Books by Ananta Kumar Giri

It opens up American pragmatism to dialogues with pragmatism and spiritual quest from other traditions such as India and China thus making contemporary pragmatism a part of much needed planetary conversations.

Self-development of individuals and societies is an epochal challenge now but surprisingly very little has been written about this in the vast field of development studies and social sciences. The present book is one of the first efforts in this field and explores in detail the dynamics of pursuits of self-development and the accompanying contradictions in the self-study mobilization called Swadhyaya. Giri is one of the pioneers in bringing self-development to the core of theory and ethnographic multiverse of humanities and development studies.

Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in todays world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. It is a multidimensional struggle and aspiration in which knowledge self, social and spiritual can play a transformative role. Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations undertakes such a journey of transformation, and seeks to rethink knowledge vis--vis the familiar themes of human interest, critical theory, enlightenment, ethnography, democracy, pluralism, rationality, secularism and cosmopolitanism.Knowledge today is imprisoned not only in structures of domination but also in varieties of dualisms expert and the lay, cognitive and emotional and thus we are in need of a new art of cultivating non-duality and wholeness. The present book seeks to nurture the garden of liberatory and transformational knowledge by presenting alternative pathways gathered from many different global locations and traditions. Discussing diverse thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Jrgen Habermas, Erasmus, Kant, Tocqueville, Gandhi, Foucault, Daya Krishna, Ramachandra Gandhi and Martha Nussbaum, this text seeks to rethink some important themes in the contemporary discourse of knowledge, including: knowledge as power; knowledge as emancipatory interest; evolution; rationality; power; freedom; anthropology; history; law; compassion and confrontation; epistemology; ontology; political consumerism and responsible consumption; civil society and self-development; and rights.Offering a groundbreaking and interdisciplinary exploration of ideas about social transformation, Knowledge and Human Liberation bridges both Eastern and Western philosophy to create a definition of transformative knowledge that defies Eurocentric thinking. Via the discourses of sociology, philosophy, religion and spirituality, the text rethinks the relationship between knowledge production and ideas to offer a unique perspective on the issue of human liberation in todays oppressive world. The volume also features a Foreword by John Clammer (United Nations University, Tokyo) and an Afterword by Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame).