The Maoists In India

Nirmalangshu Mukherji has just retired from Professorship of Philosophy at Delhi University. He started out aiming to become a philosopher of science, drifted into epistemology, moved on to classical philosophy of language, became drawn to cognitive science, and somehow ended up looking at biolinguistics, nature of musical organization, and the general properties of the human mind. The effort led to dozens of papers and two books: “Cartesian Mind” (IIAS, 2000) and “Primacy of Grammar” (MIT, 2010). He also co-edited Noam Chomsky’s “Architecture of Language” (OUP, 2000). An extensively revised edition of “Cartesian Mind” (2000) will be published soon by Bloomsbury.

Mukherji is also professionally interested on general questions of life, including the character of philosophical practice. There is no conscious attempt, but sometimes these two apparently disjoint interests seem to merge. He has published many articles in the area mostly in reputed anthologies. Some of these pieces are now collected in “Reflections on Human Inquiry: Science, Philosophy, Common Life” (Springer 2017)

There is also a third, more recent interest: to do something about peace, justice, human rights. He writes regularly for a variety of political forums such as Znet, Outlook, Economic and Political Weekly. He has published “Terror Over Democracy” (2005) earlier. His most recent publication in this category is “Maoists in India: Tribals Under Siege” (2012). There is little academic philosophy in these political writings, but Mukherji thinks that he couldn’t have written them without lifelong engagement with philosophy.

Most of his articles and summary of books may be read at https://nirmalangshumukherji.com/