The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi was one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to resolve the internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment: scientific detachment and moral nihilism with humanist values. Stefania Jha’s intellectual biography places Polanyi in the context of his time and culture, analyzes his key philosophical ideas, and explicates the application—and at times misappropriation—of his work. Polanyi’s method was not laid out in his published works, and his vocabulary tends to make his writings difficult (...) to understand. By exposing the structure of his theory of tacit knowing, and by tracing the growth of his thinking, Jha shows how the various elements of his thought are integrated. Through examination of his philosophical roots in Kant and the complexity of his evolving thought, she counteracts the popular notion that Polanyi’s philosophy stands apart from the western philosophic tradition. Jha’s deep analysis makes Polanyi’s shift of focus from science to philosophy more intelligible, his philosophy more approachable, and the causes he championed—such as the freedom of science and cultural freedom—more understandable. Applying his notion of tacit knowing in practical directions, Jha seeks to bring the study of Polanyi’s philosophy out of the specialists’ enclave and into such fields as ethics and clinical medicine. (shrink)

Contributed research papers chiefly on various aspects of Indic philosophy, Vedic literature, etc.

I examine social capital’s impact on financial reports. Based on the social capital literature, I predict that the quality of the financial reports is higher when a firm is headquartered in a region with high social capital. Consistent with this prediction, I find that the firms that are headquartered in this type of region in the USA have a lower probability of committing fraud by misrepresenting financial information. Further, I find that the firms in regions with high social capital have (...) lower levels of discretionary accruals and much more readable annual reports. (shrink)

Exposition of Guḍārthatattvāloka of Dharmadatta Jhā, 1860-1918, commentary on the Siddhāntalakṣaṇa of Jagadīśatarkālaṅkāra, work on the basic tenets of the Nyaya school in Hindu philosophy.

A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours, values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all (...) come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers, this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 143-160, May 2022. Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of conflict around visual representations in India. The field of the visual is the new terrain for rumour mongering and for maiming uncomfortable oppositional voices. With the fast-spreading mobile culture, penetrating social media and continued legacy of the pictorial as an embodiment of the real, the visual has taken over both the oral as well as the written words in its usefulness (...) to serve the political. Can we simply comprehend such a visual aggression by taking recourse in the enhanced role of visual media in our everyday life, along the lines of a ‘visual turn’? Is the visual sphere another surface of politics? With these key questions, this article revisits certain contemporary visual events by focusing on words that float in public spaces from streets to television screens. On a broader terrain, with an emphasis on aesthetics, the article relooks at an often-settled equation between the visual and the political on the one hand and the question of the visual as an archive of the contemporary on the other. Following Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a field of the distribution of the sensible, this article has tried to focus on vernacular words circulating outside the confines of the literature and create a domain of political communication hitherto ignored by scholars. (shrink)

Hindi interpretation of Mīmāṃsāsūtra of Jaimini.

Introduction to the Mīmāṃsā philosophy.

A reasoned argument or tarka is essential for a wholesome vāda that aims at establishing the truth. A strong tarka constitutes of a number of elements including an anumāna based on a valid hetu. Several scholars, such as Dharmakīrti, Vasubandhu and Dignāga, have worked on theories for the establishment of a valid hetu to distinguish it from an invalid one. This paper aims to interpret Dignāga’s hetu-cakra, called the wheel of grounds, from a modern philosophical perspective by deconstructing it into (...) a simple probabilistic mathematical model. The objective is to understand how and why a vāda based on a probabilistically weaker hetu can degrade into a Jalpa or vitaṇḍā. To do so, the paper maps the concept of ‘Bounded Rationality’ onto the hetu-cakra. Bounded Rationality, an idea coined by the management thinker Herbert Simon, is often employed in understanding decision-making processes of rational agents. In the context of this paper, the concept would state that the prativādin and ālocaka (debater) may not hold unbounded information to back their pratijñā (proposition). The paper argues that within the probabilistically deconstructed hetu-cakra model, most people argue in the ‘Zone of Bounded Rationality’, and thus, the probability of a debate degrading into Jalpa or vitaṇḍā is high. -/- . (shrink)

YO GA-DARSHAN A Sfitras of Patafijali with Bhaisya ofVy:1sa BY Ganganatha Jha he Yoga-darshana includes the Yoga-sfitras ofPataf1jali, and the ancient commentary thereon by Vyasa. The Yoga-sfitras of Patafijali are the classic?...

As it faces the threats and seizes the possibilities presented by sustainability, the television business is experiencing a profound shift. The potential for long-term expansion in the television industry is investigated in this study by looking at sustainable entertainment management practices. The research finds important tactics that production businesses and television networks may use to incorporate social, economic, and environmental sustainability into their operations by looking at existing practices and new developments. Case studies of prominent firms, examination of sustainability reports, (...) and expert interviews make up the research's mixed-methods strategy. The results show that in order to promote sustainability, it is crucial to use energy-efficient technology, decrease waste with digital manufacturing processes, and encourage social responsibility with inclusive content and fair labour standards. In order to achieve sustainable development in the long run, the research stresses the significance of stakeholder involvement and strategic alliances. Stakeholders in this sector may use the suggestions made in this paper to improve their sustainability initiatives and meet the changing needs of the global market in a way that is good for the environment and their bottom line. (shrink)

Contributed research papers on various aspects of Indian philosophy, Vedic and Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit grammar.

This article revisits the intellectual history of inequality in the thinking of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967). Both were pivotal figures in the intellectual history of inequality in colonial and postcolonial India. Yet little work has been done to systematically juxtapose the two and their thinking on inequality. This article offers a first comparison, arguing that their ideas on inequality can be seen as the emergence of a unique, Indian version of what, in this (...) article, we term “organic intersectionality.” We build this argument on four claims. First, both were organic intellectuals whose thinking was molded in the marginalized groups from which they arose, but whose ideas developed in unique and organic ways. Second, both had a unique eye to the intersectional and holistic character of Indian inequality, cutting across caste, class, race, and gender. Third, their thinking grew from a deep engagement with religion, which they saw as both legitimizing and delegitimizing inequality. Fourth, both these figures exemplify postcolonial hybridity and thus stand in contrast both to a diffusionist approach whereby ideas are simply diffused from the West to the East, and to a nationalized, self-contained, or decolonial history of ideas. (shrink)

Festschrift in honor of V.N. Jha, b. 1946, Indologist; comprises contributed papers on various aspects of Vedic literature and philosophy.

So-called ‘distinctively mathematical explanations’ (DMEs) are said to explain physical phenomena, not in terms of contingent causal laws, but rather in terms of mathematical necessities that constrain the physical system in question. Lange argues that the existence of four or more equilibrium positions of any double pendulum has a DME. Here we refute both Lange’s claim itself and a strengthened and extended version of the claim that would pertain to any n-tuple pendulum system on the ground that such explanations are (...) actually causal explanations in disguise and their associated modal conditionals are not general enough to explain the said features of such dynamical systems. We argue and show that if circumscribing the antecedent for a necessarily true conditional in such explanations involves making a causal analysis of the problem, then the resulting explanation is not distinctively mathematical or non-causal. Our argument generalises to other dynamical systems that may have purported DMEs analogous to the one proposed by Lange, and even to some other counterfactual accounts of non-causal explanation given by Reutlinger and Rice. (shrink)

For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves (...) upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built. (shrink)

Rangrez and Rangdār are two commonly used words in north India. ‘Rangrez’ is a painter/dyer, and in Sufi tradition is also a word for Allah. ‘Rangdāri’ is an illegal extortion tax, and the person w...

Papers presented at the National Seminar on Joina Logic and Epistemology held at the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, University of Poona from 27th to 29th March 1995.

Introduction of the Mīmāṃsā school in Indic philosophy.

On Maṇḍanamiśra, ancient Hindu philosopher of Sankaracarya tradition.

On the life and works of Maṇḍanamiśra, philosopher of Saṅkarācārya tradition.

Contribution of Udayanācārya to Nyaya philosophy; study with reference to his works.

Study of Pramāṇamañjarī, treatise on the fundamentals of Vaiśeṣika school in Hindu philosophy by Sarvadeva.

Exhaustive study of Sankhya philosophy with reference to various Sanskrit text; includes passages of Sanskrit text with English translation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an approach to clinical practice aiming to resolve the dilemma of choosing between a mechanistic and a phenomenological model. The approach is an extension of Polanyi's epistemology. Michael Polanyi, devised an epistemology of science which overcomes the problem of detachment, inherent in the mechanistic approach, and resolves the problem of subjectivity troubling phenomenologists. His epistemology is known as Personal Knowledge. An extension of this epistemology, a Neo-Polanyian proposal, is offered as a more (...) successful model for clinical practice than previous suggestions addressing the dilemma. (shrink)

Critical study, with text and commentary of Vedāntasiddhāntamuktāvalī of Prakāśānanda, 16th cent., of Vendānta philosophy.

The day to day experiences of answering machine messages, written notes, postcard messages, etc. and our intuitions regarding these seem to contradict the traditional assumptions in the semantics of indexicals. The primary analytical scope of the article is to undertake an analysis of Allyson Mount’s convergence of perspectives-based account of indexical reference and see whether it is able to successfully meet the challenges faced by Stefano Predelli’s intended context of interpretation approach towards the semantics of indexicals, thereby providing a viable (...) solution to the Answering Machine Paradox. (shrink)

It is often argued that the indispensability of continuum models comes from their empirical adequacy despite their decoupling from the microscopic details of the modelled physical system. There is thus a commonly held misconception that temperature varying across a region of space or time can always be accurately represented as a continuous function. We discuss three inter-related cases of temperature modelling — in phase transitions, thermal boundary resistance and slip flows — and show that the continuum view is fallacious on (...) the ground that the microscopic details of a physical system are not necessarily decoupled from continuum models. We show how temperature discontinuities are present in both data (experiments and simulations) and phenomena (theory and models) and how discontinuum models of temperature variation may have greater empirical adequacy and explanatory power. The conclusions of our paper are: a) continuum idealisations are not indispensable to modelling physical phenomena and both continuous and discontinuous representations of phenomena work depending on the context; b) temperature is not necessarily a continuously defined function in our best scientific representations of the world; and c) that its continuity, where applicable, is a contingent matter. We also raise a question as to whether discontinuous representations should be considered truly de-idealised descriptions of physical phenomena. (shrink)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly widely used in psychology and neuroscience to predict how human minds and brains respond to visual images. Typically, CNNs represent these images using thousands of features that are learned through extensive training on image datasets. This raises a question: How many of these features are really needed to model human behavior? Here, we attempt to estimate the number of dimensions in CNN representations that are required to capture human psychological representations in two ways: (1) (...) directly, using human similarity judgments and (2) indirectly, in the context of categorization. In both cases, we find that low-dimensional projections of CNN representations are sufficient to predict human behavior. We show that these low-dimensional representations can be easily interpreted, providing further insight into how people represent visual information. A series of control studies indicate that these findings are not due to the size of the dataset we used and may be due to a high level of redundancy in the features appearing in CNN representations. (shrink)