Sunday, April 25, 2010

Bring philosophy to the marketplace

[Whatever Indians may say about the depredations of British rule, the legal system is one gift the nation has taken to its heart. Indians are litigious like no other people that I have seen…
Some day India may have a political class with some semblance of morality. In a world like that, politicians will not be heading sports bodies but doing the job they have opted to do in the government or in the opposition. They may even live within the income they receive as parliamentarians. Think of that! Meghnad Desai Sunday, Apr 25, 2010 IE » Politics in command]

['Indian mathematics loved numbers'-ET Cetera 23 Apr 2010, Amrith Lal, ET Bureau
The Kerala School, as Joseph calls them, marks a continuity of scholarship in mathematics in India, which was believed to have declined after Bhaskara II in the 12th century. Joseph, who holds honorary appointments at University of Manchester, UK and University of Toronto, Canada, argues that the knowledge of the Kerala School travelled from India to Europe via Jesuit scholars and influenced European mathematics. In an interview with Amrith Lal, Joseph talks about the pluralistic origins of mathematics and how this science was practised in India, especially in Kerala. Excerpts: 
The Crest of the Peacock looked at knowledge traditions across the world. In A Passage to Infinity, you have focused on what you call the Kerala School of mathematics.

[The Crisis of Philosophy Inside Higher Ed - Jason Stanley - 5 Apr 2010

Philosophy stands apart from this emerging consensus about the purpose of the humanities. Its questions – which concern the nature and scope of concepts like knowledge, representation, free will, rational agency, goodness, justice, laws, evidence and truth – seem antiquated and baroque. Its central debates seem disconnected from the issues of identity that plague and inspire the contemporary world. Its pedantic methodology seems designed to alienate rather than absorb. Whereas humanists have transformed into actors, using their teaching and research as political tools, philosophers have withdrawn ever more to positions as removed spectators, and not of life, but of some abstracted and disconnected realm of Grand Concepts…
Logical Positivists prized the deliverances of mathematics and science (as did Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant). But nothing follows about a lack of political and cultural presence.] 

Philosophy and mathematics have umbilical links with law and justice, thus with a bearing on politics and culture. Savitri Era Party seeks to bring philosophy to the marketplace for an integral sociology to take off. [TNM] 

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