Today at Sheldonian Theatre there was a Distinguished Public Lecture, titled "The Pursuit of Justice", by Professor Amartya Sen. Chairing the lecture was Lord Patten of Barnes, the current Chancellor of University of Oxford and previously the last Governor of Hong Kong.
Interestingly, Professor Amartya Sen started and ended commenting about the two kinds of knowledge and the contradiction of theory and practice. He especially mentioned Raphael's Athenian Academy. I don't want to praise myself but this contradiction between knowledge of theory and knowledge of practice was something that I have been thinking about since the beginning of 2009, and I am pretty sure this is my original thought, just like the "Matt Hastings Question" in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding about the logical validity of waking up next morning finding oneself floating in the air.
Professor Amartya Sen reminded me of a question that I had earlier this year when we dealt with Rabindranath Tagore in Religion 309. India has produced some great intellectuals in the twentieth century. Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen are two perfect examples of influential public intellectual who are very influential both domestically and internationally. This tradition could easily be traced back to Rammohun Roy, the father of modern India. Tagore was an international celebrity with no doubt. Sen was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. I wonder, when can China produce great intellectuals like such? I can't imagine at the moment any Chinese being the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, or of Balliol College, Oxford. Looking back at the century, China never had intellectuals of such tremendous influence: 100+ people lining outside of Sheldonian after it was full, waiting to hear an Indian speak. When can we have such great intellectuals? Also, India has produced a great many brilliant scholars including Spivak, Amin, Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Charkrabarty, Sugata Bose, and many more. Not many scholars in China are as thoughtful as they are on issues of critical social theory. Wang Hui and several others are pretty good, but that's it. I really wish China could produce more great intellectuals to benefit the entire human world.
The link to this event is http://ophi.qeh.ox.ac.uk/subindex.php?id=eventsSenJustice.
P.S. By the way I spoke at the Oxford Union on Monday! Although it was only a crappy nervous speech for the emergency debate... It reminded me of the days when I prepared for provincial secondary school student English public speaking competition back in 2003 and 2004.
Chao, my friend. You should come to skype more often. I have thought a lot about this knowledge dichotomy also. We have many topics to talk about.
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