The Rahit Is The Code Of Belief And Conduct Laid Down By The Tenth Guru Gobind Singh For All Sikhs Who Join The Khalsa. The Book Traces The Development Of Rahit And Shows How The Modern Rahit, In Some Respects, Is Different From The Original One.

The First Comprehensive Work On The History And Religion Of The Sikhs Was Produced In 1914 By Khazan Singh, An Additional Assistant Commissioner. It Is A Systematic, True And Full Account Of The Sikhs And Is Regarded As A Milestone In The Early Sikh Historiography.

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth-century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this (...) text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text and community . As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past. (shrink)

This book examines the entire range of sacred literature produced between the sixteenth- and nineteenth century to give a comprehensive account of Sikhism. Dealing with the historical evolution of the Sikh tradition, it discuss issues like self-image, identity, and ideology.

Philosophical interpretation of Sikh hymns.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikh Philosophy as a Philosophy-of-PracticeMonika Kirloskar-Steinbach (bio)Some recent publications on Indian philosophy argue that the colonial narrative about the philosophical traditions from the subcontinent was erroneous. It wrongly suggested that the erstwhile Brahmanic thought embodied by the darśanas was an exhaustive representation of philosophical activity on the subcontinent and that this activity came to a grinding halt with the onset of European modernity. In an attempt at rectifying (...) this story, one path proposed by philosopher Vrinda Dalmiya (Dalmiya 2016, p. 125) is to cognize and fix the "epistemophilic excesses" in the field, that is, the obsessive compulsion in conventional academic philosophy to engage in theory for theory's sake. In the study of Indian philosophy, this malady manifests as the practice of channeling philosophical analysis solely through a darśanic framing. This monofocal lens, however, is unable to reflect either the diversity of practices on the ground or values like intellectual freedom that drive some such practices.Arvind-Pal Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), discussed here in this forum, speaks to these concerns and offers a possible way forward. Sikh Philosophy advocates a liminal perspective from which to engage with the set of philosophical practices that emanated on the subcontinent around the figure of Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and the teachings of the Sikh gurus (gurmat). In the first part of my response, I will bring into this conversation Mandair's philosophical orientation to ask whether and how he would contribute to that debate. In the second part, I will project the haumai—one concept doing much of the work in Sikh Philosophy—as one viable path that may be able to contribute to the correction of the epistemophilia currently afflicting a judicious study of world-philosophical traditions.In my limited understanding, Mandair's rendition of the haumai may serve as one component that could be implemented fruitfully in broadening the perspective on Indian philosophy. Mandair observes that a postcolonial sensibility demands a philosophical orientation that does not continue its proprietary attitude toward philosophical positions. I share his view. Instead of parading these positions as possessions that embellish one's academic finesse, they should be considered as ways of navigating life adequately. In doing so, however, the making of such navigational routes may profit from a deliberate reflection on them from different standpoints. [End Page 348]Halting Exclusivist Historiographical Trends in PhilosophyTwo recent handbooks on Indian philosophy reflect the growing awareness that changes in the field's self-understanding are imperative, should imperialist and colonial historiographies that affect this understanding be upturned. Jonardon Ganeri's editorial introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy—"Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?"—argues that students of Indian philosophy should overcome the routinized fixation on the classical darśanas. In developing their accounts, they should factor in the "regionality, vernaculars, subaltern communities, [and] eccentrics" through which "scholarly networks, nodes of philosophical activity, transnational encounters, and contexts of philosophical invention" arose on the subcontinent (Ganeri 2017, p. 2). This broader approach would, in his view, not only be viable in halting the elitist and exclusivist historiography that was the default mode in the recent colonial past. In addition, it would be better equipped to grasp the richness of practices on the ground.Accordingly, his Handbook departs from the handbook genre on one core point: instead of delivering a supposedly comprehensive study of positions that would be indispensable to the reader to understand the intricacies of the field marked out as Indian philosophy, this Handbook chooses to narrate one multi-perspectival story about practices on the subcontinent that were philosophically motivated and are worthy of study today. It suggests through this move that there are other such possible stories that can be narrated. Relatedly, Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner's History of Indian Philosophy strives as well to make a case to go beyond the darśanic mold. It includes a variety of philosophical positions located on its peripheries. For example, Sikh philosophy, which notably is not included in the Ganeri volume, is incorporated here as a tradition that engaged darśanic practices. Balbinder Singh Bhogal, the author of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diasporic Impulses:Sikh Philosophy as an AssemblageArvind-Pal S. Mandair (bio)Let me begin this response by thanking the editors of Philosophy East and West for generously allowing space for this review forum on my recent book, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), and thanking the reviewers Monika-Kirloskar Steinbach, Ananda Abeysekara, and Jeffery Long for their careful readings of this work. "Sikh Philosophy" names (...) the modern academic discourse that crystallized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of the encounter between modern Western philosophy and gurmat, a mode of thought-praxis deriving from and associated with Sikhi (lit. "the path of learning"), a spiritual-philosophical tradition hailing from India, which most readers may only have encountered through the modern knowledge system's categorization of it as the religion known as Sikhism. To avoid complicating the discussion, I will be referring interchangeably to gurmat and Sikh philosophy, even though they represent quite different entities. Gurmat represents a tradition of thought-praxis that goes back to Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhi, whereas Sikh philosophy is a modern formation that emerged from the encounter between gurmat and European thought, which is why I prefer to regard it as an assemblage. The book examines some of the key concepts of Sikh philosophy and how they inform its vision of life, what they tell us about the nature of reality, and whether it is possible to discern a distinct logic, epistemology, and ontology based on the principles of gurmat. In their reviews, Kirloskar-Steinbach, Abeysekara, and Long have provided critical readings and insightful questions, which I address below.Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach asks about the relationship between Sikh philosophy and Indian philosophy, noting that my book does not explicitly engage Indian philosophy. Specifically, she raises two questions: (1) whether Sikh philosophy should or potentially could be part of the broader field of Indian philosophy, and (2) whether I would be inclined to contribute to that field, particularly in light of recent efforts to diversify philosophical practices within Indian philosophy by scholars like Jonardon Ganeri in his Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (2017) and Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner in their History of Indian Philosophy (2018). My immediate response would be "yes," but with an important caveat. In that vein, I applaud Ganeri's and Bilimoria/Rayner's efforts to open up philosophical inquiry within Indian traditions and take them beyond darśanic framings that narrowly positioned different thought-practices of South Asia either within or [End Page 364] in relation to the Brahmanical/Vedic/Sanskritic paradigm. Ganeri's "multiperspectival" narrative about practices might well enable discussions about Sikh philosophy to flourish, given that the lexicon of gurmat (the teaching, logic, practice of the Guru) is replete with concepts that have cognate terms in the main Hindu philosophical schools including Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta; the Jain and Buddhist traditions; and perhaps most importantly, within the Islamic, especially Sufi, traditions. It is the seeming parity between cognate terms such as the Punjabi dharam (Skt. dharma), karam (Skt. karma), yoga, śabad (Skt. śabda), guru, hukam, and many more, which has given rise to the misperception that Sikh philosophy is a purely syncretic thought system parasitic on earlier Indic systems. A similar misperception might be that Sikhi is more primarily a mode of lived praxis or dharam than it is a philosophy (Bhogal 2018) and therefore has less to do with thought than with spiritual attainment. But this approach is far too narrow in that it opposes "philosophy"/"thought" to spiritual praxis without asking whether there might be a broader definition of thinking at play within Sikhi or gurmat. Such an approach fails to extricate itself from the legacy of imperial categorizations of Indic traditions as essentially religious and therefore unrelated to what is called "thinking." By doing so, it falls prey to another misconception many have, that the closest Indians have come to philosophical thought are the darśanic schools, not realizing that most Indian philosophers and thinkers were at the same time devotees and spiritual adepts who developed rigorous modes of discipline and practice.Having said this, I would premise any... (shrink)

This translation of Randhir Singh's text of the Prem Sumarag (or Param Sumarag) presents an extended Sanatan account of Sikh ceremonies, Sikh ideals, and the Sikh way of life, thus providing a fresh insight into the history of Khalsa Rahit.

This translation of Randhir Singh's text of the Prem Sumarag presents an extended Sanatan account of Sikh ceremonies, Sikh ideals, and the Sikh way of life, thus providing a fresh insight into the history of Khalsa Rahit.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikhism between Tradition and "Assemblage":Reflections on Arvind Mandair's Sikh PhilosophyAnanda Abeysekara (bio)Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World. By Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and tradition in Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I begin with a brief discussion of (...) a lecture titled "A Genealogy of Liberty" delivered by Quentin Skinner at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, which he would give again, with minor changes, in 2015 at the University of Chicago and in 2017 at Stanford University. At the outset of the lecture, joining forces with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, he says, "Here I am a Nietzschean, and it is reflected in my title"—contending that "concepts [like liberty] that have histories cannot have definitions." In giving a concise history of the rival "polemical" claims made by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Arendt, Taylor, and others about the concept of liberty, Skinner concludes that, contrary to what Anglo-American philosophy claims, there is not one "coherent way of thinking about liberty" in its contested genealogy. And "while each of these accounts is coherent in its own terms, you cannot combine them. This is genealogy. You can't get this to be the concept of liberty. You are going to have to make some choices, because they don't fit together. So what choice should you make? As to the answer, I leave that up to you" (Skinner 2016).The puzzle of how to think about such a genealogy was palpable in the questions from the audience that followed Skinner's lecture. Noteworthy was one question, about how the thinkers—for example from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill—in the history of the debate about liberty seem to "move around," their views seeming to "bleed into one another" (Skinner 2015). That is, isn't John Stuart Mill's view of liberty—as something that one can voluntarily renounce by internalizing the external views or customs—more or less the same as Hobbes' view of liberty as something free from external interference? And hence don't these competing views after all "fit together" within a single narrative? Ultimately, the concern here boils down to a question about the definition of liberty. [End Page 333]But what the presupposition in the question misses is that each of these positions—as Skinner carefully argues—is "ideological," "polemical," and "contested"; that is, these positions—even though Skinner does not say this explicitly—are marked by distinct forms of historical sensibility. That each of the historical positions, again as Skinner rightly argues, is "coherent" already grants that the sensibilities that define them within their specific conditions cannot be reproduced. That is, to extend Skinner's argument, these sensibilities cannot simply be "combined" within a seamless narrative because they presuppose relationships of power in which they have the force of intelligibility that they do in particular historical contexts. But the presumption about the meaning of a concept—for example the concept of "creativity" or "emptiness"—that can be readily and universally identified in a historical narrative is prevalent in other disciplines like Buddhist studies and South Asian studies, where, despite scholars using the term, genealogy remains poorly thought through (Abeysekara 2023; Walser 2018).1Largely absent in Skinner's genealogy is any discussion of the concept of "tradition" itself even though at times he alludes to "the tradition of liberty." This may not be a simple oversight on Skinner's part, but its very absence raises the question of whether liberalism itself is a discursive, embodied tradition in the ways a religious tradition works, as conceptualized by Talal Asad and others. Asad has described liberalism itself as a certain kind of "tradition" constituted by historical disputes (Asad 2009).2 And the broader implication of that argument is that, because it is a tradition animated by the very debates about what constitutes it, those who make claims about it are already situated within that tradition. And so it is unsound to speak of multiple traditions of liberty and, by extension, "multiple modernities... (shrink)

Articles on Sikh philosophy and history.

This essay revisits the scholarly consensus about the “earliest” song and early images of Mīrā—the sixteenth-century Rajput noblewoman who is a leading female voice in north Indian devotional (bhakti) movements. I show that what scholars have considered as Mīrā’s oldest extant poem—recorded in the Kartarpur manuscript of 1604, which culminated in the making of the Sikh Guru Granth Sāhib—has a different history of recension in the devotional sects of Rajasthan. In the early seventeenth-century manuscripts of the Dādūpanth, the (...) same poem is not attributed to Mīrā but to Sukhānand, one of the twelve disciples of Rāmānand— the first Guru of the major Rām devotional sect of north India. Various possible explanations for this double attribution will be explored, and the question asked: What do the varied attributions of Mīrā’s “earliest” song tell us about the growth of a Mīrā corpus and the multiple Mīrās as represented in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hagiographies that emerged from her own region? (shrink)

Articles on Sikh philosophy, tradition, and history.

Political agenda of Sikh philosophy; historical perspective.

Articles on Sikh ethos, history, and philosophy.

In the healthcare sector, race, ethnicity and religion have become an increasingly important factor in terms of patient care due to an increasingly diverse population. Health agencies at a national and local level produce a number of guides to raise awareness of cultural issues among healthcare professionals and hospitals may implement additional non-medical services, such as the provision of specific types of food and dress to patients or the hiring of chaplains, to accommodate the needs of patients with religious requirements. (...) However, in an attempt to address the spiritual, cultural and religious needs of patients healthcare providers often assume that ethnic minority groups are homogenous blocks of people with similar needs and fail to recognize that a diverse range of views and practices exist within specific groups themselves. This paper describes the example of the Sikh community and the provision of palliative care in hospitals and hospices. Although, the majority of patients classifying themselves as Sikhs have a shared language and history, they can also be divided on a number of lines such as caste affiliation, degree of assimilation in the west, educational level and whether baptized or not, all of which influence their beliefs and practices and hence impact on their needs from a health provider. Given that it is unfeasible for health providers to have knowledge of the multitude of views within specific religious and ethnic communities and accounting for the tight fiscal constraints of healthcare budgets, this paper concludes by raising the question whether healthcare providers should step away from catering for religious and cultural needs that do not directly affect treatment outcomes, and instead put the onus on individual communities to provide resources to meet spiritual, cultural and religious needs of patients. (shrink)

"Sikhism has a rich legacy of interfaith dialogue however, general survey of Sikh literature shows that intensive studies on interfaith dialogue are very few. In fact, Sikhism has been ignored in the studies of religion. Now the situation is changing, people from different traditions are eager to know about others. Moreover, in contemporary thought thinkers are recognizing the multiplicity of the truth. The scholars from different traditions are trying to reinterpret the religious thoughts for current needs of society. Besides, (...) in present world, it is not imaginable for any faith tradition to claim that they have only real or original spirit. Now it is not possible for one religion to stay alive in sealed structure. In this emerging pluralistic world human beings are attaining knowledge from different faiths and testing various means for their peace of mind. People are becoming passionate to learn more and more about the religion. In addition to this, present world conditions necessitate for interfaith dialogue, for this flexible pluralistic approach is becoming a need of the day, because pluralistic perspective recognizes multifarious views for the truth. This work is an attempt to understand the theory of interfaith dialogue and its significance in general and inclusively the new mystical experience from Sikhism. In the wider context this book deals with the interfaith perspectives of Sikhism and its relevance to the contemporary world. It is an academic work based on Sikh scripture which examines the current issues of interfaith studies. The work has five main chapters. A brief description of important concepts of Sikhism and its institutions is given in an appendix which is useful to non-Sikh readers.". (shrink)

Articles on the history of Assamese Sikhs.

Religion and philosophy in 'Akāla usatati', portion of Daswen̲ Pādshāh kā Granth, attributed to Gobind Singh, Guru, 1666-1708.

Avant l'âge des Lumières, on tolérait mal la religion des autres, ou alors avec réticence, comme une anomalie qu'il fallait souffrir sans l'accepter. La "tolérance des Modernes", élaborée par de grands penseurs comme Locke et Voltaire, renversait la perspective : elle mettait en place un système harmonieux de coexistence paisible entre les groupes les plus divers, tout en prônant de nouveaux droits la liberté de conscience et la liberté d'exercer sa religion dans l'espace public. Cette nouvelle conception n'allait pas de (...) soi. Elle donne à voir des éléments précurseurs en des lieux aussi divers que l'Empire ottoman et le ghetto de Venise. Après de nombreuses querelles politiques et théologiques, elle s'est enracinée en Hollande, en Angleterre, en France et dans les colonies d'Amérique. Denis Lacorne observe les manifestations les plus récentes de la tolérance dans le monde contemporain, il en analyse les usages et les limites, qu'il s'agisse des symboles religieux, de monuments, de manières de s'habiller, de ce qu'il est permis de dire et de proférer. De l'Europe au Nouveau Monde, les territoires de la tolérance n'ont cessé de s'étendre, des déistes aux athées, des baptistes aux quakers, des sikhs aux musulmans. Aujourd'hui la tolérance demeure une vertu contestée : le retour du religieux, la montée des fanatismes menacent le projet émancipateur des philosophes. Faut-il imposer des bornes à la liberté d'expression? Doit-on tolérer les ennemis de la tolérance? Pour y répondre, il nous faut redécouvrir cette grande tradition afin de mieux la défendre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pluralism ConferenceJohn HickIn September 2003 a conference was held at Birmingham University, UK, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs who all hold the "pluralist" view that no one religion is the one and only true or uniquely salvific faith, but that, in the words of the thirteenth-century Sufi thinker Rumi, "The lamps are different but the Light is the same: it comes from beyond." The conveners were (...) Professors Perry Schmidt-Leukel of Glasgow University, Paul Knitter of Xavier University (Cincinnati), Leonard Swidler of Temple University (Philadelphia), and John Hick of Birmingham University. My own account of the purpose of the conference is that we are academics who are committed and practicing believers within but not official representatives of (in rough order of origin) the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian (both Catholic and Protestant), Muslim, and Sikh faiths.We are acutely aware that throughout history almost all human conflicts have been validated and intensified by a religious sanction. God has been claimed to be on both sides of every war. This has been possible because each of the great world faiths has either assumed or asserted its own unique superiority as the one and only true faith and path to the highest good—in familiar Christian terms, to salvation. These exclusive claims to absolute truth have exacerbated the division of the human community into rival groups, and have repeatedly been invoked in support of oppression, slavery, conquest, and exploitation.The second half of twentieth century saw both a worldwide development of interreligious dialogue, coinciding with considerable east-to-west migration, and also a strong contrary growth of aggressive fundamentalism in powerful elements within each tradition. But dialogue has led to a much greater mutual knowledge and appreciation between the world faiths, so that it is now possible for leaders of the religious institutions to meet in mutual amity and respect. However they still, for the most part, retain as their bottom line a conviction of the unique centrality and priority of their own tradition. Sharing in this way the same fundamental conviction as their militant fundamentalist elements, they lack any principled ground on which to oppose them.We offer for discussion, as the fruit of our deliberations, a step beyond this unstable situation. We note that the world religions share the basic belief in a higher reality, of limitless importance to us, that transcends the material universe and yet can [End Page 253] be encountered through the depth of our own being. They also share the basic belief that this present life is not the entirety of human existence but part of a much larger life. And they share the central values of love, compassion, and justice within the human community here on earth.We note that the deepest thinkers within each tradition express a profound sense of mystery, insisting that the ultimate reality to which their faith is oriented lies in its fullness beyond the range of our comprehension. We humans can describe it, not as it is in itself, but as great revelatory moments have caused it to be variously conceived and experienced within the different ways of being human that are the great cultures of the world. The religions, then, are different and unique totalities, each with its own founding events, paradigmatic figures, sacred writings, remembered history, spiritual practices, intellectual formulations, distinctive ethos, and institutional forms. We believe that they are different responses to the universal presence of the ineffable ultimate reality.Although individual conversions between the faiths have always occurred, in the vast majority of cases religious believers are born into and are formed by a particular tradition. It therefore fits them and they fit it, so that it is for them the right and true religion. We should therefore each normally stay within our inherited tradition, using its spiritual resources to the fullest. We must also, however, recognize that the same principle holds for the hundreds of millions who have been born into and formed by other traditions. We should see those religions as independently authentic and valid, of equal value with our own, welcoming mutual enrichment from one another's traditions and also allowing for the raising of critical questions about... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) v-vi [Access article in PDF] In Memoriam: Wilfred Cantwell Smith Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian who taught for most of the first half of his career at McGill University in Montreal and for most of the second half at Harvard, died February 7, 2000, in his native Toronto at the age of eighty-three. His wife and companion of sixty years, Muriel, survives him, as do (...) five children and a dozen grandchildren.Smith, a Protestant Christian and clergyman, played an influential role among both academics and church bodies in advocating open dialogue and personal encounter with the adherents of diverse religious traditions. As one of his students, Professor John Ross Carter of Colgate University, put it, "Before I met Wilfred, I had studied Buddhism as a system. Under him, I came to appreciate the faith of Buddhists as persons."As an undergraduate, Smith studied Middle Eastern languages at the University of Toronto. He then studied theology in Cambridge, England, and taught during the early 1940s at Forman Christian College, Lahore, in what was then India but is now Pakistan. He became involved in the vital contemporary life of Muslims, and in the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh interface in the Punjab. The partition of India along communal lines in 1947 reinforced his strong sense of the moral urgency of interreligious understanding.After completing a Ph.D. degree at Princeton University with a dissertation on modern Islam, Smith took up the chair of comparative religion in McGill University's Faculty of Divinity and soon organized McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, which he directed until 1963. The institute was innovative in two respects. First, it treated Islam as the faith of millions in southern Asia today, where the numerical majority of Muslims live, in contrast with the emphasis of most Orientalist scholarship on classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature. Second, it strove to include roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Westerners in both its faculty and its student body.Though he had already made seminal contributions to comparative studies, Smith moved fully into that realm when in 1964 he took over the directorship of Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions, and later, of Harvard's entire graduate program in religion in arts and sciences. Through two decades, until his 1984 retirement, the world religions Ph.D. graduates emerging from Harvard, including a significant cohort of specialists in Buddhist studies, were inspired by Smith to focus on the faith dimension of the traditions they studied.Religious bodies turned to Smith for scholarly advice. To take one important example, he served in 1967 on a commission on world mission of the United Church of Canada. As a result of his input, the commission's report, adopted by the denomination, [End Page v] affirmed God to be working creatively and redemptively in the religious traditions of humankind. Some view this as the first declaration by any church to go so far in the entire history of Christianity.Numerous responsibilities and honors came to Smith. He became president of practically every organization to which he belonged, such as the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for the Study of Religion (which he said was his favorite), the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, and the Canadian Theological Society. His writings have been translated into many languages, as diverse as Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and Korean. He received a dozen honorary degrees, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and less than a month before the end of his life was inducted in a special bedside ceremony as an Officer of the Order of Canada, the nearest honor that country has to a title of nobility awarded for merit.Smith was primarily a historian, ever fascinated by process and change. He observed it not only in the societies and traditions of world culture, but in the conceptual vocabulary with which we describe it. His landmark book, from this point of view, is TheMeaning and End of Religion(1963), in which he traced both the emergence of the view of particular traditions... (shrink)

This paper will examine the sanskrit short-poem Āta ṅkavādaśataka written in 1988 by the famous indian pandit Vagish Shastri. Although composed in a language that is 2500 year old, the Century deals with one of the most dramatic events in contemporary indian history: sikh nationalist terrorism. The poet provides both a socio-political interpretation as well as a mythological-theological one, managing to combine a traditional approach with a pronounced ideological awareness. We will both supply information on the social and (...) historical background of the phenomenon, and discuss the poetic qualities of the work. Special attention will be given to linguistic, metrical and rhetorical features, which link this contemporary composition to classical kāvya poetry. (shrink)

As the decades passed, and the ‘humanists’ of the sixteenth century receded into history, they were increasingly seen as being not just students of pre‐Christian cultures but advocates for those cultures. Many of the values associated with this humanism can be held and are held by people as part of a wider assortment of beliefs and values, some of which beliefs and values may be religious. There may also be people who self‐identify as ‘Christian’ (or ‘Sikh’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Jewish’, (...) or whatever) for ethnic or political reasons but who have humanist convictions and no religious beliefs. Many traditional accounts of the origin of human morality have it that morality came to us from outside ourselves. Plainly, belief in theistic religions like Christianity or Islam is incompatible with a humanist view: the ability of the God to interfere at will with nature fatally disrupts the assumptions of naturalism. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to (...) have its own aims and methodology. (shrink)

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

A radical reinterpretation of Adam Smith that challenges economists, moral philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians to rethink him—and why he matters Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith’s contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. In this bold, revisionary book, Paul Sagar argues that not only have (...) the fundamentals of Smith’s political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change. Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, Sagar shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, Sagar argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith’s foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before. Offering major reinterpretations of Smith’s political, moral, and economic ideas, Adam Smith Reconsidered seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith’s original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn. (shrink)

Historians often feel that standard philosophical doctrines about the nature and development of science are not adequate for representing the real history of science. However, when philosophers of science fail to make sense of certain historical events, it is also possible that there is something wrong with the standard historical descriptions of those events, precluding any sensible explanation. If so, philosophical failure can be useful as a guide for improving historiography, and this constitutes a significant mode of productive interaction (...) between the history and the philosophy of science. I illustrate this methodological claim through the case of the Chemical Revolution. I argue that no standard philosophical theory of scientific method can explain why European chemists made a sudden and nearly unanimous switch of allegiance from the phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's theory. A careful re-examination of the history reveals that the shift was neither so quick nor so unanimous as imagined even by many historians. In closing I offer brief reflections on how best to explain the general drift toward Lavoisier's theory that did take place. (shrink)

This book deals with the history of the problem whether or not time can fully exist without the mind. This has been a vital issue in the philosophy of time, with intriguing arguments and solutions, from Aristotle to the present.

Aspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examines the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examine cross-cultural variation in how and from whom learning occurred. Learning patterns and community perceptions of task (...) difficulty were assessed through interviews. We found no relationship between task difficulty, age of acquisition, and oblique transmission, and a weak but positive relationship between task difficulty and rates of teaching. While same-sex transmission was normative in both societies, tasks ranked as more difficult were more likely to be transmitted by men among the BaYaka, but not among the Hadza, potentially reflecting cross-cultural differences in the sexual division of subsistence and teaching labor. Further, the BaYaka were more likely to report learning via teaching, and less likely to report learning via observation, than the Hadza, possibly owing to differences in socialization practices. (shrink)

CHAPTER I GENERAL ACCOUNT OF THE SUBJECT THERE is some difficulty in defining the subject of Ethics in a manner which can fairly claim general acceptance ...

A central figure in Victorian science, William Whewell held professorships in Mineralogy and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming Master of the college in 1841. His mathematical textbooks, such as A Treatise on Dynamics, were instrumental in bringing French analytical methods into British science. This three-volume history, first published in 1837, is one of Whewell's most famous works. Taking the 'acute, but fruitless, essays of Greek philosophy' as a starting point, it provides a history of the (...) physical sciences that culminates with the mechanics, astronomy, and chemistry of 'modern times'. Volume 3 first covers the mechanico-chemical sciences, emphasizing the convergence of mechanical and chemical theories in discoveries pertaining to electricity, magnetism and thermodynamics. A section on chemistry surveys Becher and Stahl's phlogiston theory, Lavoisier's theory of oxygen, and Faraday's laws of electromagnetic induction. The volume also covers mineralogy, botany, zoology, and anatomy. (shrink)

A central figure in Victorian science, William Whewell held professorships in Mineralogy and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming Master of the college in 1841. His mathematical textbooks, such as A Treatise on Dynamics, were instrumental in bringing French analytical methods into British science. This three-volume history, first published in 1837, is one of Whewell's most famous works. Taking the 'acute, but fruitless, essays of Greek philosophy' as a starting point, it provides a history of the (...) physical sciences that culminates with the mechanics, astronomy, and chemistry of 'modern times'. Volume 1 focuses on ancient Greek physics and metaphysics and their reception during the middle ages. Volume 2 discusses the rise of modern mechanics and emphasises the paradigmatic shift from mere observation to the explanation of causes. Volume 3 highlights the convergence of mechanical and chemical theories in discoveries about electricity, magnetism and thermodynamics. (shrink)

In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, author Mark Evan Bonds examines how writers have struggled to isolate the essence of music in ways that account for its profound effects on the human spirit. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to twentieth-century America, Bonds provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept, and provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how this essence explains music's effect. (...) A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field. (shrink)

The fundamental principle is that "we are good" -- "we" being the state we serve -- and what "we" do is dedicated to the highest principles, though there may be errors in practice. In a typical illustration, according to the retrospective version at the left-liberal extreme, the properly reshaped Vietnam War began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969 had become a "disaster" -- by 1969, after the business world had turned against the war as too costly and (...) 70 per cent of the public regarded it as "fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a mistake"; by 1969, seven years after Kennedy's attack on South Vietnam began, two years after the most respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is threatened with extinction...[as]... the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size"; by 1969, the time of some of the most vicious state terrorist operations of one of the major crimes of the late 20th century, of which Swift Boats in the deep South, already devastated by saturation bombing, chemical warfare and mass murder operations, were the least of the atrocities underway. But the reshaped history prevails. Serious expert panels ponder the reasons for "America's Vietnam Obsession" during the 2004 elections, when the Vietnam War was never even mentioned -- the actual one, that is, not the image reconstructed for history. (shrink)

This volume goes beyond presently available phenomenological analyses based on the structures and constitution of the lifeworld. It shows how the science of history is the mediator between the human and the natural sciences. It demonstrates that the distinction between interpretation and explanation does not imply a strict separation of the natural and the human sciences. Finally, it shows that the natural sciences and technology are inseparable, but that technology is one-sidedly founded in pre-scientific encounters with reality in the (...) lifeworld. In positivism the natural sciences are sciences because they offer causal explanations testable in experiments and the humanities are human sciences only if they use methods of the natural sciences. For epistemologists following Dilthey, the human sciences presuppose interpretation and the human and natural sciences must be separated. There is phenomenology interested in psychology and the social sciences that distinguish the natural and the human sciences, but little can be found about the historical human sciences. This volume fills the gap by presenting analyses of the material foundations of the "understanding" of expressions of other persons, and of primordial recollections and expectations founding explicit expectations and predictions in the lifeworld. Next, it shows, on the basis of history as applying philological methods in interpretations of sources, the role of a universal spatio-temporal framework for reconstructions and causal explanations of "what has really happened". (shrink)

Garrod, Smith and the contributors of the volume envisage the longue durée poetics of an early modern genre. They interpret its poetics alongside its various epistemic agenda and make a case for the literary status of natural history.

What are the relationships between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the history of science and the philosophy of science? This selection of essays by Lorenz Krüger (1932-1994) presents exemplary studies on the philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, on the history of physics and on the scope and limitations of scientific explanation, and a realistic understanding of science and truth. In his treatment of leading currents in 20th century philosophy, Krüger presents new and original arguments (...) for a deeper understanding of the continuity and dynamics of the development of scientific theory. These result in significant consequences for the claim of the sciences that they understand reality in a rational manner. The case studies are complemented by fundamental thoughts on the relationship between philosophy, science, and their common history. (shrink)