Erudition

I keep teaching my students the need to unlearn: unlearn the desire to ‘show off’ their erudition; unlearn shallowness and so on. I am more than convinced that whatever we have learnt about human beings can be formulated in a jargon-free language and in a simple manner. There is no need to appear ‘mysterious and profound’; nor is there a need for exhibiting one’s erudition or ‘critical …

Here is the question: How would one translate the word ‘God’ into, say, Sanskrit? Now, the answer has to satisfy certain conditions because the question also meets certain conditions. Let me say very clearly what all these are, so that the playground and the rules are transparent and favour no one party in the dispute. I propose we accept the best theory of meaning that exists in the market place. …

Why understanding bullshit is important? Three reasons: (a) there is a very frequent use of the word ‘bullshit’ (mostly in my posts); (b) bullshit has been tied directly to truth in the literature on the subject, (c) far more important is the fact that it is much more connected to knowledge than has so far been acknowledged. In this post, the focus is on the third reason. I First, an …

Christianity (to some extent Judaism), presented an idea, unknown to the world in which it grew, namely the Pagan world of Rome. The idea was that human beings are creatures of God and that they belonged to His domain. He was the dominus or the Lord of the domain. As a result, human beings should not be arrogant, but must be humble instead. (As the ‘Book of Job’ in the Old Testament makes it …

There is, on the one hand, the intellectual tradition of expressing opinions and points of view. Here, as it suits thoughtful minds, one tries to express ideas carefully and in a nuanced fashion. Recent peer-opinions are taken into account; generalizations are avoided; the attention is on the specific and the concrete; and, where possible, one’s ideas are either founded upon or embroidered by some …

The first point is the difficulty involved in specifying what the “real meaning of an experience” consists of. Asking an insider would not help us here: the insider may or may not know what the real meaning of his/her own experience is or even how to go about putting it in words. Assuming that the first problem somehow gets solved, the second problem lies in the multiplicities of such meanings: …

Someone, let’s say her name is Wendy Doniger, comes along and sniggers ‘when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus’. I do not identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. I say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do. Here is what I say: “I am doing Puja to Shiva.” No discussion about ‘Lingam’ or its many meanings. This is a wrong way …