In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates always pursues truth with others. Dialectics therefore is a communal inquiry that aspires to be collaborative, with various participants contributing to a better understanding of the truth. It requires people to reflect on their own point of view and then proceed to understand the viewpoint of others which hopefully leads to… Read More From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge
NB: The rebellion against reason, the cults of nostalgia or particularity are not new, these ways of thought have been with us a long time; and are a consequence of the divorce of reason from goodness, virtue, beauty and justice. Romanticism is a consequence of the elevation of scientific reason to a status above the… Read More The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms
Bharat Bhushan The protestors in the Parliamentary attack of December 13, 2023 were clearly naive, and their method patently criminal. But even while policing failures are examined threadbare, their political message should not be lost. Ignoring caste and regional affiliations, they just wanted to send a message to the entire political class about youth unemployment. They appear… Read More No jobs and a bleak future: Has the political class failed India’s youth?
These professors had to finish their doctoral research, write papers, present in conferences, and yet miraculously also had time for that extra reading that a student requested, or for lunch at D-School Canteen to give a serious answer to a question. Abinash Dash Choudhury Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the… Read More An Ode to the ‘Ad-Hoc’ Teachers of Ramjas English Department
‘Selfie-points’ in universities: What purpose do they serve? Bharat Bhushan The selfie is no longer dismissed by behavioural analysts as symptomatic of self-obsession or narcissism. Experts believe that selfies are also a way to connect and communicate with others. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, was a serious serial selfie-taker with world leaders during his… Read More University Grants Commission aiding the cult of personality
NB: So much for Ivy League education. Some life is more precious than other life. Some people have the right to defend themselves; while others, especially if backed by Uncle Sam, must not even protest whilst being slaughtered. After all, they’re just ‘human animals’. Your racist prejudice shines through the ivy. The statement of the… Read More The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza
NB: This a damn shame, even worse is that it has been going on for decades; and despite promises by the police and various administrations to educate the public and punish the offenders, nothing changes. Calling people chinki‘s and prostitutes because of the way they look is racist and misogynist. Those politicians who go on… Read More ‘What’s your rate’. Northeast women still have it bad in Delhi. Nothing has changed in 9 years
On grasping human things in human terms Wilfred M. McClay Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modelled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because… Read More The burden of the humanities
NB: A great scholar, a deeply humane person and an optimist of the spirit. This is sad news, but one must be grateful that she lived a long and fulfilling life. She and her husband Professor Chandler Davis were committed war resisters and anti-imperialist intellectuals. I salute them both; and offer my deepest condolences to… Read More Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94
By Maggie Hicks Dozens of George Mason University students and other community members, many wearing face masks, kaffiyehs, sunglasses, and all-black clothing, blasted rap music, pumped their fists, and chanted, “They got tanks, we got hang gliders! Glory to the resistance fighters!” The demonstration in Fairfax, Va., on Thursday afternoon, which grew to close to 100… Read More Heightened Security and Shouting Matches Animate Pro-Palestinian ‘Day of Resistance’
After the truth-shower 