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Concept(category)

Translation, Interpretation and Culture: On the disingenuity of a comparative theology

Dec 23, 2013 hipkapi
Check Balu’s paper on comparative theology, and in particular Francis Clooney’s: Translation, interpretration and culture: on the disingenuity of a comparative theology
concept(category) published theory-ladenness translation
Francis Clooneyreduction

Intercultural exchange of categories

Apr 30, 2013 hipkapi
What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories from one culture into another culture. But what is important about these shifts in meaning? What exactly is the problem in introducing the category of religion into India or …
Christianity concept(category) Sarah secular

Translation or Theoretical Dispute: electron, dharma

Apr 1, 2011 hipkapi
In our daily life, we hardly pause to reflect upon many problematic things that we routinely assume as self-evident. Such an attitude is useful since it allows us to focus on other things that occupy us at that moment. One such attitude is not to bestow too much care on how we use language: we routinely speak of similarity in meaning, identical concepts, exact and accurate translations and so on. …
concept(category) translation explication

Colonial Consciousness and Sanskrit Concepts

Mar 25, 2011 hipkapi
Many are concerned that English translations of some words from native languages distort their meaning. If we restrict ourselves to terms like ‘Deva’, ‘Dharma’ and such like, the worry is not just that their translations distort the meaning of these words (as we use them in our native languages) but that they suggest something (by way of reference and meaning) that does not even exist in these …
Balagangadhara colonial consciousness concept(category) translation

How Indian reformers understood Protestant Reformation?

Mar 25, 2011 hipkapi
In the second half of the nineteenth century, some western-educated, Bombay intellectuals came together in the Prarthana Samaj (inspired by Keshub Sunder Sen of the Brahmo Samaj). Perhaps the best known members of the Prarthana Samaj were Mahadev Govind Ranada and Narayan Chandavarkar (the Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University). Both reformers advocated what they literally called Hindu …
concept(category) Gelders

Bankruptcy of postcolonial intellectuals and their defense of secularism

Mar 23, 2011 hipkapi
We have developed partial explanations of why the secularism debate in India takes such peculiar forms and why otherwise intelligent people talk nonsense here. But we don’t do so by pegging our use of the word secularism “onto Balu’s theory about the nature of religion and how that entity religion behaves in the world” and then expecting that other people do the same. Let me quickly repeat our …
concept(category) Jakob secular

Fallacy of Equivocation: Indian Secularism

Mar 16, 2011 hipkapi
While reading Shabnum Tejani’s *Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (*2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform debate on secularism. This is a combination of the old claim that ‘secularism’ has acquired a different meaning in India and a general theoretical point: ‘secularism does not have any essence or universal meaning, …
concept(category) Jakob secular

Why use Indic categories to describe the world?

Mar 16, 2011 hipkapi
The issue is simply this: why use Indic categories to describe the world? What is interesting or important about this goal or venture? This, as I said, is the issue but we need to do some amount of thinking before we can identify the real question. That is so because there is a lot of deadwood floating around that makes navigation difficult. So, let me begin the process of clearing some of the …
Balagangadhara concept(category)

Fuss about Indic categories II

Mar 16, 2011 hipkapi
Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which one can), these usages do not violate the primary distinction between a word from some natural language and its meaning. Consider a classificatory scheme, say, cubes. Here, ‘cube’ is a word, it …
Balagangadhara basics concept(category)

Fuss about Indic categories(concepts) I

Mar 16, 2011 hipkapi
Let me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories. Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’. All these sentences have the same meaning, namely that it is raining. Or it could also be said that they all express the same “proposition”. So, “meaning” and “proposition” are used as quasi-synonyms; and …
Balagangadhara basics concept(category)

Meanings and Historical Context: the arguments from Indian scholars –S.N.Balagangadhara

Mar 4, 2011 hipkapi
Consider the thought that ‘meanings’ (leave aside the distinction between words and sentences on the one hand and concepts and categories on the other) do not exist outside historical contexts. What exactly does this thought say? Begin with ‘historical context’. Either every situation that an individual human being finds himself is a ‘historical context’ (because human beings are always ‘in a …
Balagangadhara concept(category) criticism secularism

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