Dissertation Defense - Zaher Ahamed: The spirit and insights of the axial flowerings: A paradigm for conflict resolution?

Dissertation Defense:

The spirit and insights of the axial flowerings: A paradigm for conflict resolution?

Monday, November 18, 2013
10:30am-12:30pm
Metropolitan Building 5183

The current convention of conflict resolution discipline is that it is a 20th century dispensation. My study argues that looking through the lenses of the history of ideas and the Axial Flowerings points to ancient and noble ancestry for conflict resolution.

The Axial Age, was identified by Jaspers, a German philosopher, as a pivotal change in human condition that was marked by the emergence of reflexivity, historicity and agentiality of the individual in four distinct and distant areas – China, India, eastern Mediterranean, and Greece. Jaspers’ focus on the Axial Age was Eurocentric, and rooted in the ethos of Christianity. In recent years, Jaspers’ term has been expanded and elaborated to include Axial civilizations more broadly, and Axial Age civilizations to bring into consideration the undocumented civilizations, as also other contemporary ancient civilizations that did not feature in Jaspers’ thesis.

Ideas have been the well spring of intellectual development of mankind. Ideas agitated by seminal thinkers have been agents of change, for better or for worse, throughout history There is, thus, a direct nexus between the history of ideas, and the Axial Flowerings.

Detailed study of the Axial Flowerings together with the history of ideas is a fit and proper paradigm for conflict resolution, and presents a great opportunity to learn and profit from multi- disciplinary, and multi dimensional insights of the Axial Age and the Axial breakthroughs, and to relate these to the present conditions