Description
Book SynopsisHuman liberation has become an epochal challenge in today’s world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. It is a multidimensional struggle and aspiration in which knowledge - self, social and spiritual - can play a transformative role. ‘Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations’ undertakes such a journey of transformation, and seeks to rethink knowledge vis-à-vis the familiar themes of human interest, critical theory, enlightenment, ethnography, democracy, pluralism, rationality, secularism and cosmopolitanism. The volume also features a Foreword by John Clammer (United Nations University, Tokyo) and an Afterword by Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame).
Table of ContentsPreface; Acknowledgments; Foreword by John Clammer; Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge; PART I – NURTURING THE GARDEN OF TRANSFORMATIONAL KNOWLEDGE: ROOTS AND VARIANTS: 1. Knowledge and Human Liberation: Jürgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo and Beyond; 2. Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the Calling of a New Enlightenment and Non-duality; 3. The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom; 4. Kant and Anthropology; 5. Tocqueville as an Ethnographer of American Prison Systems and Democratic Practice; PART II – RETHINKING KNOWLEDGE: 6. Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality; 7. Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History; 8. Rule of Law and the Calling of “Dharma”: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond; 9. Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures; 10. Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations; 11. The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations; PART III – ASPIRATIONS AND STRUGGLES FOR LIBERATION:TOWARDS PLANETARY REALIZATIONS:12. Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Consumption: Dialogues with “Swadeshi” Movements and Gandhi; 13. Swaraj as Blossoming: Compassion, Confrontation and a New Art of Integration; 14. Civil Society and the Calling of Self-Development; 15. The Calling of Practical Spirituality: Transformations in Science and Religion and New Dialogues on Self, Transcendence and Society; 16. Spiritual Cultivation for a Secular Society; 17. Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards Planetary Realizations; Afterword by Fred Dallmayr; Advance Praise
