This book introduces transpositional subjectobjectivity—a radical framework that transcends the subject-object dualism that has long constrained social scientific inquiry. Tracing debates over objectivity in social sciences from Max Weber through Michel Foucault to Amartya Sen's positional objectivity, this book offers a crucial intervention in the field, recognizing how perspective shapes observation. Moving beyond binary thinking, the chapters rethink the philosophy of science itself, exploring how subjectivity and objectivity interweave rather than oppose. Through transdisciplinary analysis drawing on philosophy, sociology, spirituality, and the arts, the book traces transpositional thinking from Plato to contemporary practice. It examines how religion, philosophy, and art have navigated the shifting contours of subjectobjectivity, offering new methodological possibilities for researchers. Essential reading for scholars and researchers of philosophy and the social sciences in general, this pioneering work cultivates innovative modes of understanding and engagement for twenty-first-century social science and humanities.
Table of Contents:
Transpositional Subjectobjecitivity: An Introduction and an Invitation; Part One: New Horizons of Visions and Practices of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 1. Transforming the Subjective and the Objective: Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 2. Shifting and Eternal Contours of Subjectobectivity in the Shaping of Religion, Philosophy, and Art, 3. Transforming the Mind through Knowledge: Spinoza’s Programme for the Individual and the Calling of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 4. Pragmaticism and Satyagraha as Creative Praxis: Peirce, Gandhi, and Giri's “Transpositional Subjectivity”, 5. The Non-Dual Horizon of Transpositional Subjectobjectity, 6. Towards a Spiritual Age: Subjectivity and Beyond and the Calling of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 7. One Mind, Two Doors: Subjectivity and Objectivity in the Philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and Mou Zongsan, Part Two: New Explorations in Subjectivity, Objectivity and Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 8. Objectivity in its Place in the Cognitive Field:A Weak-Naturalistic and Cognitive-Theoretical Exposition, 9. Transpositional Objectivity in Democracy and Media Theory and Beyond, 10. Composing the Common, The Intrusion of Gaia and the End of Science as We Knew it: Isabelle Stengers’ Critique of Predatory Cognition and Human Exceptionalism, 11. Transpositional Subjectobjectivity and Wholeness: A Buddhist Phenomenological Prelude to Overcoming the Positionality of Observation by Means of Awareness, 12. The Subject and Subjectivity of Desire: A Transpositional Consideration of Desire from the Lacanian Framework and The Bhagavad Gita, 13. From the Desiring Subjectivity to the Aporetic Subjectivity and Cultivating Pathways of Transpositional Subject-objectivity; Part Three: Transdisciplinary Explorations of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity: Anthropology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Spirituality and Beyond, 14. Transnational Community Multiplicities and the Calling of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, 15. Transpositional Subjectobjectivity in Anthropological Analysis: Towards Transcending Polarised Discourse, 16. Hegemony to Counter Hegemony: A Possible Transpositional Approach, 17. Object-Subject as Multidimensional Form-Energy:An Embodied Meditative Epistemology, 18. Mysticism and the Question of bridging Subject-Object Duality in Joy, 19. Praxis of Entangled “Life”: Transpositional Subjectobjectivity in Sree Narayana Guru, 20. Language, Subjectivities and Trans-Cultural Dialogue, 21 Transpositional Subjectobjectivity: The Need for Novel Language Structures that Embody Interdependent Co-arising; Afterwords, Transpositional Subjectobjectivity as Dynamic Co-Creations: An Afterword, Further Reflections on Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, James and Hume on Transpositional Subjectobjectivity: An Afterword
About the Author :
Ananta Kumar Giri is the Founding Honorary Executive Trustee of Vishwaneedam Center Asian Blossoming, Puducherry and Chennai and was a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He has taught and done research in many universities in India and abroad. He has an abiding interest in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature. Giri has written, edited, co-edited and translated more than six dozen books in Odia and English, including Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (1998); Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations (2013); Bahudhara Barnabiva (Splendrous Beauty of the Plural, 2021);)The Calling of Global Responsibility: New Initiatives in Justice, Dialogues and Planetary Realizations (2023); Rethinking Satyagraha: Truth, Travel and Translation (Editor, 2025); Cultivating Gardens of God: A Paradigm Shift in Faith (Editor, 2025); Contemporary Contributions to Critiques of Political Economy (Editor, 2024); New Works in Consciousness Corridors: Dialogues with Subhash Sharma and Creative Planetary Futures (Co-Editor, 2023); Rethinking Media Studies: Media, Meditation and Communication (Co-Editor, 2024); Towards a Dharma of Peace Building (Co-Editor, 2023); Social Healing (2023); Cultivating Integral Development (2023); and Covid-19 and the Challenges of Trauma and Responsibility (co-editor, 2025); Social Thought as Conversations: Towards a New Upanishad of Life and an Ecology of Hope (2026)
Review :
The anthology "Transforming the Subjective and the Objective: Transpositional Subjectobjectivity," edited by Ananta Kumar Giri, contains essays by scholars from around the world. The contributors explore the concept of transpositional subject-objectivity, which Giri has been exploring for several decades. The theme is examined by the contributors from various philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives. In our time, the future of mankind as a whole is linked to the existential need to reintegrate humanity and human mental and technological processes into the cosmically integrated life of the whole. The concept of integrating all differences in a holistic, multi-topical process, without neglecting plurality, provides the basis for a comprehensive understanding of theory and action in the 21st century. The book presents innovative perspectives from many different angles, reflecting the polycontextural landscape of the meta-concept. "Transforming the Subjective and the Objective: Transpositional Subjectobjectivity" is highly recommended.
- David Bartosch, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, China
For decades Ananta Kumar Giri has established himself as a powerful leading voice for intercultural dialogue. His abilities to bring together the most innovative and transformative scholars in order to cross national, disciplinary, cultural, and political boundaries are unparalleled. His most recent outstanding volume of Subjectobjectivity fits into this trajectory by advancing the discussion via transgressing the boundaries of the subject/object distinction or epistemology and ontology. Leading and emerging scholars from a wide variety of cultures, disciplines, and perspectives unite to produce an immensely rich and innovate volume: a must-read for anyone aiming to emphasise that objectivity requires subjectivity, that ontology is inevitably disclosed from subject-positions, and that ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘reality’ will only survive as valid concepts if based on recognizing our inevitable ‘subjectobjectivity.’
- Hans-Herbert Koegler, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA
Ananta Kumar Giri always assembles an interesting ensemble of authors to write on interesting themes, in the present volume on the relationship of an old couple: subject and object, self and other. Richard Hartz, philologist and archivist, creates a cross-cultural dialogue between Sri Aurobindo and Mou Zongsan – original thinkers, he calls them, a rare breed – who wrote in twentieth-century India and China and “reinterpreted Western ideas within Eastern conceptual frameworks”, as he puts it. Muhammad Maroof Shah, a Kashmiri embodiment of the not-two-ness which this volume explores, working on the delicate borderline of philosophy and mysticism, religiousness and secularism, writes here on mystic unicity from Abhinavagupta through Meister Eckhart and Ibn Arabi to Evelyn Underhill. A volume which includes these authors, and others, is worth reading!
- Daniel Raveh, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Professor Ananta Kumar Giri has assembled a group of stellar scholars to tackle one of the hardest problems in philosophy, namely the relationship between the subject and the object. The chapters deal with various ways this seemingly untractable problem can be solved. The world needs to transcend this duality, and this book is a useful guide.
- Soraj Hongladarom, Professor Emeritus, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
