Concept of Man in Philosophy

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About the Book:

Indian Institute Of Advanced Study, Shimla was perhaps the first research organization in India to have staged some years ago a seminar on MAN. The seminar was a many-pronged intellectual exercise directed toward the understanding of human reality. Although the participants were mainly philosophers, drawn from Indian universities, the papers and discussions at the seminar covered diverse aspects of human life-anthropological, psychological, ethical, ontological, religious, etc. The aim of the sessions was to delineate various dimensions of the human phenomenon, to uncover the meaning of human existence, to arrive at the foundation of man-and-the-world and man-to-man encounters. Speakers put across Indian and Western, scientific and metaphysical, analystic and holistic, inward-directed and outward-directed points of view.

The present volume contains most of the constibutions read and discussed at the seminar. They are by D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Ramchandra Gandhi, Ramakant Sinari, N.S.S. Raman, Suresh Chandra, R.K. Gupta, Y.N. Chopra, S.S. Barlingay, A.K. Sinha, S.N. Mahajan, Sujata Miri, Sisir Kumar Ghose, Amar Kumar Singh, Pratap Chandra, L.P. Singh and V.N. Tiwari.

Each article in this volume reflects an unduplicable paradigm, a unique way of looking at MAN. The reading of all the articles would leave one with an inevitable impression that the meaning of being human can be understood from a number of vantage points, that there are seemingly diverse though fundamentally complementary perceptions concerning humanness, that what a particular writer sees as the dominant feature of human life arises probably from his/her own experience of being in the world.

About the Author:

DR. RAMAKANT SINARI is at present Professor and Head Department of Philosophy, Goa University. Before joining Goa University, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has taught and lectured in several universities in India and abroad and has published books and scholarly articles in national and international journals.

Man’s conception of himself is a subject on which philosophers have reflected throughout the historical times. The growing complexity of human life and the growing understanding of the ways in which human action and thought find expression have not diminished but added interest to this subject of perennial importance. The Concept of Man in Philosophy contains an exposition of this important subject from different angles by a number of eminent scholars in the fields of literature and psychology as well as philosophy.

The way in which discussion in carried out makes it interesting for general readers.

Preface

The articles contained in this volume were read and discussed in a seminar on “Concept of Man in Philosophy” organized by Indian Institute of Advanced study, Shimla some years ago. The contributions span a wide canvas of approaches and methods for understanding human reality. Although most of the articles are written by scholars in philosophy there is a sprinkling of articles by scholars in other disciplines in this volume. The volume, as a matter of fact, offers a cocktail of some of the influential styles of human study in philosophy in India today.

My thanks are due to Professor Margared Chatterjee, the former Director of the IIAS for having taken the decision to publish these articles. It was a timely decision. Mr N.K. Maini of IIAS has done the excellent work of proof-reading the material and shown remarkable speed in getting the volume printed.