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Brief Lives

Anand Vaidya (1976-2024)

Manjula Menon on the short but full career of a ‘disciplinary trespasser’.

In a 2016 interview, my husband, the philosopher Anand Vaidya, reflected on his future: “I would like to see myself twenty years from now as someone who has pursued a deep engagement with core debates in analytic philosophy, especially the epistemology of modality, but also someone who has helped develop cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary philosophy in a serious way.”

Anand did not live to see those twenty years. He passed away in October 2024 at the age of forty-eight, after a battle with cancer. But in his too-brief life he fulfilled much of his vision.

I have written about my grief elsewhere; in this article, I want to focus on celebrating Anand’s many professional accomplishments. A self-proclaimed intellectual ‘trespasser’, Anand was never content to let philosophy’s subfields remain isolated, as he believed that rigid disciplinary boundaries hindered true understanding. In keeping with this principle, his work spanned multiple fields, including modal epistemology, Indian philosophy, experimental philosophy, philosophy of mind, and more recently, artificial intelligence, just to name a few.

Taking The Philosophical Path

Born in Chicago to Indian immigrant parents, Anand spent much of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, with frequent stints in Europe and India. Of these formative years, he wrote, “I made a few friends at my international school with whom I played football and soccer, jammed guitar in a heavy metal band, and rode my motorbike in the desert.” This early exposure to diverse cultures likely fuelled his desire to explore ideas from multiple traditions.

When the First Gulf War broke out in 1990, he moved with his mother to Southern California. For college, he first attended Humboldt State University, which he described as “one of the most beautiful campuses I’d ever seen, nestled deep in the redwood forests.” He transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, at the end of his sophomore year, driven by his interest in logic. He wrote, “I found myself attracted to the content as well as the method of doing philosophy. It felt honest: I was being encouraged to search for the truth, to be precise, and to challenge my classmates to present and defend an argument… I liked inspecting the deductive status of arguments: validity and soundness. I also liked thinking in terms of basic logics, such as first-order predicate logic. It didn’t matter what the arguments were about.”

Anand’s first philosophical love was modal epistemology, which concerns how we know what is possible and what is necessary. He wrote, “It was my interest in the work of David Chalmers on conceivability and consciousness that led me to pursue graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara” (‘The Story of One Male Asian American Philosopher’, 2020). After completing his dissertation on the epistemology of modality, focusing on the work of Stephen Yablo, David Chalmers, and Timothy Williamson, much of his later work explored how knowledge of essence informs judgments about what is possible and necessary (something’s essence is whatever makes it the thing that it is, without which it would not be that thing). He critically examined prevailing theories in the field, notably conceivability-based approaches, which argue that we gain knowledge of possibility by reflecting on what we can coherently conceive; and counterfactual approaches, which explain knowledge of possibilities as being rooted in the same cognitive capacities that allows us to imagine alternative scenarios to past events. He was also interested in how intuitions shape what we find possible or necessary, proposing a ‘disjunctive-social account’ of intuition-based justification in modal knowledge. This view emphasized that our intuitions about what is possible are not just private mental events, but are shaped by our social interactions and our shared language.

The Gettier Intuition is that someone who has a belief that is both justified and true that x is the case may still not ‘know’ that x is the case. Some people have this intuition, others do not, and its purported differing prevalence across cultures has been studied using statistical methods. Anand was fascinated by such studies, which spurred his research in experimental philosophy, which eventually led him to Indian philosophy. He then worked to integrate classical Indian systems of logic into contemporary philosophical discourse, particularly from the Ny ā ya school of around the sixth century CE, known for its rigorous analysis of inference and claims to knowledge. Leveraging Ny ā ya philosophy, Anand proposed a framework called Multi-Factor Causal Disjunctivism, which emphasizes the role of multiple causal factors in distinguishing between veridical (accurate) and non-veridical (inaccurate) perceptual experiences. He wrote extensively about similarities between the work of Ny ā ya epistemologists and the ‘knowledge first’ tradition advocated by the contemporary philosopher Timothy Williamson, which treats knowledge as basic, as opposed to trying to explain it in the standard philosophical terms of knowledge being ‘justified true belief’.

Anand also wrote and lectured about connections between Indian philosophy and what David Chalmers has called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Noting a resurgence of interest in panpsychism – the view that everything is conscious to some degree – he advocated for integrating insights from traditions like Advaita Ved ā nta and Yog ā c ā ra Buddhism into the discussion. In advocating for Indian philosophy, he wrote, “I do not want to imply that these traditions are better than other traditions. Rather, I cannot defend the idea that there is a principled reason to exclude them: neither their method nor their intellectual excellence seemed any different from what I had studied.” (‘The Story of One Male Asian American Philosopher’, 2020).

Anand Vaidya

Philosophy Through Science-Fiction

Anand was devoted to philosophy, and passionate about making it accessible. We also shared an interest in science fiction. Recognizing that both philosophy and science fiction engage in structured thought experiments, we, along with the philosopher Ethan Mills, co-founded the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society to investigate how far speculative fiction could be a legitimate way of doing philosophy. Although Plato banished poets from his ideal Republic, we wondered whether that was necessary. Indeed, from Arthur C. Clarke’s meditations on cosmic consciousness to Iain M. Banks’s explorations of artificial intelligence, science fiction has long wrestled with the sort of questions that occupy philosophers: What is consciousness? How do we know what we know? Are we alone in the universe?

Anand used science fiction to write about philosophy of mind, especially as it extended into AI. Self-aware machines like Data from Star Trek, Hal from 2001, or Roy Batty from Blade Runner, may still be far in the future, but AI capabilities are rapidly evolving. Anand argued that determining AI’s moral status is urgent as we move closer to artificial general intelligence or AGI (this is AI with general problem-solving capabilities). The traditional view is that having moral standing is conferred by sentience, including the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. Anand instead argued that possessing intelligence tied to preferences is sufficient for moral standing. Like the Star Trek crew, who are routinely tasked with understanding alien minds, he examined whether Large Language Models such as ChatGPT can possess mental states. He concluded that while they do not ‘think’ like humans, they exhibit a distinct form of cognitive behavior. Further, he argued that the output of LLMs might fit within Harry Frankfurt’s concept of ‘bullshit’, which differentiates lying (intentional falsehood) from bullshitting (disregard for truth). Under technical philosophical analysis, the question arises as to whether chatbots can be described as ‘bullshitters’. Anand also argued that by focusing on the cognitive aspects of emotions rather than their phenomenological (sense experience) or physiological (brain and body) correlates, AGIs could be said to have emotions – thus opening the door to the possibility of emotionally intelligent machines.

A Too-Brief Summation

Anand’s teaching philosophy mirrored his scholarly pursuits. As a professor at San Jose State University and a visiting professor at UCLA, he emphasized critical thinking and the importance of cross-cultural perspectives. He believed that exposing students to diverse philosophical traditions enriched their understanding and fostered a more inclusive approach to philosophical inquiry.

Anand was as passionate about life as he was about philosophy. Once a week, he would hurry to the farmers’ market to select the freshest ingredients for the meals he loved to cook. He played guitar often; it helped him relax. He was a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, and out of loyalty to a friend, a supporter of France for the FIFA World Cup. He had a rotating cast of favorite T-shirts, each carefully selected for its connection to his many interests. He walked almost every day in San Francisco, a city he loved and was grateful to live in. He took me hiking up mountains, through forests, to the rims of bubbling volcanoes, and across gleaming glaciers. He was a trained yoga teacher, and frequently attended musical performances. But what he loved most of all was people. He was a warm and generous presence, who listened to all without judgement, and who supported the striving of others with genuine enthusiasm. He made friends everywhere he went – friends whose lives he touched in profound ways and who wept when they learned of his passing. He was a special human being.

More than a prolific scholar, Anand was a weaver of ideas. He had a gift for spotting connections where others saw barriers, drawing together thinkers from disparate traditions and disciplines. He challenged philosophy to expand its horizons, and his ideas continue to trespass into new and uncharted territories, just as he would have wanted. He was also a warm, constructive presence, always eager to contribute, and enthusiastic to make genuine connections. His impact was not only in what he wrote, but in the communities he built, nurtured, and loved. His loss is immeasurable; but, I’d like to think, so is his legacy.

I will add a final note. Anand worked till the very end, and his work continues to be published posthumously. For those interested in his last works, updates will be available on his website, anandvaidya.weebly.com and shared through his social media at facebook.com/anand.j.vaidya.

Manjula Menon is a writer. She has degrees in astrophysics and electrical engineering and is the co-founder of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. She lives in San Francisco.