interpret, and I talk about this later on, interpretation, because it's oppressive, it will basically erase any opposition to it. So unless we're actually going to take
- [35:19]
Podcast Co-host or Interviewer
a stand and root it out, it just takes over.
- [35:24]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
So that's one important theme of the first chapter. But I also set out the main argument there about colonization as this exercise of deviating from reason. And then also that shows us that the usual kinds of criticisms that we find from people who are like, well, meaning, but you know, they point out that, well, everybody's biased and everybody's just speaking from their perspective, those are talking points that are actually extrapolations of the methodology of oppression. So they don't really help you deal with the problem. They just normalize oppression. So the other thing I point out is that if you're going to be serious of a reason and getting rid of oppression, you should take objectivity seriously because there are objective answers to questions and they're objective because they don't depend on your opinion.
- [36:10]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
Yeah, there was just a lot there. I wonder if. I wonder if there are those in the audience who either might be. Might have read a great deal of scholarship or seeing scholarships covered, or may have. May have had exposure to the peer review process. And all of the points you raise notwithstanding, I wonder if there aren't attempts, some attempts in peer review, to assess a work through evaluations that are less interpretive.
- [36:39]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Great. Yeah. So what I'm going to do, I talk about this in chapter four. So you asked me about the structure of the book, so let me quickly give an overview and then I'll get to this particular issue. Chapter two is on how when we. So basically the contrast is between this linguistic account of thought that gives rise to oppression and rationality in an alternative I call linguistic externalism. Linguistic externalism is an indigenous approach to thought where thought is really about dissent, it isn't about agreement. And then I can contrast these two both as a way to understand the history of humanity and how the west takes over, but also how the linguistic account of thought weaponizes our language and culture and motivates genocide. And so there's a lot I wrote. I started writing this after October 7th. So there's a lot about Israel and Palestine in there. And you know, what people don't usually notice is that usually victims of genocide are marked out for linguistic traits. Right? It's usually language. Identity plays a really important role both in terms of the oppressor and the victim. Chapter three is about how, like, once we understand that the west is this tradition based on the linguistic account of thought, and then it grows into an interpretive tradition we can understand. We have a way to explain religion because there's no necessary insufficient condition for something to be religious. Whether something is religious depends upon its racial origin. So I can point out the same doctrine said by South Asian and said by a white person in Europe. And whether it's going to be counted as Hinduism or secularism will depend upon just the race, not the content. And then there's just the history of how this spreads. And so the point I make there is that, contrary to Marx, religion isn't about people ignoring the needs of humans. It's actually the anthropocentrism of the colonizer that generates religion. Because in indigenous world, we live in a world of agents beyond the human. And we think about moral questions in terms of our responsibility and obligations to a variety of agents beyond the human. And an important part of the colonial mindset is the prioritization of the colonizer's human community. And so what religion then is the result of breaking indigenous possibilities into two. So we normalize the thing that's consistent with the anthropocentrism of the colonizer. And then anything that could be critical of it that's indigenous gets re understood as some type of mystical, aspirational something or the other for an afterlife. So religion then is in a way, a kind of like the mutilated leftovers of indigenous possibilities. And I argue that we should think about the philosophy of race as a better model to understand the philosophy of religion. Chapter four. I talk about how all of this plays out in peer review and public practices of gatekeeping. And anyways, to get to your point there, I talk about how if you were to pick, I just run a game. I run this game, a little game theory where we have interpreters who are peer reviewers and explicators who are peer reviewers. And let's say every contribution is adjudicated by one of each, and the interpreter is only going to allow what they agree with, and the explicator will allow anything that they can understand as an argument that contributes to our understanding of a controversy. And then I say, well, let's assume that the contributors, half of them are explicators and half of them are interpreters, right? And then I point out, in order for interpretation to work, interpreters have to converge on the same set of beliefs, otherwise they'll just get rid of each other. So if you buy interpretation, there's a lot of psychological pressure for you to just group think with everybody else. So I said let's build that into the table. Let's say that everybody who's an interpreter, whether they're a reviewer or a contributor, shares the same kind of Eurocentric outlook. And then I show that, well, after a finite number of iterations, they would have completely wiped out the explicators because the interpreters will never accept anything that they don't agree with while the excavators are willing to do that so long as we allow. Now this is a game. There are lots of simplifications in a game theoretic model. But the point is that as long as we allow interpreters into the pool and we legitimize, we normalize it after a finite set of iterations of allowing them to adjudicate, they will have wiped out all the competitors. So it's not that there aren't some people like I've had the good fortune of having some excellent peer reviewers look at my work, but you just need the one bad one and that, that their vote has to count and that their vote counts. Right? So, and I find that the more eminent and, and high status a publisher is, the more inclined they are to give way to all the peer reviewers they ask for. And also the more likely the peer reviewers will actually be an interpreter because those publications are really risk averse, they want things that are going to be praised and they're scared of controversy actually. And so what ends up happening is I think that really high status publishers, it's just worse OEP Cambridge that stuff, a worse peer review process, worse outcomes, because they're so risk averse and they're willing to just greenlight any interpreter that they, that they invite as a peer reviewer. But also if you understand the dynamics of interpreters being allowed and that they do take over, then the vast majority of the eminent people in any field would have gotten there for the wrong reason. Not because they were actually doing good research, but because they said the kinds of things that the reviewers tended to agree with. So peer review is actually shameful, the shameful exercise I pointed out, there's all sorts of evidence that that happens in the sciences too. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book, the Structures of Scientific Revolution, where he talked about this as something that happens in the sciences. So it's not that there aren't some scholars who are exceptional, but if we allow interpreters in, they take over and they just dominate. And in the rest of the book, the next two chapters, I switched to South Asia. So the next chapter is really about how do we explain how a tradition that is originally not colonial becomes colonized. And there I draw upon the rigged game of dice in the Mahabharata as an analogy. And I think it's a very good analogy about how people who might seem like they're well intentioned and good participate in oppressive systems with some type of optimism with respect to the outcome, but they're being played and taken advantage of. And then the only people who are willing to ask the moral philosophical questions are, are the sideline victims like Draupadi and not the people who are participating. They just all of a sudden become very agnostic about dharma. And I think that's a way to understand how the census function. When the British instituted the census, right, it was this game that South Asians played, but it was basically designed by the British and they decided what was definitive of the options. And then here you have this remarkable over emphasis on mimamsa and caste and all these things and constructing Hindu identity. Book six is about yoga. Sorry, Book six, Chapter six is about yoga as a decolonial moral philosophical option. And the seventh chapter is about kind of more the, like the activism, what do we do? And I contrast the history of Western moral theory and when you put it all together, you see like the main concern that Western moralists have been interested in from like Plato to Mill is a kind of managerial social bureaucracy. That's what they're worried about. They're not worried about individual freedom and stuff like that along the way. I didn't mention this, but this is the last thing that I think that's really important. We have a story about Western moral philosophy as concerned with human rights and egalitarianism. If you look at the history that only shows up once we get colonization in a big way in the modern period. And so I explain, I talk about how interpretation does this. It both appropriate ideas from colonized people. So these ideas for egalitarianism and individual rights, they're really indigenous, they're not European. They get appropriated by Europeans while they're engaging in colonization. So there's a kind of switch. So the, so the colonizer Projects the past that they don't want anymore onto the colonized. So then Plato becomes the model to understand Hindus. Right? Plato's all about caste and, you know, the body as the prison of the soul and reincarnation and all these things from the history of Western thought. The prehistory, in a way of Western thought gets imposed or projected onto colonized cessation. And then they take all these kind of radically individuals freedom more into practices of South Asians as a way to celebrate their own moral superiority. And it's remarkable that people don't kind of just look at the history of Western moral theory and go, hey, it's funny that they start talking about egalitarianism just when they're taking it away from colonized people. But anyway, that's the overview of the chapters.
- [46:25]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
What do you hope folks would most take away from this?
- [46:28]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, well, you know, I think that there are so many problems in the world right now. And I think the thing that I find so frustrating is the way people act like they're so surprised when the problem shows up again. Like the rise of white supremacy in the States or just the movement towards fascism, totalitarianism, a rollback of respect for individuals. We have a climate crisis that's like out of control, wars breaking out. And I'm just kind of always amazed that people, they wake up as though they're surprised. But you know, the world is. This is an analogy I've come to recently. The world is in like a bad relationship with the Western tradition. And it acts like the girlfriend who thinks that she can fix him by just kind of tweaking this and that and, you know, emphasizing the good stuff and leaving behind the bad stuff. And we all know the way those stories go. And I think intellectuals are like this. I think they, you know, they think that somehow we're going to find a solution to our problems by going back to Western thinkers without appreciating that, like that whole tradition is why we are where we are now. It's hard to see this when you just focus in on specific thinkers. But that's like trying to understand climate crisis by looking at the weather today in Toronto and the weather tomorrow and year. You're not going to understand a trend by zooming in on something you find, you know, convenient or happy. You gotta take a step back and then you have to wonder, well, why is it that this is the tradition that's taken over? And then I think you're gonna have to appreciate the kinds of considerations that I bring to for. Right, that and that these considerations span the tradition. This emphasize on emphasis on language leads to prioritizing humans, but then humans from the colonizing tradition. It destroys indigenous possibilities and then in the process ruins the world that we live in. And so one of the things. There's just the first point, that we have a rational obligation to decolonize. It's not even about your preference. It's not even about your values. We have a rational obligation to decolonize. Secondly, what this should teach us is that we should learn how to be indigenous. And by indigenous, I don't mean being a pretendian. Right? So in Canada, we have this phenomenon problem of pretending with somebody who claims indigenous ancestry to take up basically space for indigenous representation. That's a problem that happens if you think about indigeneity in terms of language and culture, because the people who are pretendians try and represent themselves as heirs to that. To be indigenous, to really be indigenous, I think, is to just get rid of the linguistic kind of thought, to understand ourselves as agents within a universe of agents, to recognize the earth as an agent who by, you know, by way of her generosity, we exist. And that's, I think, a really important difference between indigenous peoples and colonial peoples. Their respect for the earth as a person. You know, colonizers think they can own places and own land. And indigenous people appreciate that we're here because of her, because of her generosity. And if we can learn that this is actually rational, it's not mystical, and the mysticism, religion, spirituality, those are all just outcomes of colonization, that if we actually were indigenous, we would be reasonable, then we might be able to solve the problems that are out of control.
- [49:58]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
All right, well, certainly a vast and an important set of goals there. There was curriculum insight, perhaps colored with some provocation. We'll have the. We'll have the listeners ascertain, oh, 100%
- [50:15]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
well, this, this is what you get when it goes high level.
- [50:20]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
To what extent it was productive provocation. But thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today.
- [50:27]
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
Oh, thank you for having me.
- [50:28]
Podcast Host Dr. Rajpalkar
All right, well, for those listening, we have been speaking with Dr. Shyam Raghanathan of York University on the brand new Bloomsbury publication, Moral philosophy and the irrationality of oppression. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating moral philosophy in the west and beyond. Bye for now.