Faculty Research Fellow
Jonardon Ganeri (D.Phil. Philosophy, University of Oxford, 1994) is the Bimal K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015 and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.
Fellowship Research Project—Absence, Attention, and Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Inquiry
The brilliant 20th-century Bengal philosopher Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya argues in his justly lauded classic The Subject as Freedom (1930) that our ability to attend to absences—to wants, lacks, losses and lacunae, to the missing and the misplaced—is fundamentally associated with the birth of subjectivity, our first awareness of ourselves as conscious subjects of experience. My project aims to unpack this bold claim, demonstrating how he draws on William James’ notions of a “fringe” and an “aching void” in consciousness, interrelates it with ideas from classical Sanskrit philosophy, and how his work can lead us to a deeper understanding of related ideas in the phenomenology of Sartre, Rubin and Gurwitsch.