Events

2013

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

The Department of Philosophy, in association with the International Research Network on Religion and Democracy (IRNRD) and supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), organized an international conference on ‘Are We Post -secular? Contesting Religion and Politics in Comparative Contexts’ on 13 and 14 December 2012 at college. The conference afforded a unique forum facilitating dialogue and debates across the academic disciplines of philosophy, theology, politics and literature on emergent ideological deliberations comprehending the aspirations and realities of contemporary social contexts. The speakers, panellists and discussants included representatives from universities across Europe, West Asia and America, in addition to research groups and university departments across India. Issues ranging from fundamentalism, liberalism, secularism were examined both as academic dialectic as well as reflective of contemporary political compulsions and religious expediency. The papers presented and critiqued involved generous references to classical, modern and post-modern political philosophers including Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Gandhi, as well as novel insights into reading classical authors like Herman Melville. The keynote addresses that engagingly initiated the proceedings each day ranged from a frank exposure of the presumptuousness of the claims to the secular in The Myth of Secularisation by Professor Graham Ward of Oxford University, to an emphatic situation of the religious in Indian polity by Professor Ranabir Samaddar of the Calcutta Research Group in The Religious Nature of Our Political Rites. Innovative spaces for exchanges amongst scholars were created by means of ‘Paired Conversations’ wherein a two pairs of participants presented and discussed each other’s work. Professor Rajeev Bhargava of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies(CSDS), Delhi and Professor Maeve Cooke of University College, Dublin formed one such pair and Professor Gurpreet Mahajan of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and Professor Veit Bader of the University of Amsterdam discoursed on each others’ papers on Are we Post- secular?. A workshop on Fundamentalisms was chaired by Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo of Lapland University, involving Professor Kanchana Mahadevan of Mumbai University, Dr. Hilal Ahmed of CSDS, Professor Andrej Zwitter of the University of Groningen and Dr. Michael Hoelzl of the University of Manchester. Among the other notable presentations, were those made by Professor Sebastiano Maffettone of the Luiss University, Rome, on What Matters is Liberalism, Not Secularism, and, Diagnosis (and therapy?) of the Post-secular Disease by Dr. Walter Van Herck of the University of Antwerp. Both the disenchantment with the secular as well as the practicability of the post-secular, sharply scrutinised in both local and global contexts, recalibrate mutual understanding and perhaps, stimulate a new turn in reflective deliberations informing cross-cultural dialogues with political underpinnings and implications.

LECTURES

As part of the college initiative to optimise the audio-visual aids as well as internet resources at the reference library, an interactive session amongst the students and faculty of the department was organized on 14 September 2012, wherein a web lecture on Atheism, Secularism, Humanism: Three Zones of Argument, by Professor A.C. Grayling of the Oxford University was screened and discussed. On 30 October, a team from the Ramakrishna Mission at Delhi spoke with the students on the life and works of Swami Vivekananda, commemorating his 150th birth anniversary. On 27 February 2013, the association hosted a talk by Dr. Vijay Tankha of the Department of Philosophy at St. Stephen’s College, on’ Plato, Poets and Censorship in the Republic’.                 

2012

Annual seminar: ‘Film and Philosophy’
Speakers: V. Sanil (IIT Delhi), Bijoy Boruah (IIT Delhi),  Jigyasa Taneja (Writers’ Bridge)
Documentary Screening: ‘Words, Sound, Power’; interaction with Taru Dalmia.
Lectures: ‘Wittgenstein and Religious Belief’ by Vibha Chaturvedi; How Vedanta does things with words’ by Dhruv Raj Nagar.

2011

Annual inter-college academic meet Prasanga: Paper presentation competition, Debates, Quiz, Creative writing competition, Movie screenings
Inaugural address: ‘Self-knowledge, Narrativity and Memory’ by Manidipa Sen (Centre for Philosophy at JNU).