Vishwa Adluri specializes in Indian philosophy. [1] He is a strong critic of the academic discipline of Indology. [1]
Adluri enrolled for a PhD under the supervision of Michael Hahn, Professor of Indology and Tibetology at the University of Marburg but was failed. [2] He responded by accusing Hahn's (and others') scholarship of having Nazi leanings, notwithstanding the fact that Hahn had a Jewish heritage. [2] [3] The university responded by reconstituting the committee — without any German Indologists — and Adluri was conferred a PhD. [2] [3] Hahn criticized this reconstitution as submitting to a ploy of eliminating potential dissenters. [3]
Adluri has been a fervent critic of, what he calls, "German Indology". [2] He accuses the development of the thought-school to be intrinsically tied with Nazism and asserts that "German Indologists" continue to service the Nazi causes. [2] In 2016, he co-authored The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, which was published by Oxford University Press. [2]
Hans Harder, Angelika Malinar and Thomas Oberlies, in a 2011 editorial for Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien on combating "discrimination, racism and sexism", noted that Adluri's works engaged in polemics against multiple German scholars under the veneer of probing ideological orientations of scholarship. [3] Jürgen Hanneder mounted a detailed critique of Adluri's scholarship, the same year. [3] The Nay Science was subject to scathing critiques by Eli Franco, Jürgen Hanneder, and Bharani Kollipara. [2] [4] However, Garry W. Trompf praised it as an "extraordinary work"; so did Eric Kurlander and Nicholas A. Germana. [5] [6] [7]
Anthroposophy is a spiritual new religious movement which was founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. Though proponents claim to present their ideas in a manner that is verifiable by rational discourse and say that they seek precision and clarity comparable to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world, many of these ideas have been termed pseudoscientific by experts in epistemology and debunkers of pseudoscience.
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was instrumental in the discoveries of nuclear fission and protactinium.
Otto Hahn was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn alone, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
The Völkisch movement was a German ethnic nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through the dissolution of the German Reich in 1945, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk from the Germans.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the key piece of evidence necessary to identify the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission, as was subsequently recognized and published by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. In their second publication on nuclear fission in February 1939, Strassmann and Hahn predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process, opening up the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction.
Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram was an Indian academic.He is notable for propounding the "Indigenous Aryans" hypothesis, asserting that the Vedic period was extremely advanced from a scientific view-point, and claiming of having deciphered the Indus script. Academics find his scholarship to be composed of dishonest polemics in service of a communal agenda.
Landtag elections in the Free People's State of Württemberg (Freie Volksstaat Württemberg) during the Weimar Republic were held on five occasions between 1919 and 1932. Results with regard to the percentage of the vote won and the number of seats allocated to each party are presented in the table below. The table is an important indicator of the swings in political opinion in this part of Germany between the second and third Reichs, a period when parliamentary democracy came to have real political meaning in Germany. On 31 March 1933, the sitting Landtag was dissolved by the Nazi-controlled central government and reconstituted to reflect the distribution of seats in the national Reichstag. The Landtag subsequently was formally abolished as a result of the "Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich" of 30 January 1934 which replaced the German federal system with a unitary state. Württemberg is now a part of the modern land of Baden-Württemberg.
Sheldon I. Pollock is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was the general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
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Erich Frauwallner was an Austrian professor, a pioneer in the field of Buddhist studies.
Hermann Kulke is a German historian and Indologist, who was professor of South and Southeast Asian history at the Department of History, Kiel University (1988–2003). After receiving his PhD in Indology from Freiburg University in 1967, he taught for 21 years at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University (SAI).
Rudolf von Roth was a German Indologist, founder of the Vedic philology. His chief work is a monumental Sanskrit dictionary, compiled in collaboration with Otto von Böhtlingk.
Heinrich von Stietencron was a German Indologist. During his academic career, he was an emeritus professor and the chair of the Indology and Comparative Religion department at the University of Tübingen.
Neo-Vedanta, also called Hindu modernism, neo-Hinduism, Global Hinduism and Hindu Universalism, are terms to characterize interpretations of Hinduism that developed in the 19th century. The term "Neo-Vedanta" was coined by German Indologist Paul Hacker, in a pejorative way, to distinguish modern developments from "traditional" Advaita Vedanta.
Herbert Marcuse was a German–American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his Ph.D. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, which later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship is a 2010 book on the influence of Orient studies in 19th-century Germany, written by Suzanne L. Marchand.
Carl Maria Franz Lorinser was a German Catholic theologian, translator from Sanskrit and Spanish, and a writer on natural history.
Paul Hacker was a German Indologist, who coined the term Neo-Vedanta in a pejorative way, to distinguish modern developments from "traditional" Advaita Vedanta.
Richard Karl von Garbe was a German professor of philosophy, who made significant contributions to documenting and studying Indian philosophical texts and concepts.