This Book Presents A Lucid English Translation Of The Vaisesika-Sutra Of Kanada, Termed The Earliest Exposition On Physics In Indian Philosophy And The Textual Basis For The Nyaya-Vaisesika And Navya-Nyaya Systems Of Thought. The Translation Retains The Feel Of The Original Sutras Even While Conveying The Intended Meaning Accurately And With Clarity.

Discussion of global climate change is shaped by the intellectual categories developed to address capitalism and globalization. Yet climate change is only one manifestation of humanity’s varied and accelerating impact on the Earth System. The common predicament that may be anticipated in the Anthropocene raises difficult questions of distributive justice – between rich and poor, developed and developing countries, the living and the yet unborn, and even the human and the non-human – and may pose a challenge to the categories (...) on which our traditions of political thought are based. Awareness of the Anthropocene encourages us to think of humans on different scales and in different contexts – as parts of a global capitalist system and as members of a now-dominant species – although the debate is, for now, still structured by the experiences and concepts of the developed world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Jitendra Nath MohantyArindam Chakrabarti (bio)The only philosopher in the global history of philosophy who read and taught (in the original Sanskrit, German, and English) Patañjali, Vyāsa, Śaṅkara, Gangeśa, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Wittgenstein, Hume, McTaggart, Russell, Davidson, and Dummett with equal expertise, depth, and hermeneutic originality is no more. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, who passed away on the 7th of March 2023, was emeritus professor of philosophy at (...) Temple University, Philadelphia. In the last decade of his life, he used to spend long periods in his home in Kolkata, the city where he studied as an undergraduate. Born in in 1928 in Cuttack, Orissa, India, Mohanty ranked first in all public examinations and in his B.A. at Presidency College, Kolkata and his M.A. examination at the University of Calcutta. After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1954, he came back to India and continued his traditional-style tutelage under two great Sanskrit Pandits: Ananta Tarkatirtha (for Navya Nyāya) and Mahamahopadhyaya Yogendranath Bagchi (for Advaita Vedānta). In his long academic career, he taught at the University of Burdwan, the University of Calcutta, the New School for Social Research, the University of Oklahoma, Emory University, and Temple University and held visiting professorships at All Souls College Oxford and Jadavpur University, Kolkata.JNM was trained equally thoroughly in three distinct traditions and styles of philosophy. Even great modern Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, such as K. C. Bhattacharya, B. N. Seal, R. D. Ranade, Radhakrishnan, B. K. Matilal, Daya Krishna, and R. C. Gandhi, could claim scholarly fluency in at most two traditions (of course the "Indian tradition" itself is a maddeningly complex plurality of traditions often sharing very little in common—e.g., Abhidharma Buddhism and Mādhva Dualist Vedānta). But Mohanty was well-versed in and collected insights and inspiration from European (Continental) Phenomenology, and Analytic Anglo-American Philosophy and several of the diverse Sanskrit Indian Philosophical schools of thought. More importantly, as can be demonstrated in detail, it is his expertise in the pluralistic yet both logically and phenomenologically rigorous styles of classical Indian philosophies that made him uniquely capable of doing the bridgework between continental and analytic philosophies of the West—between Husserl and Frege, for example. [End Page 1]Within philosophy in general his interests ranged from metaphysics to epistemology, ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of physics (especially Time), Logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language and mind. Among his numerous publications, the following books achieved bench-mark status in their respective fields: Gaṅgeśa's Theory of Truth: Containing the Text of Gaṅgeśa's Prāmāṇya (jñapti) vāda (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, India, 1966); Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2002); The Self and its Other (Oxford University Press, 2000); Logic, Truth, and the Modalities (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999; Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 1999); The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972); Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1997); Husserl and Frege (Indiana University Press, 1982); Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning (Springer, 1976); and The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development (Yale University Press, 2008). His charming and inspiring intellectual autobiography was published in 2012 by Oxford University press with the title Between Two Worlds: East and West, an Autobiography. Some of his classic papers are collected in the volume edited with an introduction by Purushottama Billimoria: J. N. Mohanty: Essays on Indian Philosophy Traditional and Modern (New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). Philosophy East and West is going to publish a special issue devoted to JNM's life-time achievements in different branches and traditions of philosophy. [End Page 2]Arindam Chakrabarti Philosophy Department, University of Hawai'[email protected] © 2024 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Leading figures in comparative philosophy and cultural studies demonstrate what the future of comparative philosophy might look like in practice.

Never before, in any anthology, have contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of language come together to address the single most neglected important issue at the confluence of these two branches of philosophy, namely: Can we know facts from reliable reports? Besides Hume's subversive discussion of miracles and the literature thereon, testimony has been bypassed by most Western philosophers; whereas in classical Indian theories of evidence and knowledge philosophical debates have raged for centuries about the status of word-generated knowledge. `Is the response (...) "I was told by an expert on the subject" as respectable as "I saw" or "I inferred" in answer to "How do you know?"' is a question answered in diverse and subtle ways by Buddhists, Vaisesikas and Naiyayikas. For the first time this book makes available the riches of those debates, translating from Sanskrit some contemporary Indian Pandits' reactions to Western analytic accounts of meaning and knowledge. For advanced undergraduates in philosophy, for researchers - in Australia, Asia, Europe or America - on epistemology, theory of meaning, Indian or comparative philosophy, as well as for specialists interested in this relatively fresh topic of knowledge transmission and epistemic dependence this book will be a feast. After its publication analytic philosophy and Indian philosophy will have no excuse for shunning each other. (shrink)

This commentary raises general questions about the parsimony and generalizability of the SIMS model, before interrogating the specific roles that the amygdala and eye contact play in it. Additionally, this situates the SIMS model alongside another model of facial expression processing, with a view to incorporating individual differences in emotion perception.

Drawn on love, compassion and forgiveness, nonviolence is an inspirational value to humanity. From the historic movements led by Gandhi and then Martin Luther King Jr, to the recent Arab Spring in Egypt as also the impact of Anna Hazare's call for anti-corruption struggle further confirm the critical importance of non-violence as a cementing ideological force in present times.

Crop cultivation is one of the oldest activities of civilization. For a long time, crop production was carried out based on knowledge passed from generation to generation. However, due to the rapid growth in the human population of the world, human knowledge-based cultivation is not enough to meet the demanding need. To address this issue, the usage of machine learning-based tools has been studied in this paper. An experiment has been carried out over 0.3 million data. This dataset identifies 46 (...) prominent parameters for cultivation, which is collected from the Department of Agriculture Extension, Bangladesh. Comparison between neural networks and numbers of machine learning algorithms has been carried out in this research. It is observed that the neural network outperforms the other methods by maintaining an average prediction accuracy of 96.06% for six different crops. Other contemporary machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machine, random forest, and logistic regression, have average prediction accuracy of around 68.9%, 91.2%, and 62.39%, respectively. (shrink)

As against the Buddhist view that everything is momentary Udayana argues that recognitive perception, such as that this is the same pot I saw before, provides evidence for permanence. Such recognitive perception is common experience and cannot be set aside without compelling evidence. The Buddhist objects that such experience is not reliable; even a burning flame is recognized to be the same, but it is clear from fuel consumption that it is not. Udayana agrees that in the case of a (...) burning flame it cannot be the same flame because then it would have to have opposed features (such as being fueled by more oil before and less oil now). But there is no compelling evidence for the claim that the pot or I would have to have opposed features if enduring. The Buddhist claim that anything enduring must have opposed features such as being both capable and incapable of being productive is groundless. Such features are not opposed and may be explained as being due to availability or non-availability of auxiliary causal conditions and so on. (shrink)

Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.In the beginning was the word. And the word represented the world that was to come. The ancient Indian Grammarian Panini thickened the plot with his aphorism that the word represents its own form. Representation became so intimate and reflexive a relationship that the word and the world could hardly be distinguished. (...) Not only did uttering “I promise” amount to promising; in some cultures saying “I love you” or “I leave you” was deemed constitutive of actually loving or leaving. People could not remember persons and situations... (shrink)

We consider a normal-form game in which there is a single exogenously given coalition of cooperating players that can write a binding agreement on pre-selected actions. The actions representing other dimensions of the strategy space remain under the sovereign, individual control of the players. We consider a standard extension of the Nash equilibrium concept denoted as a partial cooperative equilibrium as well as an equilibrium concept in which the coalition of cooperators has a leadership position. Existence results are stated and (...) we identify conditions under which the various equilibrium concepts are equivalent. We apply this framework to existing models of multi-market oligopolies and international pollution abatement. In a multi-market oligopoly, typically, a merger paradox emerges in the partial cooperative equilibrium. The paradox vanishes if the cartel attains a leadership position. For international pollution abatement treaties, cooperation by a sufficiently large group of countries results in a Pareto improvement over the standard tragedy of the commons outcome described by the Nash equilibrium. (shrink)

In contemporary Western analytic philosophy, the classic analogical argument explaining our knowledge of other minds has been rejected. But at least three alternative positive theories of our knowledge of the second person have been formulated: the theory-theory, the simulation theory and the theory of direct empathy. After sketching out the problems faced by these accounts of the ego’s access to the contents of the mind of a “second ego”, this paper tries to recreate one argument given by Abhinavagupta (Shaiva philosopher (...) of recognition) to the effect that even in another’s body, one must feel and recognize one’s own self, if one is able to address that embodied person as a “you”. The otherness of You does not take away from its subjectivity. In that sense, just as every second person to whom one could speak is, first, a person, she is also a first person. Even as I regret that I do not know exactly how some other person is feeling right now, I must have some general access to the subjective experience of that other person, for otherwise what is it that I feel so painfully ignorant about? My subjective world is mine only to the extent that I recognize its continuity with a sharable subjective world where other I-s can make a You out of me. (shrink)

Thanks to the Inlaks Foundation in India, I was able to do my doctoral research on Our Talk About Nonexistents at Oxford in the early eighties. The two greatest philosophers of that heaven of analytical philosophy - Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett - supervised my work, reading and criticising all the fledgling philosophy that I wrote during those three years. At Sir Peter's request, Gareth Evans, shortly before his death, lent me an unpublished transcript of Kripke's John Locke Lectures. Work (...) on the Appendix about Indian Philosophy was supervised by the late Professor Bimal Krishna Matilal with whom informal but intense philosophical conversations used to spill over into dinner at his place almost every other day. It was Professor Matilal who sent me, over a summer, to study a tough Navya-Nyaya text under his own Nyaya teacher Pandit Visvabandhu Tarkatirtha at Calcutta. All four of these teachers were as kind to me as my life-long mentor in philosophy Professor Pranab Kumar Sen, whose clarity and depth remain the unreachable regu lative ideal of my intellect. When I came back to India, my life became blissfully free of the agonising anxiety to publish, until, after a conference at Jadavpur University where I gave an impromptu paper, ironically enough, on Non-doings, I met Derek Parfit. He had a six-hour conversation with me, explicitly planning my life. Five years had already elapsed since I had finished my D. Phil, but Derek read my thesis and liked it. (shrink)

In the Stoic view a definition is a representation of a peculiar characteristic that is neither too wide nor too narrow and has necessary or reciprocal force and is a statement of analysis matchingly expressed. That is, a peculiar characteristic is convertible and coextensive with the definiendum. Many scholars hold that for the Stoics a defining characteristic is not only a feature that is co-extensive with the definiendum but is also essential. We do not find any conclusive evidence for this (...) claim. The Stoics nowhere say that a defining feature is not only peculiar but also essential. They also sometimes offer more than one definition of a thing and this goes against the Aristotelian position that since a thing has single essence, there can only be one definition in the ideal sense. Further, the Platonic/Aristotelian tradition views a definition as being mainly concerned with relations between universals. But for the Stoics universals are mental constructs, individuals alone are real, and definitions are ultimately about individuals. (shrink)

"[A] positive contribution to the discourse on aesthetics from a cross-cultural perspective. It should be required reading for any academic who teaches and writes on aesthetics and the philosophy of art... There is much to be inspired by, and to learn from."- The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work (...) defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking, and aesthetic education to issues in film-theory and problems of the past versus present. As well as discussing indigenous versus foreign in aesthetic practices, this volume covers North and South Indian performance practices and theories, alongside recent and new themes including the Gandhian aesthetics of surrender and self-control and the aesthetics of touch in the light of the politics of untouchability. With such unparalleled and authoritative coverage, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art represents a dynamic map of comparative cross-cultural aesthetics. Bringing together original philosophical research from renowned thinkers, it makes a major contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

GANDHIAN HUMANISM : Inroads to Inner Awakening Tnii BIRTH of man is a mystery as well as a muse. It is a mystery because it is born in the womb of ...

Attention and consciousness are two distinct neural processes which are intricately intertwined. However, there is asymmetry in the distribution of attentional abilities across the two hemispheres. The right hemisphere is asserted to be dominant for attentional abilities. Research suggests that the ventral frontoparietal cortex of the right hemisphere is dominant for exogenous attentional abilities, attention is phylogenetically more primitive than endogenous attention, and, compared to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is more adept at abilities and functions that are of (...) more primitive origin. This review explores the attentional abilities of the mute right hemisphere, the extent to which these may affect consciousness, and whether the unilateral dominance of the exogenous network influences consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Stephen PhillipsArindam ChakrabartiMuch as I am honored by Stephen Phillips' detailed defense, in the face of my methodological "refutation," of the Nyāya thesis that a raw perception of the qualifier is a necessary causal factor for some (not all) determinate perception of an entity as qualified, I am not fully convinced that my deeper qualms about the very idea of immaculate perception unimpregnated by predicative structure have (...) all been adequately addressed. Instead of a detailed response, which I intend to undertake elsewhere, I wish to underscore the central worry behind my fifth (which Phillips calls "good") and seventh (which Phillips calls "weak") objections.When I claimed that perception is introduced, taxonomically, as a variety of veridical awareness, I had in mind the opening line of Gaṅgeśa's section on the definition of perception:sā ca pramā caturvidhā, pratyakṣānumityupamitiśābdā-bhedātAnd such veridical awareness is of four kinds: perception, inferential knowledge, knowledge from similarity, and knowledge from words.1This seems to be flatly incompatible with the admission of a subclass of perceptions that are not veridical awarenesses!Why does Phillips say that I am simply mistaken? True, taxonomic difficulties cannot overturn empirical evidence. But recall that there is no direct apperceptive evidence for "raw perception." The sole evidence is a generalization from a whole series of mediate (parokṣa) awarenesses that can happily afford to be instrumentally and crucially caused by other awarenesses. On the other hand, immediacy, which is the hallmark of a perception, consists of not having another awareness in its causal nexus. My seeing of a wall as white is direct, rather than inferential, analogical, or testimonial, to the extent that I did not have to go through any other awareness first in order to arrive at this visual perception. An inductive generalization from other mediate (cognition-generated) cognitions should not have such inexorable probative power over our account of immediate sensory cognition as to force us into admitting a neither-true-nor-false third kind of raw awareness!Phillips seems to have overlooked the metaphor of "spelling" that I used in this context while giving my second objection. If the step-by-step picture of building up the content of perception that Gaṅgeśa assumes is correct, then each element of the perceptual content of the predicative perception that this is a flower—the universal flowerhood, the actual physical object identified as "this," and qualification as a cementing relation, in this case inherence—would first have to be cognized in the unconnected "raw" manner! Now, even if we somehow swallow the idea of seeing a universal barely and not in relation to any one of its instances, it simply makes no [End Page 114] sense to talk about a bare, raw, unstructured perceptual acquaintance with qualification or inherence! Logically and structurally one could argue that unless you have "got" a, b, and R first, you cannot have the complex aRb. But this is admittedly a process of logical postmortem dissection of a whole piece of direct qualificative perception. And the point of my metaphorical warning—"You need to have 'L' and 'O' and 'D' and 'N' to spell 'London,' but you do not need to spell 'L' or 'O' or 'D' or 'N' first. Single letters simply cannot be spelled!"—was this: there are all sorts of different ways of "getting." You need to "get" the qualifying feature somehow in order to see or hear or taste something as qualified by that feature, but you do not therefore need to see or hear or taste that feature alone first in a bare, raw, unqualified manner! I do believe, like a good Naiyāyika, that high-pitchedness (or fifthness, in the octave) can be heard although it is a sound-universal. But I refuse to admit that before I can hear a sung note as high-pitched or (the fifth) I must somehow hear that universal directly without hearing it in any note!The central point, once again, is this: all awareness is intentional, according to Nyāya. There are only three kinds of intentional roles that our awarenesses assign to their objects: the role of... (shrink)

Counterinference is one of five kinds of pseudo-prover (similar to fallacy in Western logic) recognized in the Nyaaya school. Typically in counterinference while one side seeks to prove the thesis that a probandum belongs to an inferential subject because an inferential mark pervaded by the probandum belongs to that subject, an opponent challenges that by arguing that the probandum does not belong to the inferential subject because another inferential mark pervaded by absence (negation) of the probandum belongs to that subject. (...) A common example is: sound is eternal, since it is audible and audibility is pervaded by eternality (i.e. all that is audible is eternal, like sound-ness, the common property of all sound particulars); but sound is non-eternal, since it is originated (by clapping hands, etc.) and all that is originated is non-eternal, like a pot, etc. Critics from other philosophical schools have objected that counterinference is not an additional kind of pseudo-prover. Since it is impossible for an inferential subject both to have and not to have a probandum, either at least one of the inferential marks does not belong to the inferential subject (the fallacy of being unestablished) or at least one of the inferential marks lacks pervasion (the fallacy of deviation) and, accordingly, counterinference should be subsumed under those fallacies. Nyaaya philosophers have responded by pointing out that the formal structure of counterinference is different from that of the other fallacies: in counterinference we have two different inferential marks but not in the other candidates. The epistemic result of counterinference is also different from that of the other fallacies mentioned, it is argued further. Moreover, it is contended (against a Nyaaya faction) that the epistemic result is not doubt as specifically understood in Nyaaya but desire to know the truth about the chosen inferential mark and the probandum. Accordingly, counterinference may be explained as that which provides the ground for inquiring what is the truth about the original inferential mark and its probandum due to presentation of an inferential assimilation (paraamarsha) that contradicts the original inferential assimilation. The discussion yields also a broader normative principle that contradiction or counterproof provides the epistemic ground for further inquiry even if there is proof. The selection is from the Tattva-cintaa-maNi, the canonical Navya-Nyaaya work of GaMgesha (14th century CE?). The selection is from a large work and presupposes some things explained elsewhere in the text. Further, though written with great precision the work paradoxically belongs to the old Indian philosophical oral tradition in which a beginner is expected to read it with the help of additional information supplied by an expert. Hence paying close attention to what is implied in the context and supplementing certain ideas is necessary for interpretation and understanding. (shrink)

M. K. Gandhi's a series of talks delivered to ashramites at Sabarmati during 1926 and 1927, provides a singular instance in Indian intellectual thought in which the Bhagavad Gita's message of action is transformed into a theory of non-violent resistance. This essay argues that Gandhi's reading of the Gita has to be placed within an identifiable general understanding of the political that emerged among the so-called in the Congress towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Gandhi, we argue, wrested from (...) the their vocabulary and their pre-eminent political text, the Gita, and put them to use in the cause of non-violent politics. But, more importantly, his discourses on the Gita after 1920 suggest an acceptance, on his part, of politics as it actually was. This is where he departed from the projects of Tilak or Aurobindo. The Gita, in Gandhi's hand, became a talismanic device that allowed the satyagrahi his or her involvement in political action while providing protection from the necessary and unavoidable venality of politics and its propensity to violence. (shrink)

The twelve essays in this collection promote scholarship on the rich and diverse subject of mysticism by examining the nature of its thought both from Eastern and Western and from philosophical and religious perspectives. These include studies of specific mystics, including Teresa de Avila, Lady Nijo, Hiroshi Motoyama, and Mirabai, and thinkers about mysticism, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. The book opens with two descriptive studies of similarities in the life of Teresa de Avila and mystics of very different times (...) and cultures. The issue of mysticism and ethics is addressed in three essays, and central concepts involving pure conscious events and primordial oneness in Nietzsche are addressed in two separate essays. Wittgenstein's comments on mysticism are examined in two essays, one that places them in the perspective of his overall development and the other that studies them in comparison with recent continental thought. The book concludes with two essays that look broadly at the supersensible, one from an examination of Kantian aesthetics and the other from quantum mechanical interpretations of reality. Taken together, these essays attest to the power of mysticism to provoke reasoned thought about ultimate matters. (shrink)