Samuel Wright

Prof Samuel Wright is an Associate Professor at Plaksha University. He is an intellectual historian of South Asia. Much of his research explores connections between philosophical and practical life. His first book, A Time of Novelty: logic, emotion, and intellectual life in early modern India, 1500-1700 CE (Oxford University Press, 2021), argues that novelty was a primary concern of 'new' nyaya philosophers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India employed to mark the boundaries of a philosophical community in both intellectual and emotional terms. The book received a First Book Prize from the Ludo and Rosane Rocher Foundation.

His current research interests include the historical study of time and, increasingly, climate studies. In addition to several articles, he is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Earth and Planet in Climatic Reflection, that explores the implications of the climate crisis for philosophical and historical thought by leveraging resources from nyaya philosophy, phenomenology, and biology.

He has published in journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Indian Philosophy, and Indian Economic and Social History Review. He also serves on the advisory board of Journal of South Asian Intellectual History.

Samuel Wright’s research areas are the history and philosophy of South Asia from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and, increasingly, the philosophy of technology and climate philosophy.

His current projects include a special journal issue, ‘The Daily Life of Time in South Asia, 1300-1800’, which seeks to explore how time and temporality are employed to effect certain relations between people and sustain institutions. And he has forthcoming publications on topics such as the history of philosophy in eighteenth-century South Asia and how the unit of the hour became the standard unit of time in South Asia.

He is also working on two books. The first, Technological Time and the Making of Simultaneity, explores how contemporary technological society exerts a temporal pressure on thought. And the second, The Metaphysics of Climes: earth and planet in climatic reflection, explores the disclosure of earth through climes and the danger of such disclosure failing.

His first book is A Time of Novelty: logic, emotion, and intellectual life in early modern India, 1500-1700 CE (Oxford University Press, 2021). And he has published in venues such as Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Modern Asian Studies.

At Plaksha, he regularly teaches ‘Facing Earth: introduction to planetary humanities’ and ‘Early Modern Indian Philosophy’. And he directs the research project ‘Absence: a metaphysics for the world’.

Many of his publications are available on his Academia.edu page.