Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India

Meera Nandas adjudge Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. hardly a(prenominal) in the West be aware of the alarming meeting of ideas arising out of the coeval nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of Vedic learning and the prevalent postmodernist, social constructivist and sociological trends in scientific discipline studies in the West. Nandas book is an intellectual bombshell dropped on this potent combination. No unmatchable interested in the ways in which erudition and assimilation stand interact should ignore this book and the ch in allenge facial expression it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western perception studies. It should serve for historic period to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when it is allied with trendsetting but wrongheaded, and even deeply perverse, manqué epistemologies, such as those provided in post modernness, social constructi vism and their ilk. Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what Jeffery Herf calls ultraconservative modernism in his determine of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is an sentry that enabled Germans to accept modern scientific technology while at the same time they adopted politically illiberal and reactionary policies and rejected much of the reason of the enlightenment that informs science.

Her thesis is that contemporary India is in the grip of a version of reactionary modernism in which political nationalism is accompanied by scientific advance; but the science that informs it has been stripped of its enlightenment fact and relocated within t he context of nationalistic religion, Vedic ! Science. The stripping and move fits admirably with doctrines from Western science studies that claim that all acquaintance is local, that scientific belief is culturally caused, that power and knowledge are one, that there is no comprehensive rationality to science and that all scientific belief and its... If you compulsion to get a adequate essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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