"This is an original work by an eminent teacher of Philosophy and Religion who can present the best results of Indian and Western scholarship and evaluate them in the light of unbiased insight. The chapters on comparison of Bengal Vaisnavism with Christianity and Existentialism are highly stimulating. The book is indispensable to those advanced students of oriental philosophy and religions who are devoted to research work, since no knowledge or oriental philosophy and religion will be complete without a clear understanding (...) of Vedanta and the different types of Vaisnavism.". (shrink)

Study of Advaita, Hindu philosophy: based on the Yogavāsiṣṭharāmāyaṇa and works of Śaṅkarācārya.

Gommatsara Jiva Kanda Is Based On The Discourses Of Shri Vardhaman, The 24Th Jain Tirthankara. The Treatise Is Compilation Of The Answers Given By The Author Shri Nemi Chandra Siddhanta Chakravarti, To The Questions Put To Him By Raja Chamunda Raya, Asking Him To Enumerate The Sub-Classes Of Bodymaking Karma, And To Explain Their Existence, Bondage Non-Bondage And Cessation Of Bondage, With Regard To The Spiritual Stages Of Souls In Various Conditions Of The Life From The Line Completely Undevelopable (...) Vegetable Bodied Soul, To The Fully Deveoped Rational Five Sensed Beings. (shrink)

Gommatsara Jiva Kanda Is Based On The Discourses Of Shri Vardhaman, The 24Th Jain Tirthankara. The Treatise Is Compilation Of The Answers Given By The Author Shri Nemi Chandra Siddhanta Chakravarti, To The Questions Put To Him By Raja Chamunda Raya, Asking Him To Enumerate The Sub-Classes Of Bodymaking Karma, And To Explain Their Existence, Bondage Non-Bondage And Cessation Of Bondage, With Regard To The Spiritual Stages Of Souls In Various Conditions Of The Life From The Line Completely Undevelopable (...) Vegetable Bodied Soul, To The Fully Deveoped Rational Five Sensed Beings. (shrink)

The title seems to suggest that God is neutral or indifferent to the universe that it permeates. Its neutrality being necessary for its immanence is acceptable but not its indifference. Following Spinoza’s monistic thinking we explore here the question as to how the ultimate reality, can or cannot be indifferent to its own self. Permeating the universe, God becomes a universal form or concept into which the human can imagine any version of thought-extension in accordance with the nature of his/her (...) need. Indeed, Spinoza finds God formal it is the supreme substance which can and does inspire man’s polytheistic practices, as sustained by panentheistic faith. Moreover, for Spinoza relation between God and the universe is one of rational causality - God permeates the manifest universe, and the universe through its intelligibility illustrates God. The phrase in the title is not a denial of God’s desirability for man. Rather, it is a reaffirmation of God’s openness to the whole universe, by virtue of which it is one with Nature and vice versa. Each becomes explicable in terms of the other as both seep in rationality validating Spinoza’s ‘deus sive natura’. (shrink)

Philosophers routinely invoke self‐control in their theorizing, but major questions remain about what exactly self‐control is. I propose a componential account in which an exercise of self‐control is built out of something more fundamental: basic intrapsychic actions called cognitive control actions. Cognitive control regulates simple, brief states called response pulses that operate across diverse psychological systems (think of one's attention being grabbed by a salient object or one's mind being pulled to think about a certain topic). Self‐control ostensibly seems quite (...) different because it regulates complex, temporally extended states such as emotions and cravings. But critically, these complex states also exhibit important componential structure: They rely on response pulses as a key means by which they bring about action. The overall picture is that self‐control consists of skilled sequences of cognitive control directed against extended streams of response pulses that arise from states such as emotions and cravings, thus preventing these states from being effective in action. The account clarifies the “atoms” of self‐control—the elemental units that get combined in complex ways to produce different kinds of self‐control actions. Surprisingly, the account, which is derived from research in cognitive science, aligns nicely with the commonsense conception of self‐control. (shrink)

This is a short, critical biography of a distinguished Indian who, in many respects, contributed to the making of modern India. It explores the thought, ideas and work of Swami Vivekananda, analyzing why he remains relevant today.

Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions (...) to the agent. In a second study, we examined people's judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the critical features problem, the problem of figuring out which among the myriad features present in hypothetical cases are the critical ones that our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers. (shrink)

This article tries to explore the shifts in contemporary urban Bengali cinema and map and historicize the main trends in relation to changes in the political fortunes of the city. In this context, the article tentatively wishes to accomplish two things: one, to show the main trends in urban Bengali film-making, post-1990s; and two, to read closely two recent Bengali films, in a search for ways of mapping this newness. The article first identifies three new possibilities in Bengali cinema: first, (...) the inward-looking, often apolitical sketches that celebrate liberal development and psychosomatic indulgences, second, the sentimental, community-based films that sometimes take political changes on board as well, and attempt to bridge the rural-urban divide; third, cult-ish films of a newer pedigree that show impatience with old Left and progressive values, and are also technically experimental and avant-garde. The second objective of the article is to discuss specifically two contemporary filmmakers – Moinak Biswas and Suman Mukhopadhay – and place their films within this ferment. (shrink)

Pornographic content is harmful to children's psychological and mental development. In Indonesia, many children are involved in activities and access pornographic content through social media. In some cases, children exposed to pornography will experience a decrease in IQ and mental disorders in terms of sexuality. This type of research is descriptive-qualitative identifying, explaining, and analysing a phenomenon based on variables and primary and secondary data. The purpose of this research is to find out the impact of pornographic content on social (...) media for children's psychology and how the Indonesian government's policy addresses the problem. The results of this study show that the psychological impact of child victims of pornography include: anxiety and stress disorders, sexual perception deviations, identity and body image disorders, decreased social interaction skills, difficulty concentrating on learning and poor self-image. The Indonesian government's policy to protect children from pornography is carried out through penal means using criminal law enforcement instruments, as well as non-penal means, namely cooperation between countries and global child protection organisations, blocking content, and educating understanding of using a healthy internet. (shrink)

What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In _Sing the Rage_, Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak—to cry, scream, and wail—about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public (...) emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities. Chakravarti takes up the issue from Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, who famously understood both the dangers of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. Building on their perspectives, she argues that the expression and reception of anger reveal truths otherwise unavailable to us about the emerging political order, the obstacles to full civic participation, and indeed the limits—the frontiers—of political life altogether. Most important, anger and the development of skills needed to truly listen to it foster trust among citizens and recognition of shared dignity and worth. An urgent work of political philosophy in an era of continued revolution, _Sing the Rage_ offers a clear understanding of one of our most volatile—and important—political responses. (shrink)

Many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method, and the models of disability developed in accordance with it, inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people to preserve the integrity of the definition of disability that a given model provides. A hermeneutic investigation and critique of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will provide (...) an epistemological tool that makes it possible both to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. (shrink)

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the (...) desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models. (shrink)

In computational cognitive science, a valuationist picture of human agent architecture has become widespread. At the heart of valuationism is a simple and sweeping claim: Every time an agent acts, they do so on the basis of value representations, which are, roughly, representations of the expected value of one’s response options. In this essay, I do three things. First, I give a systematic, philosophically rich account of the valuationist picture of agency. I also highlight the generality of the model in (...) explaining diverse forms of person-level agency. Second, I discuss connections between the valuationist model and two traditional models in philosophy, the belief/desire model and the decision-theoretic model. Valuationism is related to both, but critical differences remain. Third, I canvas the wide-ranging implications of valuationism for philosophical inquiry. Among other things, valuationism illuminates the elusive boundary between activity and passivity; it flips the standard philosophical understanding of decision around, with decision being a source of, rather than a product of, one’s agency; it reconceptualizes motivation as, in part, a representational phenomenon; it challenges a philosophical dogma that control over action is more extensive than control over belief; and it offers an intriguing “accuracy-based” approach to the normative criticism of agency. (shrink)

According to Interest-Relative Invariantism, whether an agent knows that p, or possesses other sorts of epistemic properties or relations, is in part determined by the practical costs of being wrong about p. Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI. We discuss our results in light of complementary findings by other theorists, and address the challenge posed by a (...) leading intellectualist alternative to our view. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about loss of control in addiction: Some theorists say at least some addicts’ drug-directed desires are irresistible, while others insist that pursuing drugs is a choice. The debate is long-standing and has essentially reached a stalemate. This essay suggests a way forward. I propose an alternative model of loss of control in addiction, one based not on irresistibility, but rather fallibility. According to the model, on every occasion of use, self-control processes exhibit a low, but (...) non-zero, rate of failure due to error. When these processes confront highly recurrent drug-directed desires, the cumulative probability of a self-control lapse steadily grows. The model shows why the following statement—which has an air of paradox—can in fact be true: Each drug-directed desire the addict faces is fully resistible, but the addict nonetheless has significantly diminished control over eventually giving in. (shrink)