This article discusses Buddhist apologetics in Tibet by examining the formation, revision, and reception of the most renowned literary apologia ever written in defense of the Old School of Tibetan ...Buddhism: Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen’s early 17th-century magnum opus the Thunder of Definitive Meaning. It reconstructs in broad strokes the history of the Thunder’s reception from the early 17th century to the present and relates this to details in different versions of the Thunder and its addendum to shed light on the process by which this work was composed and edited. By considering this work’s peculiar context of production and history of reception alongside passages it presents revealing how it was conceived and revised, this analysis aims to prepare the ground for its study and translation. In so doing, this discussion attempts to show how a broadly historical approach can work in tandem with a fine-grained philological approach to yield fresh insights into the production and reception of Buddhist literary works that have important ramifications for their understanding and translation.
In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about ...emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire's work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter's work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a 'thing', i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire's defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation.
A series of principles can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad implications for individual and societal achievement. This book explores the development of these ...principles and demonstrates how their application can lead to greater intellectual productivity, a more fulfilling existence, and a more advanced society.
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim
theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in
the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and
his son and ...successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively
influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West
Africa.
Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad
al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical
network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their
understanding of "the realm of the unseen"-a vast, invisible world
that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible
world-Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a
set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world
and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and
invisible realms. They called these practices "the sciences of the
unseen." While they acknowledged that some Muslims-particularly
self-identified "white" Muslim elites-might consider these
practices to be "sorcery," the Kunta scholars argued that these
were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their
ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the
Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm
of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the
Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic
sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses
of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written
devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by
scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies,
Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most celebrated and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature for his philosophical work, and his ...controversial ideas about time, memory and life shaped generations of thinkers, writers and artists.
In this clear and engaging introduction, Mark Sinclair examines the full range of Bergson's work. The book sheds new light on familiar aspects of Bergson's thought, but also examines often ignored aspects of his work, such as his philosophy of art, his philosophy of technology and the relation of his philosophical doctrines to his political commitments. After an illuminating overview of his life and work, chapters are devoted to the following topics:
the experience of time as duration
the experience of freedom
memory
mind and world
laughter and humour
knowledge
art and creativity
the élan vital as a theory of biological life
ethics, religion, war and modern technology.
With a final chapter on his legacy, Bergson is an outstanding guide to one of the great philosophers. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, it is essential reading for those interested in metaphysics, time, free will, aesthetics, the philosophy of biology, continental philosophy and the role of European intellectuals in World War I.
This essay introduces the collection of articles contained in this special issue, explaining their necessity and contextualizing them within the historiographical debates around "ancient theology" ...and "civil religion". It does so by referring to well-known influential figures in Renaissance and Enlightenment studies such as Daniel P. Walker, Frances A. Yates, Charles B. Schmitt, Eugenio Garin, Cesare Vasoli and Franco Venturi, as well as to more recent studies such as that by Dmitri Levitin. It further provides a brief overview of each contribution and places the special issue within the disciplinary context of global and comparative intellectual history.
If Indian intellectual history focussed on the nature of the colonial and post-colonial state, its interaction with everyday politics, its emerging society and operation of its economy, then how much ...did/ does North-East appear in this process of doing intellectual history? North-East history in general and its intellectual history in particular is an unpeopled place. In Indian social science literature, North-East history for the last seventy years has mostly revolved around separatist movements, insurgencies, borderland issue and trans-national migration. However, it seldom focussed on the intellectuals who have articulated the voice of this place and constructed an intellectual history of this region. This paper attempts to explore the intellectual history of Assam through understanding the life history of three key socio-political figures – Gopinath Bordoloi, Bishnu Prasad Rabha and Chandraprabha Saikiani. Their engagement at the turn of the twentieth century with ideas for the future North-East region in general and Assam in partcular is parallel to the formation of the Indian nation state. Research on the writings and works of these socio-political figures is analysed to address what North-east history can contribute to the intellectual history of India and how essential is it in the field of indigenous studies?
In this paper and a second part (to appear in the next issue of
Library & Information History
), an historical account is provided of the origins and development, since the 11th century, of Nordic ...systems for library classification — i.e., schemes for the classification of the subjects of books and other library resources, both so that those resources may themselves be arranged in orders that are helpful to readers, and so that the entries and records that describe those resources in catalogues and bibliographies may also be arranged in helpful ways. The focus of the account given in the two papers is on the structure and content of the top level of each system; it is assumed that such structure and content serve as direct evidence, both of the thinking of system constructors about the ways in which fields and disciplines are related to one another, and of the constraints under which library users reach an understanding of the nature and scope of the ‘universe of knowledge’ represented by their library's collections. The history of library classification may thus be treated not only as a central aspect of library and information history, but also as an important branch of both intellectual history and cultural history. In this first part, the history of library classification in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland is outlined; the second part covers Sweden and Finland, and presents a synthesis of findings that focuses on a dichotomy between the plurality of classification schemes existing prior to the ascendance in the 20th century of the American Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the uniformity that characterizes current conditions.
The letters between Feng Zikai and Master Guangqia after 1949 in socialist China complicated interaction among religion, the self, and the world, and during this period waves of literary and artistic ...practices emerged that sought to identify individual options in the face of the atrocities. Feng's religious-cultural practices, overseas interactions, and his letters in the 1950s-1970s in my paper would be regarded as a set of values or a structure of feeling that registered a social episteme. The years 1949-1975 were a period when the cold war took place and Feng kept close relationships with intellectuals from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. This paper examines him in the transnational framework, and studies communist cultural and diplomatic policies as well. Therefore, this paper will focus on the letters between Feng and intellectuals from abroad, to explore the issue of how the religions, overseas publications and cultural practices helped Feng Zikai expand his ways of culture expression. Besides, this paper intends to investigate how Feng succeeded in retaining the continuation of Master Hongyi's religious thoughts in socialist China during the 1950s-1970s.
During the height of Muslim power in South Asia, Muslim nobles of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) patronized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language, including ...the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and numerous other works. In Translating Wisdom, Shankar Nair reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations, traversing an exceptional linguistic scope including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian materials. Using the 1597 Persian rendition of the Sanskrit Yoga Vāsiṣṭha as a case study, Nair traces the intellectual exchanges by which teams of Muslim and Hindu translators, working collaboratively and drawing upon their respective religio-philosophical traditions, crafted a novel lexicon with which to express Hindu philosophical wisdom in an Islamic Persian idiom. How did these translators find a vocabulary through which to convey Hindu, Sanskrit articulations of God, conceptions of salvation and the afterlife, Hindu ritual notions, etc., in Islamic Persian terms? How did these two communities of scholars devise a shared language with which to communicate and to render one another’s religious and philosophical views mutually comprehensible? Translating Wisdom illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars found the words and the means to put their traditions into conversation with one another, achieving a nuanced inter-religious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past, but also its present.
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