Sites of Learning and Practical Knowledge

Against Normativity

Vivek Dhareshwar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780367639730
• eBook ISBN: 9781000997408
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book examines the relationship between cultural difference and practical knowledge and its implications for the study of humanities and the social sciences.

It sketches a meta-theory of Western thought to grasp the conceptual distortions that result when a normatively structured theoretical way of understanding the world seeks to displace practical forms of understanding. The book draws on both Western thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Wittgenstein and Foucault and Indian thinkers such as Gandhi, Tagore and Balagangadhara to formulate a practical epistemology that delimits theoretical knowledge by regenerating experiential knowledge that was the hallmark of Indian intellectual traditions and provides the intellectual resources for rejecting normativity. By thus preparing the ground for a radical reconceptualization of the human sciences it seeks to overcome the loss of concepts and the violence generated by the grafting of ill–understood and experience-occluding normative conceptual structures on the fabric of practical life. Finally, the author offers an alternative conceptualization of Indian sociality through the idea of a practitional matrix, which explains both why the West necessarily misunderstood or misdescribed India and how that misdescription enables us to theorize the West.

Part of Critical Humanities across Cultures series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, Indian studies and literature.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Meta-Theory, Practical Knowledge, and Normativity
• 2 Politics, Experience, and Cognitive Enslavement: Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
• 3 Framing the Predicament of Indian Thought: Gandhi, the Gita, and Action
• 4 Truth or Fact? Reframing the Gandhi–Tagore Debate
• 5 Marx, Foucault, and the Secularization of Western Culture
• 6 Understanding the “Semblance of Objectivity”: Critique, Genealogy, and Practition
• 7 Sites of Learning and Intellectual Parasitism: The Case for New Humanities
• 8 Conclusion: Deformation of the Practical and the Categorial Error
• Appendix Re-visiting “Caste and the Secular Self”
• Bibliography
• Index