Volume 9, Number 10 October 2015 thereasoner.org ISSN 1757-0522 Contents Editorial 82 Features 83 News 85 What’s Hot in . . . 86 Events 88 Courses and Programmes 88 Jobs and Studentships 89 Editorial Welcome to the October issue of The Reasoner. When I was invited to be a guest editor, I knew immediately whom I wanted to interview. Bir- git Kellner is Chair of Bud- dhist Studies at the Univer- sit¨ at Heidelberg, in the Clus- ter of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context. We first met in summer 2010 at the conference “Modern Formalisms for Pre-Modern Indian Logic and Epistemol- ogy” hosted at Universit¨ at Hamburg. Birgit attended as one of the experts in the field, while I attended as one of the novices hoping to learn more, because what little I knew made me realize that developments in medieval Western logic—my speciality—seemed like they had more in common with the heavily pragmatic and epistemological developments in me- dieval Indian logic than they sometimes do with modern West- ern logic. Through discussion during and after the conference, Birgit and I realized that our interests and expertises dovetailed nicely, and the result was that I got to spend nearly two years in Heidelberg doing truly interdisciplinary work, bringing to Birgit’s expertise in Sanskrit and knowledge of the medieval Indian texts my knowledge of contemporary logic and argu- mentation theory. One of the most important lessons that I learned during my time in Heidelberg is that true interdisciplinary research and collaboration doesn’t come without a lot of background work putting together the right infrastructure and the right people. One of the most difficult parts about bringing together people from disparate research areas—even when they are brought to- gether by a shared research interest such as argumentation and reasoning—is that before any sort of collaborative research can even begin, everyone must reach a common vocabulary, so that the group doesn’t end up speaking at cross-purposes, or frag- menting into subgroups of people of like background. There are many different steps that can be taken to built a structure within which interdisciplinary collaborative research can take place, but one of the simplest and most basic is to simply provide contexts where people can start to develop that shared vocabu- lary, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. That is the not-so-secret agenda of my choice of interviewee. Many readers of the The Reasoner wouldn’t know a pram¯ an . a if they stumbled over one in the street; and yet, anyone interested in the epistemological aspects of reasoning will be interested in reading about ‘means of valid cognition’. And it is my hope that anyone interested in valid means of cognition will, by the end of the interview, be at least curious to read more about the developments of standards of good reasoning and argumenta- tion in the medieval Indian tradition, and maybe the next time the reader comes across pram¯ an . a she can at least nod in ac- 82