Media365
6 min readOct 8, 2026 03:42 PM IST
First published on: Oct 8, 2026 at 03:42 PM IST
People are often surprised when I tell them that I teach philosophy to engineering students at IIT Gandhinagar. Some want to know whether I teach Indian or Western philosophy. Others ask what philosophy has to do with engineering. These questions about engineering sometimes contain a conclusion before a discussion has begun: Philosophy belongs elsewhere, and its presence in an IIT requires an explanation. I find the assumption more interesting than the question. We rarely ask whether engineers have beliefs about knowledge, truth, development, society, justice, or the mind. They do, as everyone does. What we question is whether a university should help them examine those beliefs. Technical education can leave a person proficient in a discipline while the assumptions governing other parts of their life remain largely unexamined. Why should an IIT consider that an adequate educational outcome?
My argument is not that every engineer needs a humanities and social science course to practice engineering. It is that an engineering degree cannot exhaust the purpose of a technological university. An engineer designing a system for allocating public resources must make decisions about what counts as needed, whose circumstances matter, and what constitutes an acceptable error. Computation can implement a decision rule; it cannot establish the justice of that rule without further argument. The humanities and social sciences offer ways of examining these questions, and of questioning the purposes for which a technical problem has been formulated.
The humanities also help us examine the concepts engineering already uses. Evidence, causation, explanation, probability, and truth carry assumptions that deserve attention. Logic and scientific methodology developed through centuries of inquiry involving philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences. Engineers inherit these intellectual tools. Learning to use them should include understanding their limits and contributing to their development. We owe something to those whose work makes our work possible. Merely applying inherited knowledge while dismissing the inquiry that helped produce it is a poor way to honour that inheritance.
Contributing to that inheritance requires asking what counts as progress and whose needs define a problem. Philosophy and the social sciences can change how we understand the task before us. Such questioning may open possibilities that technical competence within an accepted framework would leave unexplored. Science itself requires a willingness to question what we think we know. Feynman’s account of scientific integrity asks researchers to consider evidence that could undermine their explanations. Marie and Pierre Curie’s decision not to patent their radium isolation process raises a different question: Who should control access to knowledge? These examples do not prove that studying the humanities guarantees sound judgment. They show that doing science and engineering involves philosophical commitments that an experiment alone cannot settle.
A broad education was part of the IITs’ founding conception. The Sarkar Committee report of 1948, which was instrumental in creating IITs, included humanities instruction in its plans for higher technical institutions and advocated combining scientific training with a broad human outlook. A common argument for including the humanities and social sciences (HSS) in technical education is MIT, where a substantial number of courses are offered in the humanities, social sciences, and cognitive sciences rather than solely in engineering. It is also common for students at MIT to major in an engineering field while minoring in political science. Although MIT was considered a useful benchmark by the Sarkar Committee Report for establishing IITs, our case for the humanities must also address India’s educational needs.
Section 6(1)(a) of the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 provides for instruction and research in engineering and technology, sciences and arts, in branches that an institute considers appropriate. The National Education Policy 2020 likewise envisages greater emphasis on the arts and humanities in engineering institutions, including IITs. Implementing that commitment requires more than adding courses to a timetable. It requires accepting that these disciplines may question the purposes an institution takes for granted.
It is often asked why engineering students who have undergone intensive coaching, mostly completed their education in a dummy school, and spent considerable resources to enter an IIT encounter subjects outside their “specialisation”. Selection and education serve different purposes. An entrance examination tests preparation in specified subjects, which does not determine everything worth learning after admission. Success in it does not necessarily mean that students have had opportunities to distinguish between persuasion and justification or to question familiar assumptions about caste, inequality, or progress. The curriculum should provide those opportunities without mistaking their absence for a lack of ability.
We should not defend the humanities only by demonstrating their usefulness to engineers. Its legitimacy cannot depend on whether it helps produce a device. Questions about justice or historical experience deserve investigation even when their answers offer no technical application. A university needs room for work whose relevance is uncertain and whose findings may be inconvenient. Humanities scholars, therefore, need opportunities to conduct research and educate students while pursuing questions that extend beyond what other disciplines find useful. Further, intellectual independence is the most potential possibility for innovation in India. In 1968, Vikram Sarabhai, in an interview at IIT Madras, wanted the IITs’ very identity to encompass science, technology, art, and the humanities. We must give that vision institutional form.
Conceived as institutions that would function as universities, IITs should help students ask better questions and support their right to pursue them. During a Collaboratory at Olin College of Engineering, I saw engineering brought into conversation with sociology and history. At IIT Gandhinagar, students already move between engineering, science, and the humanities. I hope more IIT faculty will build on this practice by designing courses together and bringing other disciplines into their teaching. This would enable students to examine the knowledge they inherit and create knowledge that future generations will build on.
Jaison Manjaly is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. He is the founder of Art@IITGN
