Philosophers do do a lot of suppressed or unexpressed spiritual practices

Responses to "Prof. Reddy is a visionary who dreams of the unification of India and Pakistan"

koustav mukherjee January 22, 2013 at 9:04 am unification of Indian subcontinent has to be done. it is required to make India a superpower. Almost 90 percent of our present problems will be shorted out by the unification of India. Unification of India should be done on a urgent basis.

Md. Zahidur khan February 12, 2013 at 3:15 am Unification is a reality and once it will be done must. Fact is that when. Because partition was done based on some illogical matters and political failures and for some greedy persons. The result is not good enough for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. So coming generation must reunified for their existence or hoping to be great power or from realization that unification lead them nothing than chaos.

Some thoughts on Darwin Day : Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan

Every fundamentalist evangelist, a Wahabhi or an evangelical Christian or an ISKCON devotee, attacks evolution because it is a strong rebuttal to a literal interpretation of the scripture. If one part of the scripture – particularly one as central as the creation of the universe and life – becomes poetic and symbolic, then so does every other part of the scripture. Every part becomes subject to interpretation as per the inner spiritual needs of the individual. That is the last thing that a Wahabbist – or, for that matter, any religious fundamentalist – needs. If the Garden of Eden is only a poetic metaphor then what does that make of a hell fire and if I am to spread my religion by means of the fear of eternal damnation, what does that make of my evangelical career?

Hence the fervent attempts to reject evolution… Then there are also fundamentalist of the Indic variety who oppose evolution, on both theological grounds like ISKCON and because it is a ‘western’ import… Later Jesuit and anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin speculatively and geologist Vernadsky more emphatically ponder over the subject of how human evolution is qualitatively different and give us the concept of ‘noosphere’. And in Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’, evolution becomes an epic song of spiritual odyssey. In the poetry of Tamil poet Bharathi are lines which are artistic premonition of Gaia. All these show what theory of evolution can do to a culture, when embraced as a worldview and science – it at once broadens the canvas of human understanding and internalizes the spirituality. Let us just imagine: If every seminary, every madrassa, every Veda-padasala, were to teach its students evolution, how would their worldview change? 

ABA Journal - Feb 1962 - Page 155 Vol. 48, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view In his stimulating book, The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller emphasizes the importance of values in these words: Our business as rational beings is not to argue for what is going to be but to strive for what ought to be . . . It is this pursuit of truth ...

The Nonstyle of Misknown Nonnaming: A Response to Anthony Paul Smith’s The Misknown Desire of the Philosophers: On Evaluation and Hermeticism from An und für sich by joshua ramey

The tense relation between philosophy and hermeticism (increasingly, in my work, “hermeticism” is a generic term for the “spiritual sciences”) is a kind of double-cross. There is a kind of conflicting and twice-over short circuit between necessity and contingency that binds and blocks these two levels or modes of apprehension. On the one hand, philosophical concepts are grounded or founded upon a putatively universal appeal, an appeal to what would be or might be necessary for anyone with reason to assent to. On the other hand, there is the contingency of the perspective from which any such an appeal is made. I have argued in the book that philosophers themselves do a lot of work (and have a lot of work done to themselves) at the level of their perspective, having it shaped by a distinctive but often suppressed or unexpressed spirituality, a set of disciplines or practices that inform and potentially transform their explicit or stated concepts. (This is, incidentally, what the entire opening of Deleuze’s book Nietzsche and Philosophy is cryptically about).

Roman Markets and Polanyi's Pessimism from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

I have expressed my criticism of Polanyi’s denial’s that markets were important features of classical societies, long before they became dominantly familiar in the modern period… Polanyi wrote during the 2^nd world war and had a pessimistic outlook. Those developing countries that have and are now breaking through to and beyond the $1 a day income levels or the bulk of their populations – elites in all human societies known to mankind have always done better than majority of their populations in all economic systems – have or are now experiencing the positive effect of markets on their desperate situations. 

These are the consequence of the only Great Transformation that matters: the raising the living standards of the desperately poor by growing their market economies. The angst felt by intellectuals in their comfortable circumstances at what is happening is vulnerable to the question of what do they suggest that is practical as a workable alternative, given the experience of actual collapse of 20^th-century socialist non-market experiments?