Book Review, Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility, eds. Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith, Prabuddha Bharata March 2015

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.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, is credited with having rekindled the ancient Indian discourse of an interrelation between spirituality, religion, and politics. This has been mostly studied from the perspective of faith or spirituality. The last five decades or so have seen rising scholarship on the not-so-spiritual…[Read more]

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Nileen Putatunda is a bright young man with a facile pen that betrays his erudition. A humble soul, his writings touch one’s mind. This latest addition to his many poetry collections surprises even the reader who follows Putatunda’s writings. This volume contains more than ninety poems with the date and place of the creation and occasional cre…[Read more]

This book is about the coming together of two great polyglot geniuses who were also autodidacts, who were concerned with the other’s nation, but though glorified in their own countries, remain relatively unknown in the nations of the other. Their friendship is, in many ways, a representation of the friendship of the East and the West, albeit m…[Read more]

Translating a Sanskrit text is a highly challenging task. The difficulty only gets compounded if it is a Vedic text, because the Vedas use a Sanskrit that is quite different from the Sanskrit used in other literature. To translate the Rig Veda into English requires great patience and great scholarship. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton…[Read more]

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]

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]

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.

A book designed for children with attractive illustrations, this volume brings out the spirit of India through the recounting of an incident that happened in India; where a boy—not wealthy of resources—returns a wallet he found and cannot even think of accepting a reward for his good act. Awarded the ‘Mom’s Choice Best Educational Picture Book’,…[Read more]

The very thought of death brings to mind fear and the prospect of facing something unknown. The average person is seldom prepared for death. Encountering death is the worst nightmare for most, only this is the last nightmare. We have funny notions about death. We feel it is alright if a person dies at an advanced age, particularly if without any…[Read more]

François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy adopts an approach that is not just novel but abstruse and not based on anything that philosophy has known till now. That is why it becomes necessary that the concepts are defined and what could be better than the proponent of this philosophy, Laruelle himself, working to this end.

Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata is the outcome of a series of three panels dedicated to the renowned scholar of the Mahābhārata, Alf Hiltebeitel, organized by his favorite disciple, Vishwa Adluri on the occasion of Alf’s seventieth birthday. Per its author “whatever is found here [in the Mahābhārata] may be found elsewhere…[Read more]

Published in the series Posthumanities, this book presents the author’s attempt to analyse François Laruelle’s Non-philosophy. He does this by a non-conventional method, circumventing the orthodox philosophical ways, and following the framework of Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions. Precisely because of this novel approach, Maoile…[Read more]

Religion Without God by Ronald M Dworkin Book Review Prabuddha Bharata May 2016