Akeel Bilgrami Quotes
Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian-American philosopher, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and one of the leading contemporary analytic philosophers of mind, language, and political philosophy. Belief and Meaning and Self-Knowledge and Resentment defended an externalist account of mental content together with a strong thesis of first-person authority over one's own beliefs, while Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment offered a sustained reflection on the political and intellectual conditions of secularism in a postcolonial world. The quotes below are attributed to Akeel Bilgrami, organized by topic.
Akeel Bilgrami on Knowledge
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“Nehru felt that secularism was never an exclusive concept to be discussed in India at all, because if secularism was a reparative notion towards a damage that had occurred in European society, he believed that damage to have never taken place in India in the first place.”
As quoted in "'Politics is the Art of the Possible': Akeel Bilgrami on Secularism in India
Akeel Bilgrami on Mind
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Attributed to Akeel Bilgrami:
“First-person authority is not infallibility; it is the special connection one has to what one is committed to believe.”
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Attributed to Akeel Bilgrami:
“Reason is constitutively committed to the responses it makes available to others.”
Akeel Bilgrami on Nature
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“Ch. 1 : Belief, Meaning, and the External World”
The "meaning" in the title of the book acknowledges the close and familiar connection between intentionality and meaning. The connection holds between the meaning of the sentence Smith utters when he utters "Bigmouth has struck again" and his belief that Bigmouth has struck again. The idea of this close relation is not intended to convey the obvious falsehood that the meanings of the sentences whi
Akeel Bilgrami on Politics
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Attributed to Akeel Bilgrami:
“Secularism, properly understood, is a political ideal, not a metaphysical doctrine about the disenchantment of the world.”
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Attributed to Akeel Bilgrami:
“Gandhi's politics is unintelligible without his metaphysics, and his metaphysics is unintelligible without his politics.”
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Attributed to Akeel Bilgrami:
“The disenchantment of the world is reversible, and politics is the work of its reversal.”
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“As quoted in "'Politics is the Art of the Possible': Akeel Bilgrami on Secularism in India”
Nehru felt that secularism was never an exclusive concept to be discussed in India at all, because if secularism was a reparative notion towards a damage that had occurred in European society, he believed that damage to have never taken place in India in the first place.