Meet Dr. Shyam Ranganathan of the Yoga Philosophy Institute

The Yoga Philosophy Institute, a scholar-practitioner initiative, is founded by Dr. Shyam Ranganathan. Dr. Ranganathan is a field-changing researcher, scholar, author and teacher of philosophy, and an expert in the neglected traditions of Indian moral philosophy, which covers practical questions of how to live, what to aim for, and what we should value—including Yoga. Unlike many gurus of yoga and the Indian tradition, and unlike most western academics writing on the Indian intellectual tradition, Dr. Ranganathan is a trained scholar and researcher of philosophy and is author, editor and translator of numerous peer-reviewed scholarly works.

Dr. Shyam is also a lifelong practitioner of Yoga having inherited these practices from his family and ancestors.

Dr. Shyam’s Areas of Expertise

Ethics/Moral and Political Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Thought
Philosophy of Religion, and
Asian Philosophy (especially South Asian philosophy)

He has written widely on Indian philosophies of meditation (Yoga, Buddhist and Jain). In his introductions to philosophy and critical thinking, Dr. Ranganathan draws liberally from Indian, Chinese and Western traditions to teach the discipline of philosophy.

Dr. Shyam started Yoga Philosophy in 2019.

Dr. Shyam’s Scholarly Journey

Dr. Shyam began an undergraduate degree in philosophy (in 1992) and was impressed by his professor’s insistence that he and his classmates base their writing on the classics by staying close to the text. But he noticed that all the texts he read were in translation and so when he was studying Plato, for instance, he wasn’t actually staying close to what Plato wrote, for he spoke a different language.

First research question: how does anyone succeed in translation so that when we teach a text in another language, it’s the same thing? He would end up answering this question in his PhD on translation and philosophy. This would distinguish him as one of the global experts on the topic.

After a BA and MA in Philosophy that was primarily on the Western tradition, the future Dr. Shyam went on to do an MA in South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. There he began his learning on South Asian history, and languages.

He was surprised at the myth that South Asian philosophers didn’t have anything to say about ethics, and they were completely religious: that’s a story one would create about a tradition that one wants to colonize.

With his beginning knowledge of philosophy and his research into primary texts in the original languages, he wrote his MA thesis, which would become his first book: Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy. It was published by the Indian Indology Press: MLBD.

In this book he argued that South Asian Philosophers were obsessed with ethics, and their word for the topic is “dharma.”

It was the first book on the topic in decades. It established the future Dr. Shyam as one of the very few philosophers writing on Indian Ethics all together, and he is still the only one who specializes on the classical tradition.

The future Dr. Shyam wasn’t happy with his argument in his first book. It relied upon assumptions about language but also translation that he started to think were untrue. He thus pursued the issue of translating moral discourse, in his PhD dissertation, Translating Evaluative Discourse: The Semantics of Thick and Thin Concepts (2007).

This was a PhD mainly in Analytic (English language) philosophy but also Continental philosophy. It scoped over and made contributions to Translation Studies.

This dissertation showed how translation works in general, and how it works specifically in the case of philosophy.

By the time Dr. Shyam successfully completed his PhD he had worked on and published a translation of the Yoga Sūtra, from Sanskrit, by using his advanced research on translation that he was working on in his PhD.

The Yoga Sūtra is the ancient, formal account of the philosophy of Yoga, and is required reading in most accredited Yoga Teacher Training programs.

Most scholars in the Yoga Studies environment confess to not being able to understand the Yoga Sūtra, and so they try to read it by classical commentaries. Overtime, Dr. Shyam came to appreciate that his confusion is in part related to a profound ignorance of what philosophy is.

And this translation, in contrast, is produced by the same principles that can be used to translate any philosophical text.

As Dr. Shyam enters the academic work force as a scholar and teacher of philosophy and South Asia in (2008), he comes to appreciate that the various forces of oppression that colonized the globe operate to confuse and suppress knowledge of philosophy from colonized traditions.

In this time he comes to formulate his principled distinction between interpretation (explanation in terms of beliefs) and explication (explanation in terms of logic, reasons and arguments).

Suppression of knowledge and oppression is a result of interpretation. When people interpret, they project their beliefs on to what they are trying to understand. And the result is no understanding but confusion.

Dr. Shyam also came to appreciate that this distinction between interpretation and explication is at the foundation of the Yoga tradition (YS I.2-4).

In 2017, after years of working with scholars, Dr. Shyam publishes his cutting-edge, edited volume, the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics. It was the first volume that explicated Indian moral philosophy.

At the same time, he edited the first-year MA course in Ethics, for the ground-breaking, Government of India’s effort to make materials for graduate education available online. It is the only source of resources that gives equal attention to Western and South Asian moral philosophy.

Dr. Shyam was also working on a monograph about Hinduism. Lots of people think that there is such a thing. But research shows that the word isn’t Indian and the idea that there is such a religion was invented by the British as part of their colonial administration.

And what that category does is it takes the whole history of South Asian philosophy, which disagrees about everything, and then tries to present it as a religion.

But what Dr. Shyam shows in his publications is that this is as old as the West—the tradition of philosophical thinking going back to the ancient Greeks. This tradition, invents the idea of “religion” as part of its colonial rollout to prevent people from thinking about philosophy that can criticize oppression.

But then, due to colonization, people start to believe the story of there being such things as religions, and they don’t look to study the ancient philosophy.

Dr. Shyam’s wife and partner, a perennial source of good ideas (who told him to start teaching the Yoga Sūtra back when he was a graduate student) told him to start sharing his knowledge online.

In 2019 Dr. Shyam starts Yoga Philosophy (yogaphilosophy.com).

In 2024 it is renamed the Yoga Philosophy Institute