Chairman Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning. Actually I’m the odd man out. We have success stories. We have spiritual leaders; we have an extraordinarily organizational leader in front of us. And now I have to do an exam. You see, normally I take exams in the university. Now I have to do an exam. The exam is this I must move you from these wonderful stories, success stories, good stories, to …

It is advisable to get into a discussion about this question only after one knows what ‘supererogation’ means and how it has been discussed for centuries. In the Greek ethics (especially as Aristotle formulated it), the notion plays a very crucial role without it being related to a normative sense of duty. With the Catholics, especially as Aquinas gave expression to it, a normative notion of duty …

When you provide a moral criticism of someone, you are saying that such a person is morally wrong. If you bracket, for a moment, my writings and talks on the subject, then you see that no moral criticisms are possible without using a normative language. About realizing moral ideals: do you know any way of showing how some or another event in the world is not an ‘imperfect’ realization of the …

Note: For a broader application and context, please read this paper: translation, interpretation and culture The word ’temple’ is not used in English to refer to a place where false gods are worshipped. It is used to speak of “the temple of Solomon” (the king Solomon of the Jews) too and there is no suggestion in the western culture that the Jews worshipped false gods. Your friend is providing you …

9.32 Bhagavadgita māṃ hi pārtha vyapāśritya ye ‘pi syuḥ pāpayonayaḥ striyo vaiśyāstathā śūdrās te’ pi yānti parāṃ gatim The situation is a bit more complex. The word ‘yoni’ here does much more work than one assumes. All the four are born from ‘Yoni’ but yet are distinguished in terms of punya and paapa. The last two are earnt by the organism in question: ‘svayaarjita’, suggesting that being a …

(a) Paolo Friere, a Brazilian educationalist, has spoken about such a phenomenon at length in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He calls it as an ‘internalisation of the oppressor by the oppressed’. Whether we use Paolo Friere’s terminology or the much later one of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, the problem is the same: both name the phenomenon without explaining it. In and of itself, not such a big problem …

Perhaps, one of the ways to test whether your search is taking you in the right direction is by seeing whether it solves a well-known paradox, or explicates it in a novel way. If after research, your hypothesis leads you to a well-known discussion in theology (but lacks the latter’s sophistication), then you could be on an uninteresting track. In certain phases of thinking, unbridled speculations …

Let us suppose that some school or another in India also prescribes uniform to its students. A Sikh boy and a Muslim girl enroll. They wear the colors of the school, including the right colored turban (or, if the Sikh kid is too young, his hair tied up in a knot) and the right-colored head scarf. From what I know of the Indian schools, most schools (including the fellow-students) would let the …

We can all accept the fact, I suppose, that some thing or another is a religious symbol to someone when s/he belongs to that religion whose symbol it is. In this sense, the Cross (for a long period of time), the figure of the Prophet Mohammed (also for a long period of time) and the star of David (in the course of this century) are symbols that carry religious significance to the Christians, …

It would be interesting to answer the question of whether or not The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a religious story by testing against ‘religion is an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos’. Does the Lord of the Rings give an account in which the causal and intentional explanations for the happenings in Middle Earth fall together? One of the problems in testing a scientific theory and …

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 …

I was expecting you to show me where the reasoning I formulated goes wrong , but you do not do so. The analogy you draw, I am afraid, does not quite do the job you want it to. One can easily hold the following two beliefs (your example) without any fear of contradiction: (a) There is only one way to Bombay (this is it) and (b) There are many ways to Bombay (this is one of them). The ‘how’ of it …

This article on Sulekha says: ut there can be no doubt that for the past thousand years at least the caste system has been a great nightmare for the majority of our people and continues to be a great bane of hindu society as well as hinduism today. When you write this article on the caste system, I do want you very much to make clear where your certainty regarding the nature of the caste system …

Firstly, you want to know whether there is anything intrinsically wrong with performing idol worship the way it is with robbery. Let us assume that we agree we know what robbery is and that it is intrinsically wrong. We need to make these assumptions because (a) in all probability, the robbers do not see anything intrinsically wrong in the act of robbing; (b) even then, some of us might not be …

To help you think through the problem you “whether Christians can get enlightened”, try using this analogy. Something, let us call it ‘daffodil’, fascinates us. Let us also assume that a great deal of concern and interest is expressed about it. Consider two scenarios now, each of which testifies to our fascination. The first scenario is this. There is versification (call it ‘poetry’) and …

Original. [ Appeared in Christendom en filosofie : opstellen over wijsbegeerte, wereldbeeld en wetenschappen van het antieke christendom over Nietzsche tot fundamentalisme vandaag. p.51-82] In this article, we would like to reflect upon the contemporary relevance of the encounter between ancient Roman culture and Early Christianity. There is a reason for choosing this theme. Today, a few heathen …

This post will use an imagery as its organising thread, which tracks the search for enlightenment in terms of notions known to us from our secondary and higher education. If we consider the search for happiness in these terms, then the ideas expressed there could be reformulated thus: as human beings, almost all of us would like to be literates or would like to have a primary education. This is …

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. …

This one begins to reflect about the principle of charity in relationship to the current US President, Donald Trump (from now on, Trump). As you might know, the principle of charity has been formulated in different ways by different people. (Even the first page of a google search of the word ‘principle of charity’ allows you to access many of these documents quickly.) This post will stick strictly …

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 …