So You Want to Teach Some Indian Philosophy? An article on the APA blog by Jonardon Ganeri
From the APA’s blog: In a previous post, Peter Adamson predicted that non-European philosophies are destined to enter the mainstream of the philosophical profession. He highlighted three avenues of progress. One is that departments will hire more experts, people who know the Continue reading
Link here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/minds-without-fear-philosophy-in-the-indian-renaissance/
The 3AM magazine continues with its new series (1, 2, 3) of interviews of philosophers working in Indian thought, in an interview with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (at the Pavlov Institute, Kolkata) about his work on Cārvāka. In this interview, Bhattacharya discusses the Continue reading
Link here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/taking-philosophy-forward/#! Thanks to Ayon Maharaj for the tip.
From the publisher: Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of classical Indian texts that deal with bodily subjectivity. Examining four texts from different genres – a medical handbook, epic Continue reading
Ayon Maharaj, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press, 350 pages, 978-0-19-086823-9. The book will be published on October 1, 2018. For more details and a pre-order discount, please Continue reading
Insightful analysis on limitations of Western Indologists and problem with Murty's Classic Indian library by Prof. @MakrandParanspe published with @SwarajyaMag @davidfrawleyved https://t.co/kLH4cM1QFq
https://twitter.com/apsinghvisen/status/1052537701646442497?s=19
Who do you think is “best” equipped to understand or interpret a cultural text? Someone to whom that text is a living presence, who embodies the understanding of it, or someone from another culture or tradition, to whom it remains foreign, if not remote? Also, there’s a huge difference in hiring the “best” talent and ceding control. Consider the Library of Tibetan Classics (LoTC) as a case in point; the supervision, control, and interpretation is firmly in the hands of traditional Tibetan scholars, guided by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, even if many Westerners are involved.
Don’t you think American and European Indologists have their own agenda in studying Indian culture? ... Moreover, many Orientalists were also missionaries or Christian propagandists. Their professed or covert aim was to show Indian scriptures and traditions as inferior. In fact, some of the most prestigious chairs in Sanskrit, such as the Boden Professorship at Oxford, established in 1832, had as one of their aims the specific intention of converting Indians to Christianity. This doesn’t mean that I want to dismiss the contribution of Western Indologists, only to underscore that their purposes might have been different from ours.
One might even concede that many classical texts need to be read against the grain to liberate competing claims to legitimacy, whether social or spiritual. But what Pollock does is to brand mainstream Hindu tradition, from the Vedas to the present day, what he calls the “shastric” tradition, as inherently repressive and unjust. To “save” those it has oppressed over centuries, he, messiah-like, will reinterpret Hindu texts in such a way as to liberate us from its clutches. In other words, he reads Hindu texts in an overly political manner and his interpretations contribute to a negative and skewed view of who we are. His is a scholarship with a definite prejudice; it clearly militates against the professed neutrality and non-political object of the Murty Library. Amazingly, Sanskrit itself, a language he has specialised in, is considered a vehicle of oppression and exclusion in his writings, though he also asserts that it is a “dead” language.
Who do you think is “best” equipped to understand or interpret a cultural text? asks @MakrandParanspe and adds his preference. But the answer is not simple since most texts have already been translated in different languages and interpreted in diverse ways https://t.co/7aNhj4Cfng
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1053241473527799809?s=19
#SamirShukla : This new jurisprudence that is all abt celebration of individuality & freedom of choice is born in West under a very specific condition that can b understood only by looking at history of Western civilisation of last two-three hundred years | #Sabarimala https://t.co/qqsHewKy0J
Have you considered the possibility that everyone concerned is speaking the truth but selective truth ? Now put everything together. No inconsistency whatsoever and a complete picture emerges. Everyone was playing high stakes game here. Gambler’s instincts
https://twitter.com/sarkar_swati/status/1053146775492665345?s=19
#_Me_Too_ | @Swapan55 : In the present climate, an American journalist, Lionel Shriver, has written: “... we are throwing knee-touching into the same basket as rape, which does a grievous disservice to mere knee-touchers and rape victims both | #_S_D_G_ https://t.co/5prNZX14s4
This article in today’s ToI by Dr Arghya Sengupta is obligatory reading. His critique of Justice Chandrachud’s bid to Americanise the Indian Constitution is significant. Those who talk glibly of Constitutional patriotism must consider his arguments https://t.co/lCgyoTHnFY
https://twitter.com/swapan55/status/1053112404815446016?s=19
The Constitution dharma: Intention to protect religious freedoms of groups, no matter how small, is unarguable: Arghya Sengupta That there is something deeply iniquitous about not allowing menstruating women to enter Sabarimala temple to pray to Lord… https://t.co/hmfNbEShXi https://t.co/pxn3NeWGcD
#_Sabarimala_ | #ArghyaSengupta : Importing an evocative Jeffersonian phrase and making it the founding faith of our Constitution makes for terrific reading but poor reasoning ... 2/2 https://t.co/p0VWoR1LUI via @TOIOpinion
But courts of law are not moral guardians of society. Quite to the contrary, they are expected to judiciously determine fundamental questions on the basis of the Constitution.
A reading of our Constitution demonstrates that different provisions of the Constitution serve different but equally significant objectives – liberty, equality, fraternity, diversity and so on. Equally, the Constitution speaks of duties of individuals and responsibility of the state to distribute resources to serve the common good. Limiting the breadth of the Constitution to a single virtue – dignity – is an instance of uni-dimensional holism, an entirely discredited method of constitutional interpretation.
By failing to recognise the multi-dimensional moral outlook of the Constitution, Justice Chandrachud has made the majestic Indian Constitution look like a pale replica of the American one. The Indian Constitution is not just a charter of individual dignity. It is a recognition of India’s natural plurality, a dream of a humane state that strives towards creating a more equal society, a prudent practical assessment of where the writ of the state should stop, and an embodiment of the vastness of our civilisational ethos.
Western ethical tradition is distilled through four thousand years via the Arab route and Chinese tangent. Saussure's contribution to linguistics based on his study of Sanskrit however inaugurated postmodernist worldview leading to much nuance. Sri Aurobindo's lens is the safest. https://t.co/4o2iTLjcpw
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1053236644692852736?s=19
#_R_J_ | @TheJaggi : The real problem in the #_Sabarimala_ case is not the so-called lack of “constitutional morality” where some women r excluded, but the larger exclusion of Hindu institutions from the protections available to them under articles 25-30 https://t.co/RXncXsc6lw
https://twitter.com/indiaonthe_move/status/1053244601778135040?s=19
#_R_J_ | @TheJaggi : Maybe, if Justice Chandrachud had put more faith in the innate plurality of the Indian Constitution than in the American one, he may have come to a different conclusion in the #_Sabarimala_ case https://t.co/McjLIR2sNn
#AravindanNeelakandan : Let it be clear that the Indian state has to exist for the welfare of more than one billion Indians and without the Hindu nation, the Indian state will cease to exist, and implode ... 1/2 | #_Sabarimala_ https://t.co/4lGllvnoIR
#AravindanNeelakandan : Balkanised India, a long time goal of Marxists and other ‘breaking-India’ forces, will transform every linguistic state into killing fields without Hindu spirituality uniting us – and #_Sabarimala_ symbolises it ... 2/2 https://t.co/kD7TVXEJtm
#AravindanNeelakandan : But th sad truth is that institutions of th Indian state have been increasingly becoming Hinduphobic. #_Sabarimala_ movement is th spontaneous response of the Indian nation against this Hindu hatred that is getting institutionalised
https://t.co/kYEX7079lT https://t.co/JsfDKR2GjN
#AravindanNeelakandan : In the case of Sabarimala judgement, with all due respect to the SC, there is a dangerous streak of judicial overreach which confuses imposed uniformity with gender justice and goes against the spirit of this land | #_Sabarimala_ https://t.co/kYEX7079lT
Happy birthday, @PhilipPullman! Here are a collection of all the @five_books interviews in which his books have been recommended: https://t.co/a61dHJbKWA
NEW interview: “That is what the debate about the administrative state is ultimately about: its dryness belies its importance to how we govern ourselves.” Paul Tucker, leading economist at @Kennedy_School, picks the best books on the administrative state https://t.co/f5ly9mWI9l
It is like “basic structure”. It means whatever the weighty minds and intellectual giants want it to mean from time to time, depending on their biases or mood. https://t.co/qInOeQwnvJ
https://twitter.com/RMantri/status/1053131543370055680?s=19
The Constitution is not "supreme." This is the same kind of BS pushed by those who claim some "Holy Book" is supreme because "god" said so, no matter how vile the consequences.
The PEOPLE are supreme. The French people tore up the Constitution several times to make a new one.
https://twitter.com/sankrant/status/1053145288012050434?s=19
Unfortunately, not even agreed by people of the nation. The people never ratified the constitution. The Constituent assembly was also never elected by the people of independent India.
https://t.co/glI2s29Fk6
The Ayodhya land dispute – preliminary background research https://t.co/cQpBYGpUsM
“The task of righting past wrongs is generally doomed; far better to have the self-confidence to take pride in one's past history no matter how ignoble it might seem by contemporary standards.” – Ramesh Thakur
“Indians of all faiths must accept the reality of their history, cherish it, and take care to preserve it instead of engaging in efforts to rewrite it. Trying to undo the past and remedy wrongs that go back several centuries in time will only wreck the present for all concerned”
Just like advertising increasingly elbows out news in newspapers, religious activity is encroaching on real estate more are more. Almost all places of tourist interest and natural beauty are cruelly defaced by ugly structures or statues. Reliance on physical symbols should halt.
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1053261673555877888?s=19
On his 108th birth anniversary, here’s a look back at Indian-origin astrophysicist and Nobel prize winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's life and times: https://t.co/CqqqqUoXKu https://t.co/4KH6V23N2a
Gandhi: a fox or a hedgehog? https://t.co/3jNue9v66Z
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Evolution: Generally there is a problem with the modernist concept of "cause", as Ram has pointed out in his "independent co-arising". I (as with Rosen) still use the word, but in two much more liberal ways, as the ontological aspect of entailments on the one hand and of relations on the other. The , further, I recognize inverse entailments to complete the holon, or 'causal' definition of the holon. There are difficulties with explaining evolution on strictly bottom up causes. Causes that operate from System to component, to provide attractive ends, are also involved. A good analogy comes from ecology and the same principle must also occur in evolution. It is the ecological niche.
This is not just an abstraction from the requirements of an organism to define its habitat. That bottom up causality is true but its not a complete picture. Once niche conditions exist, they form a system attractor that selects dynamics in such a way as to favor evolution to realize the niche. In other words the boundary conditions are important too because they scale and condition the bottom up dynamics in a much more specific and rapid way than in purely random mutation and selection. This is the proper answer of a biologist to an intelligent design creationist. They are identifying a genuine weakness in evolutionary theory, which is why the debate gets hot, but they have the wrong solution by invoking an intelligent being as such.
By properly entailing both bottom up and top down causality we place that intelligence in nature itself, and then it is biology again. The case I am describing has lots of evidence for it, but evidence falling outside of current bottom-up theory escapes consideration. Odling-Smee's work on niche defining phenotypes is one such line of evidence, but there is much more. It is ot sufficient to say that the environment provides selection of species because it also selects the dynamics by which certain features develop. For example, thinking off the cuff, only certain kinds of processes can happen in an ocean environment, so it is not the case that all general forms develop and then are selected, there are many specific pathways of development that are pre-selected and these can account for the more rapid time scale and even bridging selective gaps that ID theorist legitimately focus on (but have the wrong solution for).
In any case the traditional idea of cause is too limited as it tries to be singular, whereas there are in reality multiple causes operating simultaneously.
Final assertion on no need for finality: As my labeling suggests your final statement denying the need for higher causes is self contradictory. That denial has been in place for hundreds of years and is now ruining not only science but its value to society. The denial itself is an end-motivated and end-directed selection. No need for me to go into volumes of evidence for why such top-down influences are important in systems, you have provided the strongest case here! 🙄 But I realize it is hard to accept given our intensive conditioning for generations to hold it in question. After realizing the fallacy of that conditioning, it literally took me 20 years to feel comfortable again, as I had started out as a staunch mechanist.
John
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