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The academic discipline of the history of religions is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and perhaps in a position to contribute particularly useful insights to the dialogue across academic boundaries. This essay is intended to present a very thin slice of cultural responses to our contemporary condition, and to suggest a few possible resources for analysis of them.
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We often wonder: What are the limits of religious tolerance? Why can we be very open to the idea of tolerance, as a principle, and still, when it comes about our own family/actions, to be, in many cases, intolerant?1 What is the difference between the idea of tolerance and its particular application? And why, so many times, we are tolerant in words, and intolerant in practice? Why does this difference occur? And why are we showing indifference when we should implicate ourselves and make a difference? Yes, we play with notions, but we actually do this in everyday life.
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Any reference to the Romanian philosophy of the 20th century must also contain details about its relationship with modernity / modernization. As everywhere in Europe, in Romania, modernity has produced a paradigm shift. This position expressed a certain way of thinking about philosophy in a modernizing society. This volume contains the works of the Panel entitled "Tradition and modernization in Romanian philosophy in the twentieth century", proposed and moderated by Mihaela Gligor, as part of the International Conference "Modernism, modernization, modernity. Historiographical and methodological perspectives", organized by the "George Baritiu" Institute of History of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and Babeș Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, between October 13-15, 2021, within the Cluj Academic Days 2021.
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Schopenhauer’s concept of the will-to-life was transformed by one of his main disciples, Philipp Mainländer, in his Philosophy of Redemption (1876) into the will-to-death, preceding Freud’s investigations regarding the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The post-Schopenhauerian conception that non-being is preferable to being anticipates Cioran’s discussion of suicide from A Short History of Decay (1949) and his vision of the “catastrophe” of birth from The Trouble with Being Born (1973). If, from a Nietzschean perspective, Cioran’s obsession with death is a symptom of passive nihilism, from an extreme-contemporary perspective, his pessimistic thanatophilia may resonate with our anxious crepuscular mentality, prefiguring contemporary Antinatalism.
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In this chapter I will discuss the role that Mircea Eliade had, as an exponent of the generation, in the interwar Romanian culture in general and the humanist thinking in particular, under two challenges, the historical and the political. Between the two tendencies crystallized in the Romanian interwar period, philosophical universalism and autochthonism, Mircea Eliade intuits that, after the achievement of the national unity on December 1, 1918, the Romanian culture must assume a new direction. Between the first tendency, which understood that the specificity of modernity lies in the universality of truth beyond the national specificity, and the second interested in deciphering the "Romanian vein" in the cultural and philosophical capitalization of ethnicity, Eliade projects the destiny of national culture in the universal dimension, considering that Romania's destiny must be a cultural one, and our cultural modernity should by represented by the "universal man". Eliade's project, perhaps, was doomed to failure or had a partial and unfinished character, and modernity understood as cultural universalization was only the awareness of a trend that, under the "terror of history", did not materialize. But he became a personal project that Mircea Eliade assumed through the hermeneutics of the world's religions and the understanding of homo religiosus and "total man".
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Since his work of youth (On the Inner Dialogue) Mihai Şora proposes the act of dialogue as an essential, self-producing state of the human being. Dialogue involves equality in dignity and alterity and the discovery of alterity as a revelation of the world as a structure of potentialities or openings of the me-you type, characterized by reciprocity. The me-you dialogue and the inner dialogue, the communion or the generalized dialogue, are at the same time an ethical commitment of the partners practicing openness and reciprocity, the foundations for freedom and for the awareness of our position in relation to the world. Dialogue produces the occupation of the inner space of the being as voice of the being and at the same time assuming of the outer space as discursiveness, as permanence of acts of being and acting together. Communion as an emotion thus edifies not only the subject participating in the dialogue but also a new entity, the communion itself, an affective perhaps agapic composition. Starting from here, we aim to explore the philosophy of dialogue of Mihai Şora as a theoretical background for a structuring the methodology of a dialogical counselling or philosophical practice aimed at elucidating and relating the subject to the outside world as an autonomous act of the self that is exercised in communion as co-author and giver of meaning.
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The cultural relations between India and Romania are interesting to study and to understand. India is a country of immense diversity, of extraordinary customs, and a genuine feast of opinions, which attracts researchers from all over the world. Romanians are people with a profound sensibility. The two cultures met on the common ground of spirituality and the results are remarkable, as it is shown in this special volume.
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Since the commencement of colonial modernity in India, English, French, and German literature and philosophy have influenced Indian literature. Along with these three major literary spaces, authors also studied new European literature, particularly that of the former USSR republics and small European nations. Translations of literature from Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and many more nations have begun to appear frequently in Bengali magazines since the second decade of 20th century. The Bengali literary canon also was being reshaped by such translations and Europe was redefined beyond the established colonial map, as translation appeared as a new cartography. The literary canon of the colonisers was seen as a dominating literary source and the literature of such minor nations was alternative to those. Additionally, Indian minds were attempting to comprehend various European perspectives on World War- I and II at the moment of the shattering of the nations. Amita Bhose, a well-known translator, spent her life translating from Bengali and Sanskrit to Romanian and Romanian into Bengali and created an emotional bond between Romania, her Bengali as well as Indian heritage, and herself. This paper argues Amita Bhose and her works are attached to an emotional bond that causes a translator to find a new home in the world, and a translator may be regarded best as a cultural ambassador. Amita Bhose through her works from and into Bengali and Romanian bridges between two nations and produced a generation of students who essentially become comparatists in various capacities. An international initiative of an individual brought a new dimension in imagining world literature from a particular location and such paradigmatic practices can be argued as an alternative way of doing a non-anglophone, non-canonical literary comparison
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Researcher, writer, translator and teacher Amita Bhose (Calcutta, 1933 - Bucharest, 1992) has a special place in the Romanian cultural landscape. Born in Calcutta in 1933, in a family with a rich cultural and scientific activity, she graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics of the University of Calcutta, in 1953. In 1959, she came to Romania with her husband, a geological engineer, where she enrolled in a two-year Romanian language and literature course. She then returned to India, where she debuted in the Indian press with the article Rabindranath in Romania. It was the beginning of a long series of Bengali and English articles about Romanian culture and literature, from which she also translated. In 1965 she graduated from the Faculty of Bengali-English at the University of Calcutta, and in 1971, the beneficiary of a scholarship from the Romanian state, she enrolled in a PhD programme at the Faculty of Romanian Language and Literature, the University of Bucharest. In 1975 she defended her thesis titled The Indian Influence on the thoughts of Eminescu. From 1971 until her death she lived in Romania, "the country she loved perhaps more than many Romanians did, and served with her intelligence and her pen" (Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, the scientific advisor of the thesis). In India she published translations into Bengali from contemporary Romanian poetry, from Sadoveanu, Zaharia Stancu and Marin Sorescu, and plays by I.L. Caragiale and Mihail Sebastian were set on stage. In 1969, the volume Eminescu: Kavita (Poems), the first translation of Eminescu in Asia, was published in Bengali.
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Professor Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952) is probably best remembered as a Philosopher and for his contributions to the historiography of Indian Philosophy. This spirit of philosophical enquiry can also be discovered in his famous works on Yoga and Tantra – knowledge systems which are based in praxis. However, as a thinker, Professor Dasgupta defied all disciplinary boundaries and wrote and lectured on the sciences, literature, art history, aesthetics and so on. Even a cursory look at his teaching career establishes the essentially interdisciplinary nature of his calling: among other things, Dasgupta served as a Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in Rajshahi and Chittagong College; then taught Bengali at Oxford University; became Professor of Philosophy at Presidency College; then Principal of Sanskrit College; afterwards Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calcutta. He was deeply influenced by poetry, especially Rabindranath Tagore, and many of his essays on philosophy would include Tagore’s poetry as an instance to prove his point or as a moment of epiphany in an otherwise structured argument. Besides these scholarly pursuits, he has also authored poetry collections and novels in Bangla. Dasgupta liked to keep himself informed about the latest developments in World Literature and at times, he even participated in the literary debates that were taking place in the public sphere at that period. Perhaps, his initial training as a student of Sanskrit served as the foundation for this lifelong engagement with languages and literatures. My presentation seeks to locate this literary persona of Professor Dasgupta through a reading of some of his works including Sāhitya Paricay and The History of Sanskrit Literature – in which he worked as an editor and as one of the two contributors. Supplementing these with texts on art and aesthetics by Dasgupta, we seek to understand his way of approaching literature – characteristically comparative; looking for patterns of relationships and connections across time, space, cultures
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Born into a socially conservative but intellectually liberal family, Maitreyi was the daughter of scholar-philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta and Himani Madhuri Rai ( sister of Himanshu Rai, owner/ founder of Bombay Talkies). Her early childhood corresponded with the trying years of the First World War while in her youth she was exposed to the political lessons of the Second World War — to fascist Italy, to the Hitlerite regime in Germany, to Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, to Republican and communist China — when Maitreyi, was perceived as a left-wing sympathiser. This was the era of the emergence of nation-states, of obsessive nationalism and revolts against hegemonic and capitalist forces. As an intimate protégée of Rabindranath Tagore, wherever she travelled, to China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, she practised the transnationalism that marked out the travelogues of Tagore. This meant that both colonial perceptions and the nation-state centric approach were disrupted by discourses of inter-connectedness that in turn challenged conceptual boundaries of difference and ethnicity
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Maitreyi wrote books of philosophy and also travel books. For Na Hanyate (It Does not Die), the reply-novel to Mircea Eliade’s story, Maitreyi Devi received, in 1976, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the most important distinction from the Academy of Indian Letters. She was invited to give lectures on life and works of her dear friend and mentor, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, or on Indian philosophy and culture, all over the world. She also had a special role in the emancipation of Indian women. Marked by the drama of children left on the roads as a result of territorial divisions and political struggles, Maitreyi Devi set up an orphanage and attracted significant funds for educating and empowering young people in disadvantaged environments.
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