Book Review Social Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda by Amulya Ranjan Mohapatra

In this book, Muthuraj Swamy discusses how conflicts are usually caused by factors other than religious factors at the grassroots level, and how dialogue is an elitist phenomenon that does not percolate to the grassroots, who do not need it in the first place.

This book shows the importance of growing up and how childhood and adolescence is overrated. Basing on Rousseau’s philosophy Neiman shows us how it is important to understand the deeper aspects of life and to understand philosophy.

Noam Chomsky is undoubtedly one of the brilliant polyglots produced in the last century, who continues to engage critically with various issues that bother us today. In the masterly foreword to this book Akeel Bilgrami, a thinker and linguist, explains that this book is ‘a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language’ (vii). It is divided int…[Read more]

Psychoanalysis and its father in the West, Sigmund Freud, have often been seen as the antitheses of religion and faith. This book seeks to dispel this misconception and place Freud and psychoanalysis as hopes to the faithful and the hedonist alike. Ethics and morality do not get compromised and unethical and immoral behaviour do not get free…[Read more]

This book could be seen as a novel method of tracing the history of a scripture. Jacob P. Dalton does this by “tracing the vicissitudes of a single ritual system—that of the Gathering of Intentions Sutra (Dgongs pa ’dus pa’i mdo)—from its ninth-century origins to the present day” (xv). This tantra is referred to as the “root tantra” and i…[Read more]

In this bilingual edition with the original French, François Laruelle envisions a discipline of non-photography by concentrating on what photography is and not what it becomes. He emphasises the immanence of photography as opposed to its externality. He concludes that there is an ‘a priori photographic intuition’ and that a ‘photographic appara…[Read more]

Through this work, François Laruelle looks at non-philosophers from various angles. He seeks to look at them from a humane perspective and as ‘subjects of knowledge’ (25). He argues that ‘non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist’ (26).

François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy seeks to redefine the conventional modes of thinking, not just in the sphere of philosophy but also in the fields of aesthetics, religion, sociology, and other allied disciplines. In this volume, Laruelle questions the ‘fiction’ of photography by establishing that ‘photo-fiction is precisely the passage…[Read more]

François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy is necessary for the survival or popularity of philosophy according to Laruelle: ‘Philosophy can only really become “for all” or “popular” by becoming non-philosophy’ (cover). Non-philosophy is not no philosophy but a different approach to philosophising where philosophy is not the main thing but the ‘real’ is.

Review of the book ‘Intellectuals and Power’ by Francois Laruelle

Review of the book ‘Cut of the Real’ by Katerina Kolozova

Galloway critically examines how François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy subverts the digital question. Clarifying the philosophical nature of the digital concept, Galloway proceeds to show that non-standard philosophy is an attempt to come out of the authoritarian stance that traditional philosophy takes and to show that there could be a no…[Read more]

François Laruelle is a radical thinker, to say the least. He started the non-philosophy project several decades ago and developed it in five stages. Now, he prefers to call it non-standard philosophy. Laruelle’s thought and the treatment meted out to it by the academia brings to light the fact that even philosophy, which is supposed to be the vo…[Read more]

Extending his non-philosophical thought to examining possibilities of a redfinition of Marxism, in this volume François Laruelle shows that in the light of the apparent failure of Marxism or communism, we need to explore the ‘single cause-of-the-last-instance for this failure’ (12). Another reason for this failure could be, according to Laru…[Read more]

There are two kinds of academic writing, if we classify the work by the nature of the author’s expertise. The first one, the most prevalent, is the kind of writing that is born out of the scholarly work of the author and is primarily based on research and teaching experience. The second kind, comparatively harder to come by, is the writing of a s…[Read more]

Interreligious comparisons have been an interesting subject for both religious individuals and academics. The language of comparison has been contested by almost all who rely upon it, from some Western scholars who started such comparisons at the turn of the twentieth century, to phenomenologists and postmodernists. This range of disparate views…[Read more]

This book is the first of three volumes of ‘autonomous works, coordinated by the material of their themes and objects and unified by their practice of thought’, which François Laruelle calls the ‘Triptych’ (ix). Intended to be a philosophico-religious treatment of the ‘heretic’ question that theology and religious studies apparently raise but fa…[Read more]

This book is a collection of the English translations of François Laruelle’s writings, mainly from the first two stages of the five-stage development of his thought of non-philosophy. The tone of the book is set by the wonderful introduction by the editor, Robin Mackay, who brings out the dissatisfaction of Laruelle that propelled him to re…[Read more]

The argument against free will could as well have been eternal. In this short but incisive and analytical book, Alfred R Mele, a professor of philosophy, successfully and clearly critiques the rationale against free will put forward by psychologists and neuroscientists.