TY  - BOOK
AU  - Adluri,Vishwa
AU  - Bagchee,Joydeep
TI  - The nay science: a history of German Indology 
SN  - 9780190870249 (pbk)
PY  - 2014///
CY  - New Delhi
PB  - Oxford University Press
KW  - Hindu philosophy
KW  - Germany
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (pages 447-471) and index
N2  - This book offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as its example, the book develops a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities. The book shows how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, it shows how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, a case is then made in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato’s concern for virtue and Gandhi’s focus on praxis, the book argues for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures
ER  -