10 years ago to this day, on 6th of August 2010, the Postwar European historian and public intellectual Tony Judt died. A decade on, BRB reviewer Mario Clemens revisits Judt's legacy -- and finds him a superb companion for thinking about the prerequisites of sensible political judgment, which, it seems fair to say, is sorely lacking in these "post-truth" times. While the appeal of "higher truths" may have waned, public intellectuals now sometimes act in too timid a fashion -- foregoing the very courage and independence so valued by Judt. This, as Judt observed, renders intellectuals vulnerable to vacuous, yet dangerous, posturing -- a professional risk of "all-purpose intellectuals".
A handful of conventional narratives dominate the Western world's view of Indian philosophy: while some commentators cling to the view that India's pristine philosophical heritage has been preserved in Sanskrit texts, others dismiss pre-colonial traditions as 'non-philosophical'. Philosophy, on this latter view, did not arrive in India until the onset of modernity under British colonialism, and whatever philosophical insights earlier traditions may have had, can only be unearthed through analysis from within the dominant Anglophone philosophical tradition. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth -- or so argue the authors of 'Minds Without Fear', Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield. Epistemology -- to mention just one example -- was not transported to Indian shores by the ships of the East India Company, but was explored in intellectual communities and movements such as the Navya-Nyaya long before colonialism took hold. And the discomfort with using the English language after colonialism, as expressed by, say, Rabindranath Tagore, does not reflect any incompatibility of Indian thinking with philosophical traditions, but instead reflects the distrust of a colonial mindset that gave rise to Thomas Macaulay's infamous remark 'that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. In offering a historical explanation for this discomfort, Bhushan and Garfield place their philosophical protagonists in a broader, political context, while also making a case for the richness and intellectual depth of what they aptly call the 'Indian renaissance'. By deftly combining criticism of established narratives with a positive case for the intellectual value of Indian philosophy, Bhushan and Garfield -- argues BRB reviewer Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach -- succeed in nudging their readers to seek a truly free knowledge, a knowledge which honestly faces up to its social grounding and which confronts the prejudices that stand in the way of truly globalizing our philosophical thinking.
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