Faculty Associate
shyamr[at]yorku.ca
Contract Faculty
Department of Philosophy, York University
Research Keywords:
Ethics; political philosophy; philosophy of thought, philosophy of language and translation; Asian philosophy; yoga
Research Region(s):
India, South Asia
Research Diaspora(s):
Shyam Ranganathan’s dissertation in philosophy, “Translating Evaluative Discourse” (York 2007), was in ethics and the philosophy of language and the issues explored were inspired by the widespread view among Orthodox Indologist, which he discovered during an MA in South Asian Studies, that Indian thinkers (despite having extensively discussed practical problems) have no tradition of moral philosophy. He is translator from the Sanskrit and commentator of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (Penguin 2008), editor and contributor to the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics (Bloomsbury 2017), author of Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 2007, 2nd ed. 2017) and Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge 2019). His research spans moral theory, translation and reason, especially at the intersection of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism. His recent contributions on translation include “Context and Pragmatics” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, Philip Wilson, and J. Piers Rawling eds. (Routledge, in press). In York's Department of Philosophy, he teaches ethics and political philosophy, the philosophy of language, and Asian philosophy.