You say: “If ‘caste’ or ‘jati’ has the same status as alumni associations and similar social groups, with their varying practices, it seems we are prepared to say that ‘jati’ has no special place in the Indian society in the same way that my alumni association has no special status in Indian society.” This sentence is the problematic one.
First of all, it does not follow (either empirically or …
I would like to pick up the thread on ‘the caste system’ and begin at the beginning. Let us find out what we are discussing about and disagreeing with.
Assuming for this entire post, ‘caste’ is an English word for ‘Jati’, the first question is:
1. Are there Jati’s in India?
Yes, of course, there are. No one is denying this obvious fact.
2. Is there a system of Jati in India?
This question is …
Today, both in India and abroad, we see the emergence of a new intellectual trend: based on painstaking research, to write an accurate history of India. What is new about this approach? In one sense, as I shall explain in this article, this attempt is not novel; in another sense, which too shall be explained, there is something very new in it. I shall talk about both in the course of answering the …
Before deciding about whether or not Vivekananda was ethnocentric, jingoistic or even plain intolerant, one has to understand what Vivekananda was saying. In doing so, the interpretative “principle of charity” requires us to render him maximally consistent.
Consider the title of this thread: “All religions are true”. Spelling-out Vivekananda’s stance regarding this theme presupposes the ability …
When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was, is and shall be. So, when I say that religion is such an entity, namely, it claims that it is the word of God and that it claims to be unconditionally true and that it is about the Cosmos, I am accepting the self description of religion. …
When we consider Paul Hacker’s story on ‘inclusivism as a typically Indian thought form’, all we can conclude is that he has used a typically Christian thought form to understand an aspect of the Indian cultural traditions, which he is unable to understand because it is completely different from what he knows. Hacker’s inclusivism is merely an attempt to strip the following Christian account from …
Opening a dictionary to find out the meaning of an English word might indeed be an elementary student’s choice, but, if used as a methodology for settling scientific and philosophical discussions, I am afraid, it is a rather poor choice. Imagine a physicist living around the turn of the last century doing something similar when Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity. “Oh! I say,” we …
If we want to grasp the nature of the discussions in the Indian traditions, there is much we need to do beforehand: (a) identify the entity they were talking about; (b) identify the specific questions they were answering; (c) identify the generic questions that defined both the outlines of the acceptable answers and the formulation of the specific questions; etc. (The ‘cetera’ indicates that I do …
Consider the question: “why superstition?” Our problem lies in circumscribing this notion itself: is it something we should use to characterize beliefs, or attitudes, or theories or actions or all of them? Our linguistic usage allows it mostly of ‘beliefs’ and to the act of believing: to believe that walking under the ladder brings bad; to believe that vampires exist and walk as ordinary humans in …
According to your account, Vedanta claims that the world is an illusion and that only the Brahman is real.
If the world is an illusion, Vedanta has to deny the reality of the world. To it, in the way you construe Vedanta, the world is the empty set. That is to say, all experiences are on par because they are all illusions. One cannot distinguish between experiences unless one introduces the notion …
A few points about ‘self’ and about what I have said and have not.
Comment: “Say, Mr. X made 1 run, 2 runs, 3, 4, n, and a total of 50 runs. Now to say “I made 50 runs” is to assume that, Mr. X who made 1 run, 2 run, etc. is linked to each other, and this organism , in this sense, has a unity. This unity is what Balu calls rubbish”. First, I do not call this ‘unity’ rubbish. Second, this is a …
Paraphrasing Feynman: “the answers proposed like counting angels that can dance on the head of a pin are trivial.”
I am not in the least impressed by (in fact, I am disgusted by and contemptuous about) the attitude of the likes of Feynman. Here is one reason why: I too have a criticism of (some) social sciences and (some) aspects of the western philosophy. I too consider that some of these social …
When we provide explanations, we should also look at their contrastive nature: why do puja to cows and not to buffalos? The problem in this case, however, is this: the explanation one gives about a tradition (you will soon see that one of the problems is to identify the explanandum itself) must also incorporate this contrast. Someone like Kanch Ilaiah has answered this question thus: the puja to …
I have discovered that there is a fundamental difference between arguments and theory-building. As a philosopher, I have come to think that one could argue almost any position, within reasonable limits. Mostly, they consist of putting across plausible, or even logically possible considerations in order to show that either some point is plausible or that it could be true. Up to a point, arguments …
What Brig SK Malik says supports my thesis about terrorism, instead of making it redundant, as one suggests. Here is how.
In war, killing the enemy is considered a moral and justifiable act, even though ‘killing a fellow human being’ is considered immoral. (This includes many provisos, including that the war is justified.) That is to say, a theory of just war (and warfare) justifies what is …
“What is the relationship between religious intolerance and the acts committed in Mumbai?” This is an empirical question at many levels. If some or another religion is used to defend the attacks in Mumbai, then it depends very much on the kinds of justifications used; the kind of theology in question; the relationship between the belief-states of the perpetrators and their motives; the …
The first thing to notice is that I use the word “ideology” in a technical sense, which is both counter-intuitive and, for the time being, idiosyncratic. It is the first, namely counter-intuitive, because, as I use it, my use of the word does not refer to any theory, or to sets of beliefs, or to what one believes in. Normally, as we use the word in English, ‘ideology’ has multiple meanings: a …
Increasingly, the phenomenon of terrorism has begun to occupy the media, politics, and the lives of people in different parts of the world. The more the attention, however, the less the clarity: what kind of a phenomenon is terrorism? What generates it, what sustains it, and what allows it to expand on an ever-increasing scale?
This lack of clarity has to do with the fact that our ideas about …
Is bhakti what the bhaktas do, or are people bhaktas because they ‘follow’ (bad choice of words, but there is no other way to put it) the ‘bhakti marga’, or is bhakti neither of the two? I mean: is the bhakta moved because, for example, the child who stole the butter happens to be the Kannan, or because the child, who also happens to be the Lord, stole the butter? If it is the first, it is …
The first thing is that my book is about the western culture and a specific religion, which brought the former forth. It is only indirectly about India because I interrogate the way India was looked at by the western culture. I proffer some hypotheses about India there by consciously remaining within the western framework.
You are right in saying that I deny that ‘religions’ called ‘Hinduism’, …
