Tagore, Einstein and the Nature of Reality: Literary and Philosophical Reflections [Hardcover]

Introduction. Preamble: A Man-Centric View: Poet and Scientist Bimal Krishna Matilal 1. Poetic Reality Nirmalangshu Mukherji 2. Too Big a Bang for Language: Tagores Critique Reloaded Probal Dasgupta 3. Tagores Truth Amiya Dev 4. Seeing things: Tagores Sense of the Real Supriya Chaudhuri 5. Science and the World of Personality Shefali Moitra 6. Positing the Human in the Human Sciences Sourin Bhattacharya 7. Why the Moth Cannot be a Poet Saranindranath Tagore 8. Tagore-Wittgenstein Interface: The Poets Activism and Virtue Ethics Sitansu Sekhar Chakravarti 9. Two Conceptions of Reality: Tagore and Einstein Syed Sayeed 10. Reality and Intelligibility Bijoy Boruah 11. The Creative Mind: A Mirror or a Component of Reality? Ashish Lahiri

This volume consists of a selection of scholarly essays from literature, philosophy and history on the conception of reality as understood by Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein.

The nature of reality has been a long-debated issue among scientists and philosophers. Tagore (18611941) met Einstein (18791955) at the latters house in Kaputh, Germany on 14 July 1930 and had a long conversation on this issue. This conversation has been widely quoted and discussed by scientists, philosophers and scholars from the literary world. The important question that Tagore and Einstein discussed was whether the world is a unity dependent on humanity, or the world is a reality independent of the human factor. Einstein believed that reality is independent of the mind and the human factor. On the other hand, Tagore adopted the opposite view. Nevertheless, both Einstein and Tagore claimed to be realists  their conceptions of reality were obviously fundamentally different. Where dl#\