Culture - Shashikala Srinivasan

Education, Forms of Life, and Civilisation.

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 28, 2026August 28, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Education is often discussed in terms of institutions, curricula, methods of teaching, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Yet beneath these immediate concerns lies a deeper question: what kind of human being should education cultivate? This question cannot be answered independently of the civilisation within which education takes place. Different civilisations have embodied different conceptions of knowledge, formation, human flourishing and the good life, and these conceptions have shaped the ways in which succeeding…

Eudaimonia and the Indian distinction between Shreyas and Preyas

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 14, 2026August 28, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

In much of modern Western thought, ethics has increasingly come to be identified with morality. It is approached primarily as a domain of rules, obligations, and judgments concerning right and wrong. Even where ethics is treated as practical philosophy, action is often understood as derived from beliefs, values, or moral principles. By contrast, in the older Aristotelian understanding, ethics concerns the question of how to live well. Oriented toward eudaimonia—often translated as human flourishing—it belongs…