Hugo David

After graduating in philosophy and psychology at the Universities of Nancy and Paris 7, Hugo David specialised in philosophy (especially comparative philosophy) in 2002, and obtained in 2003 the French "Agrégation" in that subject, which he taught for about ten years in French high schools. In 2007, he joins the EPHE, and writes under the supervision of Gerdi Gerschheimer, first of all, a "Diplôme de l'EPHE" and, in 2012, his doctoral thesis on the linguistic works of the 10th-century Advaita Vedāntin Prakāśātman. Leaving his post as a philosophy teacher, he then devoted himself entirely to Indological research as a "Newton International Fellow" at the University of Cambridge, at the Institut für Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens in the Vienna Academy of Sciences, before joining the EFEO in 2015. Posted from January 2016 in Pondicherry, he is in charge of the direction of the Indology Department in the French Institute of Pondicherry for the period 2020-2022. Since 2016, he is the chief editor of the collection "Indologie", co-published by the IFP and the EFEO.

A specialist of Advaita-Vedānta, Vedic hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and the history of Indian linguistic thought, Hugo David approaches ancient Indian systems in their own terms, following their own foundations and presuppositions, and the logic of their historical developments. Recent research projects include a focused study of the second book of Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya (5th century) with the auto-commentary, a first critical edition of the Vyaktiviveka, Mahima Bhaṭṭa's ground-breaking work in the field of Sanskrit poetics, and a historical study of the genre of philosophical doxography in old Tamil.

Since 2018, H. David is also responsible for a large-scale preservation and cataloguing project of collections of palm-leaf manuscripts in the Indian state of Kerala.