Religious Philosophy of Guru Nanak: Literary Speculation

India has been a land of diverse culture and traditions. When we say culture it includes many things like language, social customs, food habits, religion and so on. Of this religion seems to be the most influential factor in the life of an individual. It is something which lends meaning and purpose to our life. It is that which binds human beings to the Divine. And this bond can be established through the practise of Bhakti. The concept of Bhakti is an old one. It emphasises devotion to the personal God. Bhakti movement is an important development in the cultural history of India which originated in the south. The saints of Bhakti movement preached personal devotion to God as a means of attaining Salvation. They made use of local language to spread the ideology of Bhakti. Guru Nanak is one of the most influential saints of the Bhakti movement. In his teaching he incorporated ideas both from Hinduism as well as Islam. He revealed the truth of monotheism, importance of the recitation of God’s name with utmost devotion, need of a Guru for salvation. He tried to bridge the gap between the two communities of Islam and Hinduism and eradicate social problems by focusing on the truth of monotheism and the concept of equality.

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IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF IDEAS: ARTHUR LOVEJOY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AS A FORM OF CULTURAL HISTORY

Modern Intellectual History ◽

10.1017/s1479244314000080 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 439-464

Author(s):

DANIEL WICKBERG

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Cultural Analysis ◽

Human Beings ◽

Language And Culture ◽

Academic Cultures ◽

Dead End ◽

Fertile Ground ◽

History Of ◽

New Generation ◽

Disciplinary Cultures

The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies “beyond” the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography. The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice “dead” in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.

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Vygotsky’s natural history of signs

Sign Systems Studies ◽

10.12697/sss.2019.47.1-2.10 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 47 (1/2) ◽

pp. 257-304

Author(s):

Lauri Linask

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Cultural History ◽

Interpersonal Communication ◽

Psychological Functioning ◽

Cultural Development ◽

Human Beings ◽

Sign Systems ◽

Material Environment ◽

History Of ◽

Individual Human

The paper organizes the topic of signs in Lev Vygotsky’s various writings into a coherent whole in order to study signs’ role in child development. Vygotsky related conventional signs that have their origin in interpersonal communication, and are subject to cultural history taking place over generations during historical time, to psychological functioning of individual human beings. Vygotsky’s “natural history of signs” is the study of how symbolic activity appears and develops. The paper outlines the process of inclusion of symbols within the behaviour of the child and gives an account of various changes in psychological functions and their interrelations that it brings along. In cultural development specifically human forms of behaviour appear, and children’s relationship to social and material environment is changed qualitatively. Vygotsky outlines the formation of sign use and analyses its developmental steps. Vygotsky’s approach explains how the use of various sign systems shapes both the cognitive processes in the person, the child, and the cognitive development as a whole. Vygotsky’s approach to signs is presented within the conceptual framework of its time.

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