Minutes of Session 2: 24.02.2013
- The dynamic of Knowledge and ignorance
- Knowledge as a skill to make distinctions between things
- Knowing the "ignorance of ignorance"
- Acquiring the 'range of knowledge' of ignorance
- The idea of an educated man
- How to shape the intellectual abilities of individuals?
- How to shape the intellectual landscape we live in?
- Distinction between intellectual virtues and moral virtues: Although some say that intellectual virtues implies moral virtues our intuitive tendency would be to doubt it.
- The distinction between 'individual' and 'community'
- An individual is constituted by relations and and these include internal and external relations
- Social Contract theories explain the relationship between individuals using an external-relationships model (of utility, interest and so on)
- The good life constitutes a habitat
- Family, jaati
- Community (geographical, confessional etc)
- State, nation-state
- The general question for building a habitat includes the question of nation-building
The idea of citizenship and its implications- What is it? Is it needed? If yes, why?
- Nationalism could be seen as a response to the French Revolution. Whereas, the French Revolution was made in the name of the "Rights of Man", nationalism, especially in its German variety, emphasizing the idea of the volk culture as against the court culture (represented by the French Aristocracy), was made in the name of the "Rights of the People". the assumption here was that every volk, every people have a special characteristic realized in its language, literature and customs. Citizenship defined in terms of rights now becomes a semi-ethnic characteristic
- What is it? Is it needed? If yes, why?
- Sketching an intellectual landscape
- What role is assigned to writers? What do they write about?
- They recreate experience which involves the capacity to take another perspective
- Novel: Reconstruction of a plausible view of a cross-section of lived experience or a life experience-able
- Idea of Reconstruction
- Making of an individual involves
- the shape of the ethos
- the gestalt of the competencies available
- making links between different institutions during a time: a history of an epoch
- An Aristotelian distinction
- The made versus the generated
- Artifact versus nature
- Is the City 'made' or 'generated' and similarly, is an individual 'made' or 'generated'?
- The idea of shaping one's life as an artwork
- Every doing has a co-relative aspect of happening
- Doing and encountering happening
- Skill is the ability to control the happening aspect so as to serve one's aim
- The distinction between artisanal and artistic ability in making things
- What kind of attitude should we instill in an individual?
- Relationship between a personality and his times
- Reconstruction of nature: assumes that nature is an artisanal product of the Great Artisan
- The
relationship between history and fiction: the question is not quite
what characteristics define the one as against the other form but when
is it judged as one or the other
- based on one's criteria of truth
- by our mode of reading, i.e., what we bring to it as an attitude
- not by its textual features alone but by what features we attend to
- Making of an individual involves
- What role is assigned to writers? What do they write about?
- Discussion on the making of Gandhi
- The importance of the social network in bringing about the social revolution of Gandhi
- The international currency of ideas from which Gandhi borrows
- What is the kind of intellectual network that Indian national movement provided for intellectuals? How is it different from a network today? Would a similar social network like the one put together by Gandhi be conceivable today?
- Today networks seem to be transformed into associations (like language associations and caste associations) providing a semblance of a cultural motive and 'interest' which may not be the case with the networks of the Gandhian era.
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