How to Philosophize in the Age of the Apocalypse

In the contexts of the madness of unreason that has gripped the world which has given rise to global diseases, environment disaster and unending wars situated in what this book calls the “Age of the Apocalypse”, this book argues for a philosophical rethinking of our contemporary human condition. The leitmotiv of this book is that fundamentalists have taken hold of world governments placing their apocalyptic idea of the “end of the world” at the base of their political ideology, displacing thus peace for violence, democracy for authoritarianism and human reason for mytho-poetics. Scanning the terror of the corona pandemic along with the discontents of liberalism which have given rise to violent right-wing ethno-nationalist movements all over the world, coupled with the failure of 20th century socialism, in the form of Stalinism, which has given rise to Putinism and the old czarist idea of Great Russian Imperialism, the book talks of the necessity of going back to philosophical reasoning to understand this Age of the Apocalypse.

Drawing on popular culture, history and politics the book examines what it is to philosophize in our unhappy times. This accessible volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and philosophy, as well as the general reader.

Murzban Jal is Professor and Director at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune, India. He was Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla and an Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) Senior Fellow where he worked on the ethnography of the makings of a minority community in India. He is author of The Seductions of Karl Marx (2010), Zoroastrianism: from Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. (2012), The New Militants (2014), Why We Are Not Hindus (2015), What Ails Indian Muslims, ed. with Zaheer Ali (2016), Challenges for the Indian Left, ed. (2017), In the Name of Marx (2018), Zarathushtra and the Inmates of Paradise (2018), Yusuf and Zuleika. The Return of the Despot (2019), The Prison House of Alienation, (2019), Theory and Praxis: Reflections on the Colonization of Knowledge, ed. with Jyoti Bawane (2020) and The Legacy of Karl Marx (2020). He has also published more than hundred papers in national and international journals.