LIFE & CAREER - FIELDWORK & WRITING
Frits Staal 's life and career have always been eventful.
Now transplanted to a forest in the Chiang Mai hills, his writings and lectures have become more wide-ranging. Creativity thrives on specialization, yet he is convinced that the distinctions between letters, sciences and other man-made disciplines are arbitrary. The seeds for these outlandish beliefs were planted during WWII in his native Amsterdam where he attended The Barlaeus Gymnasium, called after Caspar van Baerle whose Inaugural Lecture on Logic of 1632 was on Mercator sapiens, "the learned merchant." That legendary institution taught Biology, Chemistry, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Latin, Mathematics and Physics with optional Hebrew and Italian, to which Frits added Arabic and where he fell in love with a part Indonesian student who excelled at gymnastics. At The University of Amsterdam, he combined Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy with Philosophy, specializing in Greek Philosophy and Mathematical Logic; and played violin and viola in the student's orchestra.
Halfway through his graduate studies, a scholarship of the Government of India took him to India for three years of Indian philosophy at the University of Madras, where he obtained a Ph.D., and at Banaras Hindu University. At Mylapore, he studied PËÙini's Sanskrit grammar with a Pandit and in the old city of VËrËÙasÌ, nibbled at Navya-NyËya logic under the tutelage of another. Indian hobbies included martial arts, Vedic recitation, chant and ritual. The combination of PËÙini and Logic opened the door to modern linguistics, first at the International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science at Stanford, later at MIT.
In the mean time, Staal had moved from Amsterdam to London where he taught Sanskrit for three years at the School of African and Oriental Studies. Professorships followed in Indian Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philosophy at Amsterdam, Indian Grammarians at MIT, and finally Philosophy and South & Southeast Asian Studies in two departments at Berkeley. After retirement he moved to Thailand, having long predicted that civilization would return to Asia under the intellectual guidance of India and China.
FIELDWORK & WRITING
Staal's earliest and rarest recordings of Veda recitation and chant were made during a ride across South India on an old Royal Enfield. On journeys from California to India, he surfed in Hawaii and visited Japan, China and the countries of Southeast Asia. He trekked in and across the Himalayas, to Zanskar, Ladakh and Tibet. But his chief activities have always remained swimming and writing. Among more than fifteen books are the two volumes of AGNI, The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, published in collaboration with two ritual experts, C.V. Somayajipad and Itti Ravi Nambudiri (1983); Universals. Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics (1988); and Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (1989, paperback 1993). 150 articles on Sanskrit, philosophy of language, history of science and other topics include "The Sanskrit of Science" (1995), "Artificial Languages Across Sciences and Civilizations" (2006) and "Artificial languages between Innate Faculties" (2007), all in the Journal of Indian Philosophy. He has just completed Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals and Insights, published in March 2008 by Penguin INDIA. See the Table of Contents.
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