Chief Guest Shri Pranab Mukherjee, Jury Chair Professor Amartya Sen, Dr.

Narayana Murthy,
Trustees of the ISF, it is with honour, pleasure and gratitude that I am here to accept the Infosys
Science Foundation Humanities Prize for 2015, a Prize that since its inception has been peerless
in putting research in both the sciences and the humanities at the centre of intellectual life in India.
I also want to pay tribute to the Murty Classical Library of India, which is a tremendous initiative
brilliantly run by Rohan Murty and Sheldon Pollock.
I wouldnt be standing here today were it not for the encouragement over many years of teachers,
colleagues, students and family. I was unbelievably fortunate as a doctoral student to be taken
under the wing of Padmabhusana Professor Bimal Matilal, and indeed by his whole family. He
envisaged for India a greatness that simultaneously embodies both the compassionate concern of
the Buddha and the formidable logical rigour of Dignga, rhara, and Raghuntha iromai. As I
sat by his bedside, and read with him ntarakita and Gaddhara, an entire world of Indian
genius merged in my mind with the sound of his faltering voice. He located himself simply in a
parampar, yet in reality he was engaged in a profound act of transformation, transforming the
tradition of scholarly inheritance into a modern vehicle for intellectual exchange. So Im very
privileged that his wife Karabi has been able to travel from Kolkata to come here tonight. Matilal
drew great strength from the friendship and intellectual comraderie of Sir Richard and Lady Kate
Sorabji, who Im honoured to say are also here. I have known Richard since the time I began my
career in philosophy, and he has been a mentor and an unwavering support on every leg of the
journey that has brought me here.
My colleagues in India, who have been more like family to me, have done the most to keep my
love for philosophy alive when sometimes it has felt like a struggle. I should just mention the
incomparable Madhucchanda and Manipida Sen, whose father, Pranab Sen was, along with Daya
Krishna, one of the greats of the philosophical scene, and Franson Manjali, Heeraman Tiwari and
Nirmalya Chakraborty, and also Prabal Sen, a truly inspirational teacher of the Sanskrit
philosophical tradition.
This is the first time the Infosys Prize in the Humanities has gone to Philosophy, and so I thought I
would say just a few words about Philosophy as a modern discipline of active research. There
have been great changes in the field of Philosophy over the last forty or fifty years. Thanks in part
to increasingly strong ties with the empirical and logical sciences, philosophers now have at their
disposal a powerful set of conceptual tools with which to study all that it is to be human and the
place of human beings in the world. Ironically, in achieving these great advances, contemporary
philosophy is just catching up with the rigorous logical and scientifically grounded traditions of
philosophical inquiry that have flourished in India for two millenia, and the insights and discoveries
of our forebears are now starting to feed into modern research programmes in the field. I see
Philosophy beginning to emerge as a truly global area of research endeavour, and that is hardly
surprising because ideas do not carry passports, and theories about what makes us human dont
respect national borders. So Philosophy is becoming more pluralist and cosmopolitan, and India,
which already has some very fine institutions for philosophical research, including the IIAS in
Shimla, the IIT departments, and established as well as newly formed centres, and also thanks to
the astonishing theoretical riches of its deep intellectual history, must inevitably be at the vanguard
of this new emergence. So I hope that this Infosys Prize will shine a fresh spotlight on all the worldclass philosophical research that is already going on our country.
Ill just conclude by thanking my late father Puranmal, my brother and sister, Robindra and Anita,
and my partner Masha, for their love and support.