Until the sixties of the previous century, there was some kind of consensus about the nature of scientific enterprise. One strand within it had to do with the nature of facts. One thought that scientists collected facts (data) and formulated hypothesis (or theories) to explain them. This distinction between theory and facts was seen as an absolute distinction: facts (or data) existed in Nature …
Is the Bhagavad Gita revelation? E.g. 15:15, rendered by one translator as “And I am seated in the hearts of all; from Me are memory, knowledge, as well as their loss; I am verily that which has to be known by all the Vedas; I am indeed the author of the Vedanta as well as the knower of the Vedas”.If nothing else, the authorship of Vedanta is what is revealed here. But the claim is there both to …
One has faith in God and, therefore, trusts that His message is also The Truth. That is to say, one should not predicate the attitude of having ‘faith in’ to the EI account directly. There is a very important additional reason for being clear about our terminologies. Consider the distinction between having no idea that the Cosmos is an EI entity and having an account that makes the Cosmos into …
X says that Christological dilemma is some kind of theological logic and suggests that ordinary Christians are not affected by this artificial problematic.
There are two issues here worth looking at separately.
Is the problematic artificial? Well, it depends. I am not claiming that every Christian (past, present and future) is aware of this problematic, of course. This is a general formulation …
What does it matter where they came from and how? Newton did not travel through the Cosmos and visit planets in order to formulate his theories of planetary motion. That guy did not even visit India to find out whether the naked fakirs levitate or not. With the proverbial falling of the apple on his head (this story is too beautiful to let go!), Sir Isaac made claims about gravitation and flatly …
Social issues, inherently, are neither paradoxical any more than they are contradictory. It is the formulation of these issues that gives birth to paradoxes, contradictions and such like. (For the simple reason that ‘paradox’, ‘contradiction’, etc. are properties of statements, not of objects and events.) If there is a ‘paradox’ of freedom, then it lies not in the situation where one tradition (or …
Each time I tell someone, whether in a one-to-one discussion or in a conference, “there is no religion in India”, I get the following answer: “Of course, that depends on how you define ‘religion’”. I answer as follows: “In that case, here is my definition: ‘Religion=what does not exist in India’. Will that do? If it is really a question of the definition of a word, why does one need to write such …
In many cultures, especially in the Indian case, it is important to understand that stories are not explanations. They are neither true nor false because they do not describe ‘factual’ events; they do not claim that they do either. Unlike the Bible, the Puranas do not have to be true or known to be true for them to play the role they do in the Indian culture. The Indian myths neither allegorize …
Religion lays claim to truth, both about itself and the Cosmos. It is true the way no other account (that we know of) is. However, religion also generates (or brings into being) a configuration of learning. That is, it enables a coordination of different learning processes into a configuration. A culture is such a configuration of learning.
Could religion be a neural disorder? I do not see how we …
A Disquieting Suggestion Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaced a book he wrote in the 70’s on oriental thought and moral philosophy titled Mysticism and Morality with the following words:
The factual beliefs (that the civilizations of the East) take for granted are …too alien to our (the West’s) representations of the World to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their …
[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107]
Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, the …
Though the book was published nearly two decades ago, Said’s Orientalism continues to be topical. Many have rejected the message of this work; others have attempted to develop its arguments yet further. This article will not be one more interpretation of Said’s book; after all, there are many such interpretations, including Said’s own. Instead, it probes the phenomenon of ‘post-Orientalism’. Even …
Introduction
Perhaps it is best that we begin on a personal note. Neither of the two authors of this article is a ‘specialist’ in the domain of argumentation theory. Even though we have picked up smatterings of logic, we are not professionals working on either informal or formal logic. One of us is a practicing anthropologist, while the other is oriented towards comparative anthropology. And yet, …
Consider, say, a ritual like sandhyaavandanam. Here are two extremes, when it comes to saying what it is: (a) one goes very deeply into what Mudras mean, which of the mudras occur in this daily ritual; analyses the praanayaama as it is taught; goes into what the Gaayathri mantra really means; and so on. (b) The other extreme is an ordinary Brahmin who performs all the prescribed actions without …
It is an event because the colonial consciousness that I am talking about comprises of multiplicity of actions executed by indefinitely many Indians over a long period. It is a process because colonial consciousness reproduces itself, colonial consciousness is transmitted from generation to generation and it is learnt. Consequently, we need to understand the mechanisms of this process and the …
Speaking of ’the greatest mystery of our humanness’, Sinari raises the following questions: “Why are we present in the world rather than not being there at all? Why are we present to ourselves as world-experiencers and world-explorers rather than being simply there as perhaps animals are” (p.1) In brief reply to his provocative paper, I would like to reflect on the nature of these queries and with …
When we speak about ignorance, we can do so in two ways. One is by talking about ‘how the world is’; the other is by talking about ‘how we think the world is’. Even though we could use both ways to characterize ‘ignorance’, they are not coextensive (or synonyms) because (a) they are about different things – in the first case it is about the world; in the second case it is about what we take to …
In this post, I want to reflect on what it means to access and think about experience. Perhaps, not so much on what these words mean but what is entailed by (or what happens when we indulge in) this kind of activity. I think the best way to begin this analysis is by asking the following two questions about an activity familiar to most of us: what do we do when we think about ourselves? Do we do it …
Experiences are structured differently in different cultures. We believe that it is possible to give a true description of this difference, at some level or the other, asa difference regarding the experience of time itself. Consider the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. One of the central notions in these traditions is that of temporality. That is, they believe that all events, …
Introduction
During the last decade or so, a new restlessness has begun to disturb the calm facade of the social scientific academia. As yet, it has no name. Better said, it has many names: from ‘reflexive’ to the ‘post-modern’. The ferment is not widespread, but the voices of discontent are coherent and articulate. The critical voices indicate the many kinds of dissatisfaction they have with the …
