Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and (...) the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’. (shrink)

Picturebooks that focus on environmental issues offer children the chance to connect with natural settings, promoting emotional and mental health, while also developing ethical principles and an authentic concern for the environment. This genre possesses the capacity to emotionally captivate children through its combination of text and visuals, potentially resulting in a shift in their perspectives towards the topics and issues being portrayed. In addition to this, picturebooks are educational because they use words and images to choose, arrange, and understand (...) data and statistics, thereby making knowledge accessible to those who are generally interested and engaging readers on an emotional and intellectual level. This essay examines how the picturebook Seeds of Change: Planting a Path to Peace (2010) effectively communicates Wangari Maathai’s environmental advocacy. For this purpose, the article offers a brief examination of the influence of Maathai’s Green Belt Movement and the holistic ecological connotations that the visual representations seek to emphasize. The article contends that this ‘green informational picturebook’ acts as a catalyst for transformative learning by enhancing ecological literacy in children and serving as a platform for environmental education and sustainability in the public as a whole. (shrink)

This essay attempts to outline a philosophical anthropology with dialogicality as its key concept. It argues that it is impossible to explicate this concept with any bias toward the ontological primacy of either the subject or the knowable object. The essay develops from the philosophy of Martin Buber who vindicated the need for subject-object binarism to be superseded by a relational ontology of human existence, that is, a space between the dialoguing I and Thou. From this point of view, different (...) sectors of human studies – including those involving politics or socio-political crafting of human states of affairs – must be approached according to their unique dimension. The essay’s envisioning of knowledge of humans by human being beyond any subject-object dichotomy implies a new perspective of self-other relationship whereby the phenomenological notion of intentionality is apprehended in its dialogical mode. (shrink)

This is an introduction to Sri Aurobindo, considered by the author to be one of the most profound and relevant contemporary Asian masters speaking to the West. His vision he contends transcends the different strengths and weaknesses of India and the West. His teachings include the yogas of the Hindu spiritua; classic the Bhagavad Gita - knowledge, action, devotion and meditation and applies them to the task of world transformation, rather than just spiritiual liberation.

ABSTRACT This article attempts to define karma as both action and the effects of action. In terms of the effects or fruits of action, the effect of action upon the mind is the focus; thus, the idea of “effect” is primarily defined as psychic residue and is compared to Freud's notion of memory traces. In addition, action that produces karma is said to be accompanied by the “pulling” feeling of volition (cetanā). Some comparisons are then made between cetanā and the (...) theories of Karen Horney in Western psychology vis à vis her view of the neurotic's compulsive, driven feelings. The article also has a more ethically oriented side. Often, the karma doctrine is believed to be the only causal factor responsible for one's present condition, and thus, a person's unfortunate circumstances: sometimes this notion leads to blaming a person for his or her misfortune. This article seeks to discover whether or not this idea truly has scriptural backing. Lastly, the article explores the issue of whether or not one must always live out the entirety of the effects of one's actions or if it is possible to purify or eliminate actions' effects before they come to fruition. For this question in particular, the article examines both Theravāda and Mahāyāna thinking. (shrink)

We argue that the Aharonov-Anandan-Vaidman model, by using the notion of so-called “protective measurements,” cannot claim to have dispensed with the ldcollapse of the wave function,” because it does not succeed in avoiding the quantum measurement problem. Its claim to be able to distinguish between two nonorthogonal states is also critically examined.

A commitment to engage with the structural and historical processes that result in discrimination and injustice in the utilisation of natural resources and landscapes is an epistemic responsibility that must be achieved in order to imagine a just society in which environmental justice is a feasible possibility. Indian author Bhoopal’s Forests, Blood & Survival: Life and Times of Komuram Bheem (2023), translated from Telugu by P A Kumar, is one such literary narrative that vividly portrays the injustices endured by tribal (...) communities in India at the hands of colonial forest officers, money lenders, capitalist extractive authorities, and other oppressive authorities. In this context, the article explicates this narrative of tribal communities to demonstrate and encourage alternative viewpoints and positions of tribal cultures that may confront the dominance of colonial-capitalist logic as a monolithic framework in environmental discourse. In doing so, the first section discusses the natural environment of the tribes and their way of life, followed by an intervention on the colonial brutality and injustices that tribals have been subjected to, and finally, how their resistance is deemed to be subaltern environmentalism. (shrink)

The Original Work Presents A Totally New Methodology For Understanding The Concept Of Aesthetic Experience Through The Medium Of Dialogue A Dialogue Between The Subject And Object, I And Thou.

This interview with Peter Singer AI serves a dual purpose. It is an exploration of certain—utilitarian and related—views on sentience and its ethical implications. It is also an exercise in the emerging interaction between natural and artificial intelligence, presented not as just ethics of AI but perhaps more importantly, as ethics with AI. The one asking the questions—Matti Häyry—is a person, in the contemporary sense of the word, sentient and self-aware, whereas Peter Singer AI is an artificial intelligence persona, created (...) by Sankalpa Ghose, a person, through dialogue with Peter Singer, a person, to programmatically model and incorporate the latter’s writings, presentations, recipes, and character qualities as a renowned philosopher. The interview indicates some subtle differences between natural perspectives and artificial representation, suggesting directions for further development. PSai, as the project is also known, is available to anyone to chat with, anywhere in the world, on almost any topic, in almost any language, at www.petersinger.ai. (shrink)

Revolutionary, philosopher, litterateur, and seer, Sri Aurobindo remains one of the brightest minds India has ever had. This book captures the evolution of his thought through excerpts from his political articles and speeches, essays, talks with and letters to disciples, and public messages-presented chronologically. It includes his views on Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose; his doubts about Gandhi's method to attain freedom and insistence on Ahimsa; and his very distinctive contribution to the nascent Nationalist Movement. Both prophetic of the (...) challenges to come India's way post-Independence, and persuaded of her potential to overcome them, Sri Aurobindo's vision of a new India melds the spiritual with the political. More than sixty years after his passing, Sri Aurobindo's penetrating insights on issues such as building on India's cultural and spiritual foundations, a national agenda for education, Hindu-Muslim coexistence and the need to distinguish reason from a blind imitation of the West, continue to resonate. (shrink)

Terms of logic like 'all' and 'some' can be understood in relation to one another purely in thought. Individual objects of which one becomes aware by sense perception are not objects of pure thought. Hence they cannot be uniquely named. Since Aristotelian and mathematical logic deals with pure thought alone there are no singular terms in either of them. The individual constants of mathematical logic are not objects of sense perception. In Nyaya and Buddhist logic singular terms are indispensable, because (...) inference does not deal with pure thought, but with knowledge which includes both thought and sense perception. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of belief change have been criticized for placing undue emphasis on the new belief provided as input. A recent proposal to address such issues is a framework for non-prioritized belief change based on default theories (Ghose and Goebel, 1998). A novel feature of this approach is the introduction of disbeliefs alongside beliefs which allows for a view of belief contraction as independently useful, instead of just being seen as an intermediate step in the process of belief revision. (...) This approach is, however, restrictive in assuming a linear ordering of reliability on the received inputs. In this paper, we replace the linear ordering with a preference ranking on inputs from which a total preorder on inputs can be induced. This extension brings along with it the problem of dealing with inputs of equal rank. We provide a semantic solution to this problem which contains, as a special case, AGM belief change on closed theories. (shrink)

Examining the eviction of Occupy Philadelphia from city hall on November 30, 2011, this paper analyzes police tactics to address public protests in the United States. The results highlight three aspects of the police strategy deployed during the eviction: a preconceived plan to manage protests, the use of militarized tactics to implement this management plan, and the imposition of a state of dissociative meditation triggered by the incarceration that followed the eviction. The strategy of management, militarization, and meditation demonstrates the (...) Marcusean notion of repressive tolerance and characterizes the police response to public dissent. (shrink)

We review the present status of wave-particle duality of single-photon states in the context of some recent experiments. In particular, Bohr's complementarity principle is critically reexamined. It is explained in detail how this principle is confronted in these experiments and how a contradiction with the notion of “mutual exclusiveness” of classical wave and particle pictures emerges.

Chiefly letters of the Indian philosopher.

Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity - that it vindicated the action-reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity supposedly violated it. In this paper we examine why Einstein came to emphasise this position several years after the development of general relativity. Several key considerations are relevant to the story: the connection Einstein originally saw between Mach's analysis of inertia and both (...) the equivalence principle and the principle of general covariance, the waning of Mach's influence owing to de Sitter's 1917 results, and Einstein's detailed correspondence with Moritz Schlick in 1920. (shrink)

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cognitive Modelling presents a new approach to cognition that challenges long-held views. It systematically develops a broad-based framework to model cognition, which is mathematically equivalent to the emerging 'quantum-like modelling' of the human mind. The book argues that a satisfactory physical and philosophical basis of such an approach is missing, a particular issue being the application of quantization to the mind for which there is no empirical evidence as yet. In response to this issue, the book (...) adopts a COM (classical optical modelling) approach, broad-based but mathematically equivalent to quantum-like modelling while avoiding its problematic features. It presents a philosophically informed and empirically motivated mathematical model of cognition, mainly concerning decision making processes. It also deals with applications to different areas of the social sciences. It will be of interest to scholars and research students interested in the mathematical modelling of cognition and decision making, and also interdisciplinary researchers interested in broader issues of cognition. (shrink)

On the philosophy of Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950; comprises speeches and papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Sri Aurobindo Samiti, Calcutta.