Leviathan contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken

Desiderius Erasmus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

His time in England was fruitful in the making of lifelong friendships with the leaders of English thought in the stirring days of King Henry VIII: John Colet, Thomas More, John Fisher, Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn. … Erasmus's best-known work was The Praise of Folly (published under the double title Moriae encomium (Greek, Latinised) and Laus stultitiae (Latin)).^[36] a satirical attack on the traditions of the European society, of the Catholic Church and popular superstitions, written in 1509, published in 1511, dedicated to his friend, Sir Thomas More, and inspired by De triumpho stultitiae, written by Italian humanist Faustino Perisauli born at Tredozio, near Forlì.

Thomas Hobbes - Philosopher - Biography

At this time Hobbes friend Mersenne was encouraging scholars to respond to Descates' forthcoming treatise Meditationes de prima philosophia. In 1641 Hobbes sent his critique to Descartes in Holland, and they were published in Objectiones with the publication of the treatise. The two men continued their discourse, exchanging letters on the Dioptrique, which had been published in 1637. Hobbes disagreed with Descartes' theory that the mind, independent from material reality, was the primal certainty. Hobbes instead used motion as the basis for his philosophy of nature, mind and society. His correspondence with Descartes led to a paper on his views on physics and a Tractatus Opticus to works published by Mersenne.

Gottfried Leibniz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On the journey from London to Hanover, Leibniz stopped in The Hague where he met Leeuwenhoek, the discoverer of microorganisms. He also spent several days in intense discussion with Spinoza, who had just completed his masterwork, the Ethics. Leibniz respected Spinoza's powerful intellect, but was dismayed by his conclusions that contradicted both Christian and Jewish orthodoxy.

Baruch Spinoza - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz's own published Refutation of Spinoza, but he is also known to have met with Spinoza on at least one occasion^[15][16] (as mentioned above), and his own work bears some striking resemblances to specific important parts of Spinoza's philosophy (see: Monadology).

Comparing Locke and Voltaire Locke and Voltaire - A Tale of Two Exiles by Rit Nosotro

The lives and works of these two men overlap each other, yet their views on politics and religion were quite different. They were different men too. Locke took a more humble view of his call, “…to be employed as a laborer in clearing the ground a little and removing the rubbish that lies in the way on knowledge.” Voltaire, on the other hand, determined to edify an entire country. Locke saw the need for religion in a steady government while Voltaire thought religion, especially Orthodox Christianity, was useless to the well being of a government. In the great experiment of America Locke’s views were put to the test. During the French Revolution the ideas of Voltaire were applied.

Hume's quarrel with Rousseau | Books | The Guardian 29 Apr 2006 Enlightened enemies

When the philosopher David Hume offered refuge to the persecuted writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau it was apparently a meeting of minds. But the friendship soon soured, casting a shadow over the Age of Reason and calling into doubt Rousseau's sanity and Hume's reputation …So, in less than a year, the relationship between Hume and Rousseau had gone from love to mockery by way of fear and loathing.

In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision." 

Why Do We Need "Political Representation"? from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik Chakraverti

As I have detailed in my latest book - which you can read here - there is a "natural order" in civilized human society. I am certainly not the first to think along these lines - in my collection of Basiat's essays, which you can read here, the second essay is on "natural order." Adam Smith too looked at human society as self-regulating and self-ordered. That is, Thomas Hobbes was wrong. It was Hobbes who recommended Leviathan to us all - and in that book he predicted that without the State, society would degenerate into a "war of each against all." Hobbes said that human interests are always in conflict. Bastiat said there was harmony. 

thinking through urban debris: violence, terror and the state from & where do all these highways go now that we are free by Nandita

The fundamental preoccupation of classical western political philosophy has been to address the functioning of the human community. As rural village communities developed into city-states, the city provided the context in which philosophers understood themselves as human and then, progressively, as humans with specific rights prescribed by their context – they came to understand themselves as citizens. The contentions of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle over the nature of justice were fuelled by their identification of the city-state as a human arrangement to promote such a value (Meagher, 2008, 3-5). St. Augustine, moving away from Athenian concerns, contended that common good, lost on earth, ought to be recreated in a heavenly city. Machiavelli moved away from the tradition of founding philosophical utopias, yet he too began his work by classifying cities.

It is only with Hobbes that one first sees the privileging of the concept of the state as an entity that goes beyond the city (Ibid, 6-7). Skinner has attributed this to Hobbes’ desire to articulate the state in a new form – one in which sovereignty is located above both the ruler and the ruled – in effect, the manner in which we understand the state today (Skinner, 1989). While the utopia that was dreamt of and written about from Hobbes onward was no longer directly a city-state, it is undeniable that the city continued to be central to the imagination of the state in classical western political philosophy. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre argues that in “classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel, the city was much more than a secondary theme, an object among others. The links between philosophical thought and urban life appear clearly upon reflection, although they need to be made explicit” (Lefebvre, quoted in Meagher, op cit, 3).

Schopenhauer vs. Husserl

the role of experience in writing from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Schopenhauer says somewhere that you should never turn down a social invitation for the sake of reading. His point was that your own original thoughts are more stimulated by getting out of the house and becoming involved in a real situation than by reading someone else’s thoughts as set down in a book.

And he has some truth on his side here. Every new situation in which we become involved, whether it be “social” in the narrow sense or not, throws a few minor or major surprises our way. There is something slightly distinct about the emotional tonality with which we react to every new person, place, or thing.

And this suggests the already fairly obvious point that building up a stock of experiences is the best stimulus to your writing. It is quite conceivable in some cases that writing nothing at all for 2 or 3 years might be exactly what someone needs to do for the purposes of better work later on.

depression and graduate students from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

George Santayana is an underrated author. In The Sense of Beauty (always the surprise hit of my aesthetics classes whenever I use it) he talks about how beauty and happiness are not the same, that artists (and by extension, thinkers) suffer because they prefer beauty, whereas happiness generally comes from social factors: friends, marriage, a satisfying job, sufficient income so as not to worry, and being held in high esteem in the circles in which you travel. And in fact, it’s a reasonably good rule of thumb. Happiness (though perhaps not self-fulfillment) generally comes from links with other people. Or maybe with animals as well: pets can make us happy too. 8:18 AM 

Great Moments in the Classroom from Larval Subjects

Students shuffling out of the classroom after a discussion of Platonic realism and the possibility of transcendent, objective values independent of culture, history, and individual determination.

STUDENT: “This class is impossible.”

ME (Alarmed): “Why?”

STUDENT: “We come in here thinking we understand the world and now we discover that everything we think might be mistaken.”

from Larval Subjects

Husserl begins with an obvious thesis – “look at the things themselves!” – yet in executing this project he unsettles our assumptions about what it is to experience the world and objects, opening a vast domain that continues to challenge central assumptions in cognitive science, psychology, the social sciences, etc. 5:27 AM

An assumption of ''otherness'' blocks interest in Indian philosophy

Sadhana and Sahitya: The Early Years in Pondicherry by Richard Hartz

Yet in retrospect we can say that Sri Aurobindo's arrival in Pondicherry ...Sri Aurobindo's sadhana in his early years in Pondicherry had already been ... [Ilion: An epic in quantitative hexameters, Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion; Illumination, Heroism and Harmony, A commentary on Sri Aurobindo's poem Ilion V Murugesu]

Human Rights Activist Kavita Ramdas To Receive Distinguished ... 17 Sep 2010 

Ms. Ramdas will receive the award at CIIS's seventh annual dinner celebrating the Institute's Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri Endowment for South Asian Philosophy and Culture, which supports courses and public programs on Indian philosophy, ...

Why is Indian Philosophy ignored by Western educational institutions? 14 Aug 2010 by Jeff

prevalence of cultural relativism, the presumption being that Indian philosophy has to be very different. Here ethnocentrism is evident. An assumption of ''otherness'' blocks interest on the part of philosophers. ... [Essays on Indian Philosophy: Traditional and Modern, Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy J. N. Mohanty]  

'Brahmins need a deeksha to awaken empathy' « churumuri by churumuri
Kuvempu's impatience with the Madhwa philosophy can be understood in the context of his broad humanist position. The “Nithya muktha, nithya samsaari, nithya naraki” (“One who is forever free, forever involved in worldly affairs and ...

The New Atheists and Their Recent Attacks « Student Loans Zone

Let me give a thumbnail sketch of the history of philosophy to give you an idea of the context in which the new atheists operate. For the nearly 2000 year period from Socrates (470 - 399 BC) to Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) the emphasis in philosophy was on metaphysics which is defined as the philosophy of ultimate causes and the ultimate reality beyond the physical sense world.

Metaphysics was closely tied to theology. Plato, with his doctrine of the "unmoved mover" and the great medieval philosophers all respectfully regarded God as the starting point or baseline of thought. Descartes brought in a major shift away from metaphysics to an emphasis on epistemology.

The fallacy of Dictatorship of Relativism « A divergent variation ... by evolvingprimate
Among the many philosophers that attacked the philosophy of Saint Augustine, there is perhaps none more profound and relevant than Thomas Hobbs. Hobbs believed that people are in fact inherently and fundamentally estranged. ...

Defending Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism – Part One « Stand Up For ... by USWeapon
Just as opposed is the philosophy behind the novel, objectivism. What I intend to do this evening is offer my defense of Atlas Shrugged, followed tomorrow by my defense of objectivism. I then open the topic for debate. ...

On the Seventieth Anniversary of the Assassination of Trotsky POSTED BY ALEX STEINER AT 4:44 AM FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010

Today marks the Seventieth anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Rather than indulging in empty tributes to the memory of Trotsky while dishonoring his legacy in practice, as so many do, it is worth reflecting on the reason why Stalin had Trotsky murdered in the first place.

Democracy, Diaspora, Dalit, & Development

Democratic Culture: Historical and Philosophical Essays (Critical Interventions in Theory and Praxis) by Akeel Bilgrami (Jan 25, 2011)

A collection of essays by distinguished scholars, this book delineates a substantial conception of democracy, the great promise as well as the pitfalls of a democratic mentality and culture. These essays go beyond the institutional and formal descriptions of democracy to its underlying cultural context — expressed both historically and analytically, descriptively and normatively. About the Author: Akeel Bilgrami is at present Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written extensively on philosophy of mind and language as well as on political and moral psychology. 

He is the author of Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (forthcoming), What Is a Muslim? (forthcoming), and Gandhi’s Integrity (forthcoming).

Wronging Rights?: Philosophical Challenges for Human Rights (Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought) by Aakash Singh Rathore and Alex Cistelecan (Jan 11, 2011)

History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self by Aparna Devare (Nov 25, 2010)

Nation, Diaspora, Trans-nation: Reflections from India by R. K. Jain (Nov 25, 2010)

Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today by Ramesh Bairy(Aug 25, 2010)

Religion, Community and Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India (Religion and Citizenship) by Gurpreet Mahajan and Surinder S. Jodhka (Jul 22, 2010)

Theories of Value from Adam Smith to Piero Sraffa by Ajit Sinha (Jul 22, 2010)

Grounding Morality: Freedom, Knowledge and the Plurality of Cultures by Jyotirmaya Sharma and A. Raghuramaraju (Jul 21, 2010)

Put together to honour one of the most influential philosophers in recent times, Mrinal Miri, this book brings together articles on philosophy, politics, literature and society, and updates the status of enquiry in each of these fields. In his philosophical writings, Miri has broken the stranglehold that early training has on academics and written on a range of themes and areas, including analytical philosophy, political philosophy, tribal identity, ethics and, more recently, an abiding engagement with the ideas of Gandhi.

The articles in this volume mirror some of Miri’s concerns and philosophical interests, but go beyond the format of a festschrift, as they seek to enhance and restate themes in moral philosophy, ethics, questions of identity, Gandhi’s philosophy, and offer a fresh perspective on themes such as secularism, religion and politics. About the Authors: Jyotirmaya Sharma is Professor of Political Science, University of Hyderabad. A. Raghuramaraju is Professor of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad.

History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha by Deepa Sreenivas (Apr 15, 2010)

M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Pathfinders) by Kris Manjapra(Apr 15, 2010)

Indias Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (Cities and the Urban Imperative) by Christiane Brosius (Apr 14, 2010)

Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in Practice by Ute Husken and Christiane Brosius(Apr 14, 2010)

Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self (Exploring the Political in South Asia) by Manuela Ciotti (Apr 14, 2010)
The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore by Debashish Banerji (Jan 7, 2010)

Foucault engages in an immanent “critique of critique”

Amy Allen on Foucault’s Alleged Role in the “End of Man” rom Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

I recently came across Amy Allen’s excellent book, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, and have found her discussion of Foucault in chapters two and three particularly helpful and insightful.  In chapter two, Allen offers a careful reading of Foucault’s relationship to Kant and concludes that Foucault does not reject, cancel, or write off the subject per se but rather a particular historical understanding of the (transcendental) subject as the source of all meaning. […]

In short, Foucault’s comments advocating the subject’s demise must be taken not as a complete rejection of subjectivity or the subject itself; rather, Foucault’s criticism are aimed specifically at the notion of a subject shielded from all socio-historical and cultural influences—the ahistorical subject as sovereign originator of all meaning.  For Foucault, it is undeniable that the subject is socially constituted; however, the subject as a free being is also capable of (re)constituting him/herself because all the converging, intersecting, socio-historical lines which shaped the subject in the first place are contingent, not necessary.  In addition, Allen adds that Foucault himself “argues that Kant’s own writings on anthropology point beyond this transcendental conception and pave the way for the fully historicized conception of the subject that Foucault later develops. On this interpretation, Foucault’s call for the end of man is perfectly consistent with the project of reconceptualizing subjectivity carried out in Foucault’s later work.”[3]

Pointing toward an argument that she develops in chapter three, Allen ends chapter two with a foreshadowing of her conclusion.  “[A]lthough Foucault does rely in his late work on notions of subjectivity and autonomy, he radically reformulates these concepts; thus, they are not the same as the strictly Kantian and phenomenological notions that are taken up and transformed in his early work.”[4] Like myself, Allen does not see Foucault’s ethico-aesthetic turn as a significant rupture with or cancellation of his early work, nor (as we’ve seen) does she hold that Foucault has done away with the concept of the subject per se. Rather than, as Habermas would have it, a “total critique of modernity,” Foucault engages in an immanent “critique of critique”; he does not give us “an abstract negation of the self-referential subject,” but instead “interrogates its conditions of possibility. That interrogation is designed to show the historical and cultural specificity and, thus contingency of this conception of subjectivity, which in turn makes possible new modes of subjectification.”[5] In essence, Foucault performs an act of philosophical resistance via reverse discourse by simultaneously taking up and transforming Kantian categories and structures.  Or applying a jazz analogy, Foucault improvises on a Kantian lead sheet quoting Kantian melodies reharmonized in a postmodern key.

Materialist aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy

DRG: “Assemblages Against Totalities” from Larval Subjects 

In this post my aim is just to outline the general features of DeLanda’s assemblage theory as presented in the first chapter of A New Philosophy of Society with little in the way of critical commentary or questions. Here I want to get a clear picture of what he sees as the central features of assemblage theory and how it differs from other social theories.

1. Relations of Exteriority versus Relations of Interiority:

DeLanda begins chapter 1 with the declaration that we must removed the entrenched metaphor of society as an organism. Within the organismic metaphor, society is compared to the human body, such that 1) all parts aredependent on one another, and 2) all parts (institutions) work together like organs in an organism to promote the harmony of society as a whole. Here it is notable that this conception of relations between parts is not restricted to organismic conceptions of society, but also to structuralist conceptions of society. The key thesis shared by these orientations is that parts have no existence or being apart from the whole to which they belong. Thus, for example, when we talk about a sound in language, we cannot say that “b” has an existence of its own independent of other sounds in language, but rather that “b” exists only in a phonemic relation with other sounds: b/p. The concept of structure is such that elements have no independent existence apart from their relations. As a consequence, elements are their relations within an organismic or structuralist conception of the social world.

abdul lateef Posted September 6, 2010 at 5:51 pm | Permalink

One interesting aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy that DeLanda points to is that in the world of 20th century philosophers almost every single major philosopher traces their lineage back to Kant and idealism (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida etc), whereas Deleuze’s materialist philosophy is the only one whose genealogy goes in a different direction back to Hume.

Note: One also should not confuse Deleuze’s materialism with reductionism (that he opposed) because it is rooted in the ontology of emergence. In fact with regards to one of the themes of this blog, although Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy may be formally characterized as idealist (with some cross-cultural caveats), there is in fact a materialist aspect to it and its prescribed practices that makes Deleuze’s materialism extremely relevant.

Understanding disenchantment from The Immanent Frame by Akeel Bilgrami

Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay “What is Enchantment?” (published in the volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age) describes the notion of disenchantment that I present as primarily addressing the theological displacements that emerged with the rise of the new science. Her own work, she says, offers a quite different focus, one of a mood or affect that “circulates between human bodies and the animal, vegetable, and mineral forces they encounter.” […]

Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I said above) of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.

I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.”  She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing “disenchantment,” as I understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “re-enchantment,” as I understand the term.

I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non-sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands.

If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word.  In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science.

Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “re-enchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek. [...]

My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say.

I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.”  I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.

Foundations of Indian Culture: the Veda, the Upanishads, & the Gita

Volume 14		Vedic and Philological Studies (TO BE PUBLISHED) Writings on the Veda and philology, and translations of Vedic hymns to gods other than Agni not published during Sri Aurobin do's lifetime. The material includes (1) drafts for The Secret of the Veda, (2) translations (simple translations and analytical and discursive ones) of hymns to gods other than Agni, (3) notes on the Veda, (4) essays and notes on philology, and (5) some texts that Sri Aurobindo called "Writings in Different Languages". Most of this material was written between 1912 and 1914 and is published here for the first time in a book.
Volume 15		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 The Secret of the Veda Essays on the Rig Veda and its mystic symbolism, with transla tions of selected hymns. These writings on and translations of the Rig Veda were published in the monthly review Arya between 1914 and 1920. Most of them appeared there under three headings: The Secret of the Veda, "Selected Hymns" and "Hymns of the Atris". Other translations that did not appear under any of these headings make up the final part of the volume.	2.12MB
Volume 16		Hymns to the Mystic Fire (TO BE PUBLISHED) All translations of Vedic hymns to Agni; and related writings. The material includes all the contents of Hymns to the Mystic Fire(translations of hymns to Agni from the Rig Veda, with a Foreword by Sri Aurobindo) as well as translations of many other hymns to Agni, some of which are published here for the first time.
Volume 17		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Upanishads-I : Isha Upanishad Translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad. The volume is divided into two parts: (1) Sri Aurobindo’s final translation and analysis of the Isha Upanishad. This small work contains his definitive interpretation of the Upanishad. It is the only writing in this volume published during his lifetime; (2) ten incomplete commentaries on the Isha. Ranging from a few pages to more than a hundred, these commentaries show the devel opment of his interpretation of this Upanishad from around 1900 to the middle of 1914.	1.82MB
Volume 18		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Upanishads-II : Kena and Other Upanishads Translations of and commentaries on Upanishads other than the Isha Upanishad. The volume is divided into two parts: (1) translations of and commentaries on the Kena, Katha and Mundaka Upanishads and some "Readings in the Taittiriya Upanishad"; (2) early translations of the Prashna, Mandukya, Aitareya and Taittariya Upanishads; incom plete translations of and commentaries on other Upanishads and Vedantic texts; and incomplete and fragmentary writings on the Upanishads and Vedanta in general. The writings in the first part were published by Sir Aurobindo during his lifetime; those in the second part were transcribed from his manuscripts after his passing.	1.36MB
Volume 19		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Essays on the Gita Essays on the philosophy and method of self-discipline presented in the Bhagavad Gita. These essays were first published in the monthly review Arya be tween 1916 and 1920 and revised in the 1920s by Sri Aurobindo for publication as a book.	1.91MB
Volume 20		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 The Renaissance in India with A Defence of Indian Culture Essays on the value of Indian civilisation and culture. This volume consists of three series of essays and one single essay: (1) "The Renaissance in India", (2) "Indian Culture and External Influence", (3) "Is India Civilised?" and (4) "Defence of Indian Culture". They were first published in the monthly review Arya between 1918 and 1921. In 1953, they first appeared in a book under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture.	2.50MB

Agency is always a human-nonhuman collective

On the call from outside from The Immanent Frame by Jane Bennett

In Akeel Bilgrami’s contribution to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, “enchantment” refers to the historical belief that God or his divine expression is accessible to the everyday world of “matter and nature and human community and perception.”

In the wake of Schiller’s critique of Kantian morality as too disembodied (echoed in Foucault’s work on ethical ascesis), I understand ethics as requiring both  principled beliefs (and duties) and also a set of  moods, sensibilities, and bodily comportments hospitable to carrying them out.  My contention is that the intensity of the compound mood of enchantment (wonder/disturbance) could serve as one impetus to ethical action, insofar as it contributes the energy or motive force needed to render human bodies capable of jumping the gap between mere conviction that a course of action is good and the actual doing of the deed.  What Spinoza called the “joyful” affects are needed to energize a body called upon—by habit, sympathy, or reason—to love, forgive, treat with compassion or minimized harm to (an ontologically diverse range of) others.    In short, I think that, under the right circumstances, the mood of enchantment, which entails the experience of the outside as making a call, can be an important part of ethics.

Bilgrami, too, is interested in the ethical implications of enchantment. He begins with the intriguing claim that the call from outside serves as the very condition of possibility of human will and therefore agency: to desire to have or to do something is to experience that thing or activity as “desirable rather than as desired,” as, in other words, a response to an external call.   What is more, the very experience of ourselves as moral subjects depends upon this experience of a world of outside objects: “in the very moment and act of perceiving values without, we also perceive ourselves within, as subjects rather than as objects.  The experience of value without and agency within are not two different and independent experiences.” In short, “it is only because the world itself contains desirabilities (or values) that we perceive that our agency really gets triggered or activated.  The very possibility of agency therefore assumes an evaluatively enchanted world.”

Based as it is upon an assertion of the constitutive interdependence of the notions of subject and object, this argument makes good sense.  But it also reveals the extent to which Bilgrami and I have different views of human agency—what composes it, how it is activated and sustained.  I think that human agency is best conceived as the effect of a perspicuous configuration of human and nonhuman forces.  When humans act, they do not exercise exclusively human powers, but express and inflect the powers of a variety of “foreign” bodies internal to them, including bacteria in the human gut, heavy metals absorbed into flesh, words and sounds from human and nonhuman cultures, etc.  There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency.  The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective.

The Subject of Being from Silika Mohapatra

Even though Aristotle is driven towards concretion in both (a) asking the question “What is being” in terms of “What is primary being”, and (b) in offering an exhaustive categorial determination of all things in the world, he seems to fall short of the step that would yield fuller concretion. In fact, it is implausible to hold that any claims to the concretion of being can bypass or underestimate the ‘who’ of the question of being.

The question of meaning of Being cannot be isolated from the one who interrogates. In the act of asking the question: ‘What is being?’ Aristotle seems to gloss over the fact that Being is an issue for the one who asks that question. To lay it out in another way, in merely keeping to the ontical-categorial framework, Aristotle devalues the ontological priority of the question.

It is to address this skew that Heidegger’s Dasein steps into the picture. In asking the question of meaning of Being, rather than simply ‘What is Being’, Heidegger creates the need for Dasein itself and retrieves the quest for being. Dasein is that ‘being which is concerned in its being about its being’ (Heidegger: Being and Time). Da is a German word referring to place, though it also has a temporal aspect to it – ‘there/here, at this time’. Sein, on the other hand means ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’. This renders Dasein a meaning of ‘existing-there-or-here-then’. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence and not in its substance.

In his ontological framework laid out in Categories, with great emphasis, Aristotle attempts to distinguish substance from subject and yet his subject appears most substance-like, without any subjectivity. Aristotle’s main complaint against his predecessors is the absence of logical clarity of terms in their systems, but he himself doesn’t clarify what he means by a ‘subject’ and how it is to be properly distinguished from a substance, even in situations which appear to demand an explicit articulation. It is interesting that Aristotle uses multiple instances of ‘a man’ to illustrate his discussion of being in Categories, Physics and Metaphysics. But he uses it as a mere substantive ‘man’ and not as a subjective ‘man’. A particular entity like a man, the locus of primary being for Aristotle could satisfactorily be replaced by a particular table or a clay pot and is therefore dramatically different from the Dasein of Heidegger. This is because even though Dasein can be conceived of as merely ontical like a clay pot, the fact that it has the possibility to be concerned with whether its being is merely ontical (or not) is an issue for it, is certainly ontological in character.