Anand Vaidya (1976-2024)
Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, professor of philosophy at San José State University, has died.
Professor Vaidya worked in philosophy of mind, epistemology (especially the epistemology of modality), perception, logic, and critical thinking, among other areas, with an emphasis on cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary philosophy. You can learn more about his research here and here.
Professor Vaidya joined the faculty at San José State University in 2005. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his BA at the University of California, Los Angeles (though he began his undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University).
A lengthy interview with Professor Vaidya can be found here (with a discussion of an aspect of it here). Discussing his interests in different approaches to philosophy, and the resistance he has encountered to work that brings together different philosophical methodologies, he says:
I think we get a better conversation, at least for the purposes of bringing philosophy to the public, when we mix [different approaches] together. Sometimes I worry that because I want to pursue all of these, some members of these groups will try to exclude me from them. The reason why is because professional philosophy for most practitioners is territorial. If you are part of one group, Analytic philosophy, you are not supposed to talk to another group, Experimental philosophy, and if you like either of those than you should not hangout with Comparative philosophers. This is sad, and I am a trespasser who likes to go across boundaries and genuinely take other philosophers seriously. Somehow professional philosophy is at odds with what it is really supposed to be about. This is likely because of jobs and economic factors. My hope is that both theoretically, through my aim at unification, and practically through my participation with a variety of communities I will be able to bring people together for a larger more significant conversation. Just because you bat for one team on one day, doesn’t mean you cannot bat for another, and then return to the former, or even move on, yet still be involved in the others. It is all about seeing which point of view is most important in a specific debate at a specific period of inquiry.
This past August, Professor Vaidya published an essay in The Philosophers’ Magazine about being diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer and his thoughts about dying.
He died on Friday, October 11th, 2024.
Anand was a warm, kind, generous, and intellectually curious human being. He was a connector—of people and ideas. I, and so many others working in Indian and analytic philosophy, benefited from his time, his seemingly boundless energy, and his willingness to talk through any idea at length.
The world, not just the philosophical world, has lost someone special, and far too soon.
Those three words — warm, generous, and curious — were the very ones that I wanted to use as well. He really was an extraordinary colleague and philosopher (and wonderful person).
I saw Anand last weekend, along with 4 or 5 other fellow former UCSB grad students. We were a tight-knit group during graduate school. I’m glad that we were all able to see Anand one last time. To have one such group of friends is rare, but Anand seemed to have a multitude; he was special in that way.
We knew each other at UCSB too; he was a beginning grad student when I was near the end. I remember that at some point he didn’t have a place and was sleeping overnight in his cubicle in the Girvetz Tower. I saw him in SF at the APA last year. We had not seen each other in person in many years, and he was organizing an event for which I was just sitting in the audience, but he recognized me and came over to talk. Everybody wanted to talk to Anand. This is very sad news.
Anand profoundly influenced me with his collaborative, inclusive, and adventurous approach to philosophy. He didn’t just talk about philosophy; he lived it—engaging in meditation and thoughtful, continuous scrutiny of the many dimensions of human life. As one of his former students, I am deeply inspired by his commitment to fostering greater inclusion in philosophical debates, a lesson I will carry with me always.
This is very sad. I finished at UCSB just a bit ahead of Anand and so we never met there, but our paths crossed later at an HEH institute in on self-knowledge that remains one of the highlights of my career. Anand embodied everything great about philosophy, and he was devoted to sharing all of it with as many people as he could.
I met Anand nearly a decade ago at a conference. He immediately charmed me with his openness, warmth, and curiosity.
We saw each other from time to time in the ensuing years. I can’t claim to have been a close friend, but I had only friendly feelings for him and was always happy when we crossed paths.
The last time I saw him was a few months ago in Antwerp. He was still in good spirits despite the cancer diagnosis.
He is now the second philosopher to whom I owe an email that I can never deliver (Adam Morton is the other). Be kind to each other. We are fragile beasts.
I had not read the article and had no idea about his declining health (my fault, I know). I will miss his complete and almost child-like dedication to philosophy, to new ideas, to openness.
I might have not always agreed with him, but he was honest, open to suggestions, generous (and funny!).
So devastating. Anand and I were roommates in graduate school at UCSB, and have been close friends for 25 years. Graduate school was amazing: long walks, chess, wine, cooking, music, and reading late into the night. After graduate school, we got to go on all sorts of adventures together: abroad to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. National parks in Utah and Montana, and back to Montana years later for my wedding. APAs all over, most recently Chicago. So many memories.
Friends came in from around the country/world to see him in San Francisco last week. It was sad, but we tried to focus on the positive: reconnecting with people we hadn’t seen in years, and celebrating the beauty of Anand’s life. Our hearts go out to his wife Manju and his brother Tony, for how challenging these last weeks have been, and their profound courage in the face of adversity.
I love you brother; miss you forever.
Oh no! What a tragedy. I wish I’d had a chance to meet him and talk to him.
This is a terrible loss. The last time I saw him Anand called me a “scimitar.” I wish I had responded that he was one of Indra’s jewels. I will miss him.
Amazing, amazing, amazing human being – I was privliged to know him as a teacher, mentor, and friend. He was fiercely intelligent and wonderfully kind human being – everyone he encountered loved him – he would do anything to help you grow, succeed, and flourish. I’ll miss his squirrelly-devious laugh and the long talks about everything from Kripke to Nina Simone to why his ID said his middle name was jack. A true exemplar of what a great human can become. Hard to believe; this just sucks.
A sensitive, generous soul, a mensch. I wish I knew this from purely positive interactions, like – I’m guessing – everyone else here. But my last conversation with Anand, over a year ago, was me apologizing for something. Turns out you can learn a lot about people in that context, too. And I say again, mensch.
This is very sad news. I met Anand in 2018 at a self-knowledge NEH summer course in Charleston, South Carolina. He was such a light. I gave a couple of talks on cognitive phenomenology, and throughout the course, he sat next to me in many of the sessions. In one session, Anand passed me a note with an argument for cognitive phenomenology based on hyperintensionality. I’ve been passed a lot of notes in ‘class’, but never one with an argument on it! To this day, I carry that note in my wallet. My thoughts are with his family.
I too had the fortune to meet Anand at the NEH Summer Institute in Self-Knowledge in 2018. We discovered a shared love of Gareth Evans and that one of his dissertation advisors wrote a book with mine. Since I was new on the job market, he gave me some advice on my CV, which arguably led to the job I have now. After that I always hoped to run into him at more conferences and was lucky to do so once more at the Central in 2022, where he encouraged me in several of my projects in the course of regular conversation. He was perceptive, enthusiastic, unpretentious–and managed, I suspect, to help a lot of other people flourish. He was always talking about new ways to bring people together in philosophy and bring different kinds of philosophy into conversation. I’ll forever be inspired by him as an example of what a philosopher and human being can be.
This is such a sad news. Prof. Anand was a kind and generous person, a wonderful scholar, and always willing to engage with and guide young scholars. He was a friend of the philosophy community in India, and often collaborated with scholars here. My deepest condolences to his family and friends.
I was friends with Anand for almost ten years. We first met and bonded at an APA in 2015, where we drank whiskey and talked about philosophy in the hotel bar (a not uncommon occurrence that was reiterated several times, most recently in San Francisco in the spring of 2023).
He loved to talk about philosophy, which he always did without the slightest shred of egoistic attachment to his own ideas or animosity toward the ideas of others. With Anand, it was always about the ideas themselves. He had a pure love for philosophy that the vicissitudes of academia dim in the rest of us.
Anand was probably the most supportive colleague I’ve ever had. I could talk about how he organized a panel on my book at the APA in 2019, or how he encouraged me to submit my work in venues I consider above my station. I could talk about he encouraged me, along with his wife Manju Menon, to cofound the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, a society I hope to carry on in his honor with more events in the future.
I could talk about all that. But I wouldn’t be the only one. I’ve always known he was super supportive of others, but in the days since his passing, I’ve discovered that he was as supportive for many others as he was for me.
Anand was always trying to reach out and forge bridges between different colleagues and areas of philosophy. He often talked about how much he wished his colleagues in all areas of philosophy would walk across the hall at conferences and attend each other’s talks and engage with each other’s work.
I was lucky to be able to send him a brief video message before he passed away. I thanked him for being such a supportive colleague, a great philosopher, and above all an excellent friend and human being.
None of us are in this life forever, but I feel immensely grateful that Anand’s life intertwined with mine and so many others in the time that we had with him. Farewell, my friend.
Anand and I became friends after he wrote an article in 2013 engaging with a paper I had written the year before. I reached out to him after I had read it, with some notes of appreciation and some gentle disagreements, but from the outset our relationship was friendly and supportive on both sides. I’m grateful for how seriously he took my work at that early stage of my career–it meant a lot–and, further, for the way he used his talents as an analytic philosopher and comparative philosopher to advance the cause of Indian philosophy in the discipline.
Over the years we would keep in touch, sharing papers for comments or advice, and working on some collaborative projects. In our interactions, Anand was unfailingly humble and willing to learn just as he was creative, insightful, and bold in his thinking. One of his last published pieces was part of a collection that Malcolm Keating and I put together in honor of Stephen Phillips, happily bringing together some friends and shared philosophical passions a final time. He was a good person and a good philosopher, and he will be missed.