Kaustuv Roy – författare

This book identifies and expands upon the link between ontology and education, exposing a lack of ontological inquiry as the vital missing element in the study and practice of modern education today. In this book, Roy aims to reintroduce ontological thinking and reasoning that grounds historical and modern educational understandings and practice. Beginning with a historical perspective, he then turns to examine the results of his scholarship into practical concerns of education such as language, dialogue, and curriculum: ultimately proposing a new way forward emphasizing a balance in the education effort between epistemic content and ontological disclosure.

Against the backdrop of a historical debate between science and philosophy with regard to the nature of time, this book argues that our commonsense understanding of time is inadequate—especially for education. Teachers’ work is heavily imbued with the effects of clock time, and yet there is another time—duration—which remains out of sight precisely because our sights are filled with temporal things and projections of futurality. The book rests primarily on Henri Bergson’s work on time, and works toward intuition as phenomenological method for the discovery of a creative time in experience.

This book argues that global crises such as the present Covid-19 pandemic are correlates of the contemporary thought regime that it calls technohumanism. Taking up the pandemic as the central case in point, the book shows how the basic assumptions of technohumanism encourage large-scale dependencies and a consequent loss of endurance in the populace. Next, it shows that a form of recuperation can be pedagogically attempted by means of a “psychoanalysis” of thought which releases it from the humanist limits placed on it. To do this, it introduces the notion of a living unconscious as distinct from the Freudian Unconscious, and argues that in the living unconscious there is no distinction between the prehuman and the posthuman, and a posthumanist pedagogy can be constructed on the basis of an adequate transfer of prehuman dynamism.

This book initiates fresh pedagogic thinking on the nature of intelligence and human potentiality in the midst of a rising panic over so-called artificial intelligence. At the rate of current advancement, entire social and cultural landscapes including education and work are going to change in unprecedented ways in the near future. In light of these developments, the author sets out to critically assess the role of education in creating the capacity to distinguish between machinic “intelligence” and organic intelligence, thus helping us move from passive acceptance to active becoming.

This book facilitates a missing dialogue between the secular and the transsecular dimensions of human existence. It explores two kinds of limits of the secular: the inadequacies of its assumptions with respect to the total being of the human, and how it curbs the ontological sensibilities of the human. Kaustuv Roy argues that since secular reason of modernity can only represent the empirical dimension of existence, humans are forced to privatize the non-empirical dimension of being. It is therefore absent from the social, imaginary, as well as public discourse. This one-sidedness is the root cause of many of the ills facing modernity. Roy contends that a bridge-consciousness that praxeologically relates the secular and the non-secular domains of experience is the need of the hour. 

This book explores the possibility of philosophical praxis by weaving an ontological thread through four principal thinkers: Heidegger, Schelling, Goethe, and Heraclitus. It argues that a special kind of redemptive power awaits the structural understanding of thought that is beyond semantic formations such as concepts and ideational systems. The author claims that the “power” is negative in nature, trans-personal, and derived directly from the understanding of thought as a structural pulse. The book travels backwards in time, encountering successively Heidegger’s critique of calculative thinking, Schelling’s Mind/Nature relation, Goethe’s Delicate Empiricism, and the aphoristic wisdom of Heraclitus in search of a redemptive power that lies in the self-knowledge of thought. This power is ontological and not historical or developmental; it is the same at all times and all points of history. The author refers to the praxis as “philosophical bilingualism.”