Kuvempu University, Shivamogga, 20-22 February 2025
Sunil Sahasrabudhey Sharath Ananthamurthy
President,Vidya Ashram Varanasi Vice Chancellor,Kuvempu University
Convention Co-Chair Convention Chair
The focal theme of the Convention is ‘Knowledge in Society’ and the convention proposes to bring it into all discourses – economic, political. philosophical, cultural etc. As an epistemic idiom it should also be able to enter the discourses in the formal institutions of knowledge like the universities, on the internet and in places of spiritual persuasion – the three major organized locations of knowledge and knowledge activity today. Terms like traditional knowledge, local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, ethnic knowledge etc. would all be included in the term knowledge in society.
The science and technology discourse of the previous era has changed into a knowledge discourse largely after the Information Revolution. What was earlier categorized as skills and practices of the people at large has come to be recognized as knowledge in the present era. The domain of knowledge therefore stretches from one end in artisanal-peasant communities to the other end of artificial intelligence. Searl’s Chinese Room experiment has reappeared in a new guise.
This has far reaching consequences, for now different ways of thinking and doing, which unlike modern science do not abhor the ethical and aesthetic considerations, have a common address ‘Knowledge in Society’. ‘Knowledge in Society’ does not prioritize between the material, ethical, aesthetic, spiritual etc. So, now men and women are rational not just because they can construct analytical and scientific arguments, but also because they can, equally well, construct sound arguments for ethical, aesthetic and spiritual understandings and undertakings. This could liberate human rationality from the European yoke.
Through Knowledge in Society, the proposed convention hopes to address the entire width , and with a sense of non-hierarchy and equity built into it. The peasants and artisans are not inferior knowledge beings compared to the professionals from the university.
The convention shall explore the knowledge question and knowledge choices involved in the processes of nation building and development and also in people’s movements. We shall explore whether and how knowledge issue enters the realm of art and are also inclined to conceive a new political imagination, may be an idea of ‘swaraj’ suited for the contemporary times. There will be dialogue on regional/ cultural/linguistic knowledge traditions, specifically focused on Kannada traditions of knowledge. Put together this Knowledge Dialogue is at the same time also about ethics and aesthetics, not leaving out metaphysics, and about matters of language, policy and governance. It can take us to a new concept of emancipation, at the same time both political and philosophic. India should be a reasonably well suited land for heralding some such new idea and practice thereof, and this Convention should open doors for it.
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