Abstract des Vortrags von Dipesh Chakrabarty

„This lecture will look at three interrelated intellectual-cum-political legacies of Europe and examine their futures in light of the writings of three global thinkers, two of them European and the third one, Indian: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Carl Schmitt, and Rabindranath Tagore. The three legacies in question are the idea of the University and the concomitant production and organization of knowledge, the idea of civilization, and the idea of justice between nations and peoples mediated by a striving for perpetual peace. I argue that these three distinctly-European legacies were once intimately tied to the process globalization through which the planet came to be seen as a connected whole but are now threatened by the emergence of problems threatening human existence on a planetary scale. I end with an argument for global thinking needing to be supplemented by what I call planetary forms of thought.”