There are uses and abuses of class separatism. It draws clear lines of demarcation, helps sort the ideal from the material, and finds issues that cut across a lot of differences. But it gets abused, and the abuse is rooted in its mistake about relations of production. My contention, having done this assessment of class separatism, is that the…[Read more]

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from
other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in
UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise,
the REF.…[Read more]

Over the last 20 years the imbrication between capital and the university has grown much firmer. This
paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic
management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of
profit, value, and growth.…[Read more]

Philosophy is seen as a dry business. It is often considered to be the pastime of overread zealots, who are desperate to have some fixated world view. In the same vein, many have stereotyped Jean-François Lyotard to be just a postmodern thinker. Lyotard was definitely one, no arguing that, but he was more importantly a great philosopher. This…[Read more]

Book Review Truth by Alexis G. Burgess and John P. Burgess

Book Review Tragic Views of the Human Condition: Cross-Cultural Comparisons between Views of Human Nature in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy and the Mahabharata and Bhagavadgita by Lourens Minnema, Prabuddha Bharata March 2015

Søren Kierkegaard has left insightful and penetrating texts on the inner life. He gave context to contemplation on and surrender to God. The awareness of agency in a spiritual aspirant creates the obstacle of letting the grace flow freely into one. The lily of the field and the bird of the air breathe a freedom that the conscious agency of a…[Read more]

Book Review The Labyrinth of Solitude by K D Prithipaul

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