REVIEW

Science, Philosophy, and Culture : Multi Disciplinary Explorations
Part - I

The present collection of papers, in two parts, provides a comprehensive introduction to the multi-volume Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture (PHISPC).

No civilization can remain great or escape breakdown without a sound theoretical and practical foundation underlying it.  This multi-disciplinary Project is based on this time-tested truth. Dichotomies between theory and practice, science and technology, nature and nurture, and their cognates are fancied and of relatively recent origin.  Fragmentation and porochialism are gaining ground, and the philosophical insights into linkages between different branches of learning are being lost, in the name of specialization.  A balanced emphasis on dharma and karma, knowledge and virtue, pure reason and practical reason, is evident in all the lasting cultures of the world—the Indic, Sinic, Semitic- Arabic and Hellenic-European.  Another collateral principle that informs the explorations of this Project is that the roots even of formal sciences like geometry and arithmetic are traceable to our life-world which is commonly shared by the literati and the laity.

The perspective of the Project is admittedly historical.  But history is presented here in a non-linear or fuzzy way.  Its context is cultural in all its major aspects-scientific, technological and humanistic.  That history is contemporaneous is generally recognized, but its futuristic implications are often disregarded.  Not just the past and the present of India, but also its projected identity in the twenty-first century have received the attention of the scholar working on the Project.  Attempts will be made to indicate how different languages, religions, ethnic groups, nationalities and their cultural forms, the Asian and European presence, their thought and action, have contributed to the shaping of modern India and to the emergence of a civilizational state.