A01=Joydeep Bagchee
A01=Vishwa Adluri
Author_Joydeep Bagchee
Author_Vishwa Adluri
Category=QRDF
Category=QRVC
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Product details
- ISBN 9780199931361
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 231 x 150mm
- Publication Date: 24 Jul 2014
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities.
The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth.
Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.
Vishwa Adluri has a PhD in Philosophy from the New School and a PhD in Indology from Philipps-Universität Marburg. He is Adjunct Associate Professor of Religion at Hunter College.; Joydeep Bagchee has a PhD in Philosophy from the New School and is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Freie Universität Berlin.
