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

Meera Nandas adjudge Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. a couple of(prenominal) in the West be aware of the alarming coming together of ideas arising out of the present-day(a) nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of Vedic learning and the frequent 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 noesis and assimilation stand interact should ignore this book and the intriguing facial expression it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western information studies. It should serve for historic period to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when it is eachied with trendsetting but wrongheaded, and even deeply perverse, manqué epistemologies, such as those provided in post contemporanei ty, social constructivism and their ilk. Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what Jeffery Herf calls extreme right-winger modernism in his determine of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is an observation post 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 technical ad vance; but the science that informs it has b! een stripped of its enlightenment position and relocated within the context of nationalistic religion, Vedic Science. The stripping and relocation fits admirably with doctrines from Western science studies that claim that all knowledge 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 all-encompassing essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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