Welcome to Dr. Ashok Gangadean's Haverford College Professorship page on ((AwakeningMind)).Org™. Dr. Gangadean is Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Please feel free to visit his Haverford College webpage at http://www.haverford.edu/phil/faculty/gangadean.htm, or visit the official Haverford College Philosophy Department website at http://www.haverford.edu/catalog/Philosophy.html.
Also available in PDF format (requires Adobe's Acrobat Reader or any program capable of reading .pdf files) is Dr. Gangadean's Greeting and Self–Introduction.
Primary Objectives in Teaching
I consider the following to be some of the primary objectives in my courses:
- To come to a deeper recognition of our hermeneutical condition – that we humans are situated in certain forms of discourse, forms of life, life worlds sense structures, habits of interpretation and judgment that we bring to all our hermeneutical activity.
- To achieve a deeper appreciation of the categorial and grammatical nature of the language–worlds we inhabit and which influence and shape our existential condition and conduct of mind.
- And in achieving this grammatical sensitivity and competence to achieve a deeper literacy in all areas of the language arts and hermeneutical arts; thinking, interpreting, reasoning, judging, translating between variant narrative forms of life or language forms, dialogue and conversation – listening and speaking, critical skills, writing, creatively developing onešs own voice, original research...
- Experiencing the classroom as an intensive living conversational laboratory for testing and developing the full range of hermeneutical skills, especially dialogical research and the creative encounter with the text.
- Learning to regard the text as open to ever deeper interpretation and being sensitive to the voice of the text and its inner categorial force – hence learning to become more aware of onešs own hermeneutical commitments and biases as we engage the text in its own inner integrity and logic.
- Recognizing that the text in its inner grammatical force needs to be spoken, enacted, performed in first person creative acts of interpretation and dialogical inquiry: a living space of dialogue.
- Becoming clearer on the locus of onešs own voice in making the critical turn to appraise a given form of discourse: when for example one is raising critical internal questions to the discourse, and when one is speaking from a different grammatical commitment external to the text, etc.
- Developing creative skills in translating and other rational transformations between diverse narrative forms, grammars, cultural worlds, disciplines – hence developing a deeper sense of inter–grammatical discourse and inter–disciplinary understanding.
- Developing onešs own philosophical voice through such means as ongoing conversation in class, the intensive midterm conferences and the conferences in developing a personalized research topic, and in producing original essays.
- Developing writing skills in which one becomes more aware of the categorial nature of philosophical arguments, skill in developing a thesis in a systematic and coherent narrative, and strengthening onešs own voice through developed critical appraisal and creative shaping of arguments.
- In entering certain texts of meditative thinking to become more aware of the power and constraints of the structure of identity and the dynamics of the egological voice in dialogical relation to the meditative voice and its unitive narrative forms, thus achieving greater expertise in the art of reason.
- Through the above means, becoming more deeply aware of the ethics of interpretation and taking primary responsibility for the origins of ethics in the conduct of mind and voice; hence gaining greater competence in negotiating alterity in the living issues of diversity and dialogue; and thus becoming more liberally educated with deeper self understanding and sensitivity to the dynamics of fixity, and closure of uncritical discourse.
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