Department of Philosophy, Goa University.

26/03/2026

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies, Goa University
invites you to an online guest lecture on "The Free Subject: Autonomy and Moral Agency in Kant" by Prof. C.A. Tomy, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad, on 27th March 2026 (Friday) at 3.30 PM (IST).
Abstract:
The lecture will first examine Kant’s account of the subject and freedom in order to clarify how moral agency is possible within a world governed by natural necessity. It first distinguishes three senses of the subject in Kant: the empirical subject as appearance in the inner sense, the transcendental subject as the unity of apperception, and the intelligible or practical subject as a rational agent belonging to the world of understanding. The lecture will then distinguish Kant’s two concepts of freedom—transcendental and practical—and explain their systematic relation. It will argue that freedom cannot be attributed to the empirical or transcendental subject but only to the intelligible subject as self-active and spontaneous. On this basis, the lecture shows how Kant’s doctrine of autonomy grounds the universal principle of morality: laws that reason legislates for itself must be universal, unconditional, and binding on all rational beings. Finally, the lecture will explain how Kant’s two-standpoints framework allows a single subject to be both naturally determined and morally free, thereby grounding the concepts of duty and moral responsibility.
Google Meet Link: https://meet.google.com/gss-hgbf-syv

19/02/2026

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "The Role of Aesthetic Experience in Kant’s Architectonic" by Dr. Nishad Patnaik, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, IIIT Delhi on Friday, 20th February 2026 at 3:30 PM (IST).

Google Meet Link: meet.google.com/vdc-udji-jiw

Abstract

For Kant, the interrelation between the logical-epistemological and the practical-moral domains of reason, and thus, the possibility of transition from the one to the other, is mediated by aesthetic experience. Yet, the grounds for this specific modality of mediation, that is, why it should have an aesthetic character, and how aesthesis itself is to be understood, remain difficult to fully fathom. In this paper, I will address these themes by explicating how both the theoretical and practical domains entail a certain representative closure of reason, through its determinate conceptual articulation. Consequently, even in their non-illusory, regulative functioning, the two modes of representative closure, through which the “unbounded yet also inaccessible […] field of the supersensible” is mediated, continue to maintain the strict demarcation between the sensible (phenomenal) and supersensible (noumenal) realms.

It is in relation to this problematic that Kant’s introduction of aesthetical considerations must be understood. I will argue that if reflective (as opposed to determinative) judgment serves a mediating function between the theoretical and practical realms, it is because it tries to rearticulate the transcendental as an experiencing, that is, as the ceaseless yet purposive (regulative) movement of rational thought, below the threshold of ‘objective’ or determinate conceptual representation. On the one hand then, this move appears to reintroduce experiential content into the apparent formalism of Kant’s practical philosophy. On the other, it maintains the negative character of this experiencing, (both in the awareness of the contingency of the harmony between the imagination and understanding in the experience of beauty, and in the indeterminate, non-representational feeling of the sublime), that is objectified in the unconditional or universal form of the moral law.
To explicate this claim, I analyze reflective judgment with respect to the experience of beauty and sublimity, to show how it functions as the non-reified transcendental ‘ground’, that is, ‘reason’ understood as experiential movement, that connects and underlies the determinate theoretical and practical articulations of reason.

29/01/2026

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "Interculture" by Dr. Anthony Savari Raj, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy (DLLP), Faculty of Humanities and Education, at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica on Friday, 30th January 2026 at 3:30 PM (IST).
Google Meet Link: meet.google.com/xnu-nwqi-wap
Abstract
Philosophy is etymologically defined as “love of wisdom.” But our present times indeed demand that it is not only love of wisdom, but also becomes a “wisdom of love!” And this is urgently so in our present cross-cultural human situation, as interculture has become a contemporary fact as well as a need.
And yet, the situation is paradoxical: Despite our new moment of meeting and mingling of cultures, paradoxically, we have also been experiencing fanaticisms and absolutisms of all sorts, marked of course by the continuation of a monocultural mentality: “truth is one, and I alone have it.” The contemporary avatar of this mentality is technocracy with its reductionism of reality to calculus.
In responding to the worldwide hegemony of the modern technocratic and reductionistic world-view, all cultures, with no exception, are invited and even expected to perform a double task, overcoming a double temptation: The double temptations are colonialism, on the one hand and cultural apartheid, on the other. The required double tasks are: universalizing the truth experiences of a tradition and overcoming the blind spots. Here, the three human elements of Philosophy, Religion and Culture present themselves for a re-vision.
It all amounts to a realization of contingency: a recognition that we are not sufficient in constructing the picture of reality all by ourselves and that the universal range of human experience cannot be represented or exhausted by a single human phylum, however ancient, glorious or powerful it may claim itself to be. Humility and receptivity, therefore, become the key intercultural virtues.

04/11/2025

Sadbhav Sammelan: International Interfaith Conference. 6th and 7th February 2026, Pilar Pilgrim Centre, Pilar, Goa.

Deadline for Abstracts: 25th November 2025.

28/10/2025

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "Knowing Together: Reflections on Social Epistemology" by Prof. Vikram Singh Sirola, (Professor of Philosophy, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay).

Kindly join us on 31 October 2025 (Friday) from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM IST

GoogleMeet Link: meet.google.com/trb-vejw-txa

ABSTRACT:
Modern epistemology has largely been preoccupied with individual knowers – their cognitive faculties, perceptual capacities, and rational justifications. Largely, within the modern theories of knowledge, the world was presumed to be real and knowable, though differing accounts were offered of its accessibility to human reason. While this focus on the individual knower has its justification, it has also obscured the social and impersonal dimensions of knowledge—those embedded in the very practices, institutions, and discourses through which knowledge is produced and sustained. The sociologists of knowledge in the early twentieth century sought to redress this imbalance by treating knowledge as a social phenomenon, amenable to empirical investigation. Yet their project, despite its insight, often remained limited to tracing how thought is shaped by its social context, without adequately exploring how epistemic norms and truth-claims themselves are constituted within social life.
This talk revisits these questions through the lens of social epistemology that reconceptualizes knowing as a collective enterprise. It examines how knowledge attains authority, credibility, and stability within communities. The focus is not merely on the diversity of knowledges, but on the processes through which a body of belief comes to be recognized as knowledge. In other words, it is an analysis of knowledge and its foundation in the social world.

18/09/2025

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "Toward a Metaphysical Anthropology" by Prof. Predrag Cicovacki, (Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA). Kindly join us on 19 September 2025 (Friday) from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM (IST) Link: meet.google.com/meq-pgaw-qbv

Abstract

After years of struggling with how to provide a needed structure for a philosophical examination of what it means to be and live like a human being, I have come to believe that we should organize it around four pillars of human existence: personality, values, interactions, and transcendence. In a nutshell, these pillars deal with the following issues:
1. Personality, which centers on the problem of identity: how can we integrate our general humanity with our irreplaceable uniqueness?
2. Values, which are concerned with the problem of orientation: how to find our way in the complex flow of reality? What is right and what is wrong, and how can we tell them apart?
3. Interactions, which deal with the problem of community, with living together, through exchanges and common rituals: how can we form societies that are not mere aggregates of people?
4. Transcendence, which boils down to our commitments: What are our ultimate bonds? What do we hold as most sacred? I call this novel and ambitious project “metaphysical anthropology.” It is not an attempt to establish a new philosophical discipline (like “philosophical anthropology”) but to outline a new paradigm of a reflective and responsible, interactive and creative life.
In my lecture, I want to explain these four pillars and outline how metaphysical anthropology aims to find out not the truth about human beings but the truth of being human.

18/07/2025

It's a proud moment for all at Goa University: the Students, Faculty, Non-teaching staff and officers, the alumni and every stakeholder of GU.

We are immensely proud to announce that Goa University has been conferred with the highly coveted A+ grade in NAAC review, securing a remarkable CGPA of 3.3/4

Heartiest Congratulations to Students, Faculty, Non-Teaching Staff, Alumni, Statutory Bodies, Stakeholders, Retired Employees and Goa University Well-Wishers.

28/05/2025

Goa University was established under the Goa University Act of 1984 (Act No. 7 of 1984) and commenced operations on 1 June 1985. The University is included under Section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956 and also awarded the status 12 B of the UGC Act, 1956 by the University Grants Commission. The universit...

29/11/2024

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "Integrating Universal Wisdom with Individual Contexts: Philosophical Counselling in Practice" by Prof. Balaganapathi Devarakonda. Kindly join us on 30 November (Saturday) from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM IST at meet.google.com/qup-wftd-dyg.

Abstract

Everyday human life is an attempt to harmonise the universal wisdom to the specific contexts of existence to make sense of, what we call, ‘Living.’ Philosophical counselling, one of the recently emerged fields of philosophical practices, helps the counselees to discover, identify and regulate the universal wisdom of the individual and community in addressing everyday ‘living’ concerns through dialogue. In this particular sense, philosophical counselling is therapeutic in nature. This presentation addresses the following concerns, which are crucial to ‘harmonising universal wisdom to individual contexts.’ What role does the philosophical counsellor play in helping the counselee resolve the concern? What qualifications and expertise does the counsellor require to lead the counselee to a successful resolution? What role does the context play in binding/liberating the counselee to/from the concern? Can universal wisdom resolve context-specific concerns? How to address the concerns which are culturally rooted? Can a philosophical counsellor use his traditional philosophical expertise (say, Indian philosophy) in the counselling process? If so, what are the limitations? How to address ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ problems in counselling? This presentation, while addressing the above concerns, will talk about some instances from some previous counselling sessions.