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Tag Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy


Steven Pinker
RATIONALITY: WHAT IT IS, WHY IT SEEMS SCARCE, WHY IT MATTERS
2021

Pinker follows his other popular writings (on language, violence, the enlightenment), with a lucid account of the importance and astonishing lack of reason in today’s world. Elegantly written, with abstruse ideas clarified (the difference between Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence, for instance), with choice quotes, anecdotes, charts, cartoons.


Reviewed by: Vijay Tankha

Dev Nath Pathak
IN DEFENCE OF THE ORDINARY: EVERYDAY AWAKENINGS
2021

Dev Nath Pathak’s In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings is an inordinary demonstration of a routine exercise that most sociologists, certainly in their professional lives, claim an association with: sociological imagination. Pathak too informs us about the deep connections between his personal and the public but his concerns are routed in assuringly different ways. Indulging in a polemic against himself, the author invites his readers to undertake a not-so-usual reading of politics and philosophy of knowledge.


Reviewed by: Irfanullah Farooqi

Swadesh Deepak. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto
I HAVE NOT SEEN MANDU: A FRACTURED SOUL-MEMOIR
2021

There are few book reviews that can begin with a ‘must-read’ recommendation and this is one. The book is an intimate capturing of an author’s journey into the dark abyss of mental illness, his inability to comprehend his reality and the world, the journey to come to terms with it—finding his way back to his words—writing this book and some more plays and then getting lost forever. This sense of loss is the kind of foreboding throughout the book—the loss of one’s capacity to write, to express in words their pain, confusion and suffocation—the loss of loved ones to an illness they don’t understand, a loss of control over one’s actions and thought, a loss of respect—loss seems to be a theme entrenched in the narrative.


Reviewed by: Surabhika Maheshwari

Ashis Nandy
BREAKFAST WITH EVIL AND OTHER RISKY VENTURES: THE NON-ESSENTIAL ASHIS NANDY
2021

Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures: The Non-Essential Ashis Nandy is a collection of columns, essays, forewords to books, interviews, and lectures by Ashis Nandy originally published between 1975 and 2018. The book contains thirty-six chapters and is divided into five parts. In these texts…


Reviewed by: Swaha Swetambara Das

Ashutosh Shukla
TUMHARI JAY
2020

In these volatile times, when every word written is scrutinized for any hint of religious fundamentalism, it is difficult to assess a book like the present one. Its very title is bound to raise the hackles of those who read anything that has the word ‘Jai’ in it with the Pavlovian…


Reviewed by: Ira Pande

Hriday Narayan Dikshit
GYAN KA GYAN
2019

Gyan ka Gyan is a multi-nodal intervention in the academy of Vedic studies, or Vedic ontology to be precise.  The Vedas, Rigveda, Samveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, in that order, are one of the most ancient sources of knowledge. From the four Vedas essentially .


Reviewed by: Aditi Maheshwari-Goyal

Chaturvedi Badrinath/Shashi Tharoor
DHARMA: HINDUISM AND RELIGIONS IN INDIA/THE HINDU WAY: AN INTRODUCTION TO HINDUISM
2019

Hinduism is the oldest living religion. Like all statements about Hindus, this needs further and then further qualification. The Indic tradition (shorthand for Hinduism), as expected, provides it: neti, neti. It is not a religion, nor an -ism.


Reviewed by: Vijay Tankha

Jhilmil Breckenridge and Namarita Kathait
SIDE EFFECTS OF LIVING: AN ANTHOLOGY OF VOICES ON MENTAL HEALTH
2019

The edited volume is an anthology of twenty-four real-life experiences of mental illnesses survivors along with seventeen lovely poems and a little bit of art on mental health. At the outset, the editors explain the rationale for the title in their Preface.


Reviewed by: Chittaranjan Subudhi

Manu V. Devadevan
GOD IS DEAD, THERE IS NO GOD: THE VACHANAS OF ALLAMA PRABHU
2019

The title is a misnomer. This tantalizing title of a book of translation that is saturated with divinity is an invitation to the enterprising reader to explore what lies within and what lies beyond the imagined entity called ‘God’. I would like to begin my review.


Reviewed by: Vijaya Ramaswamy

Tulasi Srinivas
THE COW IN THE ELEVATOR: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF WONDER
2018

In the novel Nights at the Circus, set at the end of the 19th century in Western Europe, Angela Carter writes: ‘In a secular age an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax in order to gain credit in the world’ (1994: 16). Carter’s novel, which follows a colourful group of characters travelling from.


Reviewed by: Ankur Datta

Mahima Nayar
AGAINST ALL ODDS: PSYCHOSOCIAL DISTRESS AND HEALING AMONG WOMEN
2019

Issues related to women’s mental health have always occupied centre-stage attention. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The lived realities of women’s existence that highlight their subjugation and distress in a patriarchal order have been.


Reviewed by: Namita Ranganathan

Sarah Pinto
THE DR. AND MRS. A: ETHICS AND COUNTERETHICS IN AN INDIAN DREAM ANALYSIS
2019

Aside from the reflections of India’s first psychoanalyst, Calcutta-based Gindrasekhar Bose (1886-1953), made famous via his correspondence with Sigmund Freud, contemporary Indian psychoanalysts have been fairly unanimous in finding the clinical work.


Reviewed by: Amrita Narayanan

Sibesh Chandra Bhattacharya
EXPLORING AGENCY IN THE MAHABHARATA: ETHICAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF DHARMA
2018

Few texts in history have generated as much debate around philosophical and ethical issues as did the ancient Indian text named the Mahabharata. Its huge size, encyclopaedic nature, and openness in discourse has turned the Mahabharata into an archive of diverse thoughts and viewpoints prevalent in early India, alongside the extensive period of the composition of the text, ranging over a millennium if not more.


Reviewed by: Kanad Sinha

Shaj Mohan
GANDHI AND PHILOSOPHY: ON THEOLOGICAL ANTI-POLITICS
2019

The collected writings of MK Gandhi stretch over a 100 volumes. Prolific even for prolific writers, but for someone so politically active, this is not just phenomenal but incredibly so. Further, there are as many and more volumes about Gandhi’s life and thought, nor does there seem to be an immediate end to the discussion, debate and appropriation that Gandhi is subject to.


Reviewed by: Vijay Tankha
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ISSN No. 0970-4175 (Print)