About Author
Debajyoti Gangopadhyay
Writer/Editor/Professor
Writer/Editor/Professor
While teaching graduate level physics in Annada College, Vinoba Bhabe University in Jharkhand, India during the last 24 years, I had also been engaged to figure out some 'meaningful' overlap between foundational issues in Physics and Philosophy in its Eastern and Western versions. Attempts to understand philosophy of science in the Indian context started much earlier while I was doing my Masters in pure physics in M. S. University of Baroda during 1989-91. After completing my Masters, I started visiting the traditional Indian philosophers located around my hometown Chinsurah, West Bengal and outside. Unfortunately traditionally trained Indian philosophers were considerably reduced by that time.
After more than two decades, when I look back to that time it seems quite crazy and unlikely for a physics graduate to do so in context of the-then Indian academic scenario . But it was a phase of strange fits of passion! It was an uncontrollable journey through the uncertain border of 'our belief' committed simultaneously to Tradition and Modernity. In fact, getting back to Indian Philosophy for me is basically a self-ethnographic process to define my point of entry into the knowledge store of my own Tradition - engaging myself in the dynamic process of interplay with the Past which I am a part of !
Eventually during 2005, I was invited by Navanalanda Mahavihara, Nalanda - a deemed University under the Ministry of Culture , to organise a meeting where scientists would try to open Dialogue with the Buddhist monk philosophers commemorating the Vada-parampara(Dialogue) in ancient Nalanda Mahavihara. Indeed much of the Indian philosophical tradition is an outcome of Dialogue between different rival schools .The first Dialogue in Navanalanda was devoted to the concept of Sūnya in Madhyamik Buddhism - one of the most enigmatic Indian versions of Nothingness. This was the beginning of a long journey which finally took shape as the Nalanda Dialog Mission.
Subsequently I conducted Science Philosophy Dialogues and workshops of different orders almost all over India in places of traditional interest like Varanasi, Mithila, Tirupati , Navdeep as well as in Bangalore, Delhi , Jodhpur , Kolkata…
I was offered an adjunct professorship in Centre for Foundation Studies, Institute of Scientific Research, Bangalore in 2017. I was invited to join the editorial board of Quanta in 2016.
However after the inaugural Dialogue on Sunyata, Navanalanda Mahavihara continued to provide space for systematic annual Dialogues up to 2019. Last year Mahavihara published four Volumes of Nalanda Dialogue Series based on the 13 Dialogues from 2005 to 2019. First two of these volumes are under my editorial supervision. Other than opening Dialogues of different orders, Nalanda Dialogue mission is also aimed to develop a History and Philosophy of Science community in India as there are practically no community of researchers in India devoted to the systematic study of History and Philosophy of Science.
However , the last few years of intense Nalanda Dialogues have brought me closer to recognize the question of Individuation and Identity as almost central to the whole nexus of foundational concerns which seem to ensure the largest non-trivial overlap of Philosophy ( both in its Indian and Western variants ) with modern foundational debate in quantum mechanics. It is quite curious to note that, the potential scope of the question of individuation and identity can provide grounds of scepticism about our most comfortable ontological standpoints based our everyday common sense experience.
With these lessons of more than two decades of science philosophy Dialogues in view , I am recently focused, as one extreme of this non-trivial overlap , to make further sense of some logico-philosophical aspects of IDENTITY which seems to unveil severe limitations of the language of standard logic and set theory in question of talking about the quantum mechanical domain . I am designing an online course on this
Other than English, I have extensively written and edited Books and articles in Bengali mostly on colonial issues of knowledge synthesis as well as history of our colonial response to newly arrived western science in Bengal during the 19th century, its aftermath and the overall impact on our misguided pedagogical policy till date.
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