The conflict of the Epistemologies in Turgenev’s Russia and its resonance with the African intellectual crisis
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Date
2010
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Research Review 26(1): 1-22
Abstract
Turgenev’s fathers and sons is not only about a generational conflict, it also depicts a crisis in the paradigms of knowledge in nineteen the century Russia. While the nobility revel in the arts, letters and aesthetics, the nihilists dismiss them as romantic nonsense. For them the only worthwhile knowledge is that which has practical value and can be varied in the laboratory. This paper sifts the nuggets from the otherwise nihilist dross, and pushes the debate to the frontiers of the African experience insinuating the culpability of the dominant intellectual paradigms in perpetuating the continent’s crisis of underdevelopment.
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Keywords
Underdevelopment, education, intellectual crisis, imperialism, science