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This book explores border crossing among pragmatism, spirituality and society. 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. It cultivates new visions and practices of spiritual pragmatism building upon the seminal works of Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, Sri Aurobindo, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Luce Irigaray which can help us rethink and transform conventional conceptions and constructions of practice, pragmatism, language, religion, politics, society, culture and democracy and create new relationships of pragmatism, spirituality and society.
List of contents
Part One: Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: New Horizons of Theory and Practice.- Pragmatism and Spirituality: New Horizons of Theory and Practice and the Calling of Planetary Realizations.- Pragmatism, Geist and the Question of Form: From a Critical Theory Perspective.- Naturalistic Spirituality, Religious Naturalism, and Community Spirituality: A Broader Pragmatic View.- Pragmatism and the "Changing of the Earth": Unifying Moral Impulse, Creative Instinct and Democratic Culture.- Towards Spiritual Pragmatics: Reflections from the Graveyards of Culture.- Mystical Pragmatics.- Pragmatism and Spirituality in Anthropological Aesthetics.- Part Two: Pragmatism and Spirituality: Border-Crossing Adventures, Creative Experiments and New Pathways of Planetary Realizations.- Peirce's Semiotic Pragmaticism and Buddhist Soteriology: Steps Towards Modelling "Thought Forms" of Signlessness.- Spiritual Pragmatism: William James, Sri Aurobindo and Global Philosophy.- William James's Pragmatism and Some Aspects of Roman Catholic Teaching.- Gandhi, Hegel and Freedom: Aufhebungen, Pragmatism and Ideal Type Models.- Cosmopolitan Nationalism, Spirituality and Spaces in Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.- Thought of Mahatma Gandhi: A Path-Breaking Experience of Spiritual Pragmatism.- Pragmatism, Spirituality and the Calling of a New Democracy: The Populist Challenge and Ambedkar's Integration of Buddhism and Dewey.
About the author
Ananta Kumar Giri is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research in many universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University (Denmark), Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris (France), the University of Kentucky (USA), University of Freiburg & Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany), Jagiellonian University (Poland) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has an abiding interest in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature.
