pt. 1. Ramanuja, Madhva, Chaitanya, Vedanta Desika, Meykandar, Asvaghosoa, Utpaladeva, Kumarila Bhatta, Udayanacharya.

Meditations.--Some views on Paul Deussen's "Elements of metaphysics."--The fundamentals of Vedanta.--Uma's mirror.--The drum-beat of angels.--Heroes of ancient Ind.--The spirit of Vedic Ind.--Was Śaṅkara a crypto-Buddhist?--Vedic support for non-dualism.--The system of Ramanuja with side-lights on those of Madhava and Śaṅkara.--The system of Sankhya.--The system of thought revealed in the Bhagavad-gītā.--The philosophy of Advaita or non-dualism.--"Tiger" Varadachar.

Distributed programming paradigms such as MapReduce and Spark have alleviated sequential bottleneck while mining of massive transaction databases. Of significant importance is mining High Utility Itemset that incorporates the revenue of the items purchased in a transaction. Although a few algorithms to mine HUIs in the distributed environment exist, workload skew and data transfer overhead due to shuffling operations remain major issues. In the current study, Parallel Utility Computation algorithm has been proposed with novel grouping and load balancing strategies for (...) an efficient mining of HUIs in a distributed environment. To group the items, Transaction Weighted Utility values as a degree of transaction similarity is employed. Subsequently, these groups are assigned to the nodes across the cluster by taking into account the mining load due to the items in the group. Experimental evaluation on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PUC with TWU grouping in conjunction with load balancing converges mining faster. Due to reduced data transfer, and load balancing-based assignment strategy, PUC outperforms different grouping strategies and random assignment of groups across the cluster. Also, PUC is shown to be faster than PHUI-Growth algorithm with a promising speedup. (shrink)

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding (...) principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes. (shrink)

Extant business ethics literature available for application to international business demonstrates some variety but no comprehensive principles. While the domains of both international business and business ethics are expanding, they are also becoming increasingly divergent. At the same time, the primacy accorded to the multinational enterprise in both fields ignores the socio-cultural and political embeddedness of economic activities, and multiple agencies in international business (individuals, firms, nations, etc.). Some international business theorists have offered the view that international exchange should be (...) the central building block for theories on international business. In this paper, it is argued that international exchange could be the fundamental unit of analysis for international business ethics as well. The potentially unifying features of exchange norms and ethical principles leads the author to develop some core exchange ethics principles that are tested on three recent international business practices. (shrink)

This journal's well-intentioned consideration of the arts has turned out to be quite the Pandora's box. As soon as we broach the subject of aesthetics, we are already in the realm of ideology; as soon as we impose the frame of scientific inquiry upon any subject, we invoke another kind of ideology. The previous issues in this series have depicted the unfolding of an ideological clash of cultures between sciences and the humanities, enough to make C.P. Snow blush. For the (...) time being, this is an unavoidable condition; yet the more we remain aware of it, the further we may push our insights. (shrink)

There are two opposing views on the nature of corporations in contemporary debates on corporate social responsibility. Opponents of corporate personhood hold that a corporation is nothing but a group of individuals coming together to achieve certain goals. On the other hand, the advocates of corporate personhood believe that corporations are persons in their own right existing over and above the individuals who comprise them. They talk of corporate decision-making structures that help translate individual decisions and actions into corporate decisions (...) and actions. Importantly both the advocates and the opponents of corporate personhood rely on a contractual model of corporate–social interaction to explain corporate social responsibilty. However, this contractual model misses crucial aspects of the relationship between corporations and societies. Economic history reveals that the relationship between corporations and societies is essentially dynamic and heterogeneous and so extremely difficult to characterise in terms of a contract. The economic and the political aspects of this relationship are so finely intertwined with each other and it is impossible to extricate the one from the other. We need to be more conscious of the actual nature of corporate–social interaction in order to deal more comprehensively with issues of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Although arguments are a good way of exploring the limitations and complexities of a concept or a theory we may find ourselves faced with a real phenomenon that challenges the existing formulations of a concept or a theory so strongly and reveals its limitations to us so starkly that we are forced to break away from the current discussion and start anew. Such is the challenge posed by the phenomenon of farmer suicides on our existing theories of corporate social responsibility. (...) Contemporary discussions in corporate ethics are replete with many theories of corporate social responsibility which in one way or the other rely on the concept of the social contract. For the most part these theories have gone unchallenged and no fundamental limitations have been revealed. However, the phenomenon of farmer suicides in central India poses a serious challenge to them. This article attempts to show how the phenomenon of farmer suicides in central India starkly exposes some of the fundamental limitations of the contractarian formulations of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled (...) to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move. (shrink)

"In this book, first published by OUP USA in 1973, Professor Iyer elucidates the central concepts in the moral and political thought of Mahatma Gandhi, bringing out the subtlety, potency, and universal importance of his concepts of truth and non-violence, freedom and obligation, and his view of the relation between means and ends in politics." --.

Embryos and microscopes share a long, remarkable history and biologists have always been intrigued to watch how embryos develop under the microscope. Here we discuss the advances in microscopy which have greatly influenced our current understanding of embryogenesis. We highlight the evolution of microscopes and the optical technologies that have been instrumental in studying various developmental processes. These imaging modalities provide mechanistic insights into the dynamic cellular and molecular events which drive lineage commitment and morphogenetic changes in the developing embryo. (...) We begin the journey with a brief history of microscopy to study embryos. First, we review the principles and optics of light, fluorescence, confocal, and electron microscopy which have been key techniques for imaging cellular and molecular events during embryonic development. Next, we discuss recent key imaging modalities such as light‐sheet microscopy, which are suitable for whole embryo imaging. Further, we highlight imaging techniques like multiphoton and super resolution microscopy for beyond light diffraction limit, high resolution imaging. Lastly, we review some of the scattering‐based imaging methods and techniques used for imaging human embryos. (shrink)

The category “music” as used in this area of science is inconsistent and unstable, and its logical relationship to the word “musicality” – used by scientists to denote the human capacity for music – is circular. Therefore, rather than pursue the question, “Why did music evolve?” let us ask more inclusively, “What experiences in humankind's deep past might have felt like music?”.

While N6‐methyladenosine (m6A) is a well‐known epigenetic modification in bacterial DNA, it remained largely unstudied in eukaryotes. Recent studies have brought to fore its potential epigenetic role across diverse eukaryotes with biological consequences, which are distinct and possibly even opposite to the well‐studied 5‐methylcytosine mark. Adenine methyltransferases appear to have been independently acquired by eukaryotes on at least 13 occasions from prokaryotic restriction‐modification and counter‐restriction systems. On at least four to five instances, these methyltransferases were recruited as RNA methylases. Thus, (...) m6A marks in eukaryotic DNA and RNA might be more widespread and diversified than previously believed. Several m6A‐binding protein domains from prokaryotes were also acquired by eukaryotes, facilitating prediction of potential readers for these marks. Further, multiple lineages of the AlkB family of dioxygenases have been recruited as m6A demethylases. Although members of the TET/JBP family of dioxygenases have also been suggested to be m6A demethylases, this proposal needs more careful evaluation. (shrink)

Are mathematical objects affected by their historicity? Do they simply lose their identity and their validity in the course of history? If not, how can they always be accessible in their ideality regardless of their transmission in the course of time? Husserl and Foucault have raised this question and offered accounts, both of which, albeit different in their originality, are equally provocative. Both acknowledge that a scientific object like a geometrical theorem or a chemical equation has a history because it (...) is only constituted in and transmitted through history. But they see that history as a part of its ideality, so that, although historical, a scientific object retains its identity as one and the same object. (shrink)

The advent of pharmacogenomics—the study of how the human genome influences drug response within a person or population—has begun to drive the development of pharmaceuticals in Western medicine today. Although pharmacogenomics promises dramatic improvement in drug safety and efficacy, the field also raises a host of ethical questions. The need to protect informed consent and confidentiality and to promote justice and equity—both nationally and globally—requires that one approach pharmacogenomics with an enthusiastic, yet critical, eye. Drawing on the normative values of (...) respect for persons (as both autonomous and relational), human well-being, socioeconomic justice, and human solidarity and the common good, this article offers several concrete suggestions for public policy to help ensure that pharmacogenomics develops in a way that promotes the good of both individuals and the broader society. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the issue of the relationship between philosophy, critical commentary as Blanchot practises it and the literary work of art. I take issue with Gerald Bruns’ claim in Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy in which Blanchot’s critical practice is contrasted to philosophy. The “refusal” of philosophy attributed to Blanchot by Bruns is a subtle affair, as I indicate in readings of “Literature and the Right to Death” and The Space ofLiterature. Blanchot’s critical (...) commentary remains faithfuI to the literary work of art only insofar as he tolerates a paradox that pertains to the peculiar ontological or trans-ontological status of the literary work of art. In attempting to bear witness to the work of art insofar as it problematizes and even exceeds ontology, Blanchot can indeed be said to refusephilosophy insofar as it resists the impulse to resolve paradox.Cet article cherche à explorer les enjeux relatifs aux rapports qu’entretiennent la philosophie, le commentaire critique tel que le pratique Blanchot et I’oeuvre d’art littéraire. J’engage un débat autour de la déclaration de Gerald Bruns, dans Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, où la pratique critique de Blanchot est mise en contraste avec la philosophie. Le «refus» de la philosophie que Bruns attribue à Blanchot est une question subtile, tel que je I’indique dans des extraits de «La Littérature et le droit à la mort» et L’Espace littéraire. Le commentaire critique de Blanchot ne demeure fidèle à I’oeuvre d’art littéraire que dans la mesure où il tolère un paradoxe relatif au curieux statut ontologique ou trans-ontologique de l’oeuvre d’art littéraire. En cherchant à saisir l’oeuvre d’art en tant qu’elle problématise etmême excède I’ontologie, on peut en effet prétendre que Blanchot refuse la philosophie dans la mesure où celle-ci résiste au désir de résoudre le paradoxe. (shrink)

This article is a phenomenological analysis of the Urdu poem Tum ek gōrakh dhandā hō by the Pakistani Sufi poet Nāz Khayālawī (d. 2010). It approaches the poet's engagement with perplexity ( ḥayrah ), as an ontological feature of reality, through the lens of Heidegger's understanding of truth where concealment ( lēthe ) is central to the event of unconcealment ( alētheia ). The article demonstrates how a Heideggerianphenomenological exploration enables us to uncover the dynamic of un/concealment (or un/veiling) in (...) the Sufi tradition's understanding of Being and intelligibility. The rich possibilities of interpretative pluralism and polysemy—through the explorative nonfinality evoked by Being as ḥayrah —are explored as well. The article's argument not only allows for fresh extensions of Heidegger's phenomenological approach to unexplored cultural and historical territory, but also adds to Heidegger scholarship's recent tentative attempts at bringing together Heidegger and Sufi poetry. (shrink)

Arguing that the seafarers in Hölderlin’s late hymn “Remembrance” are ambiguous, as they keep slipping between the figure of the merchant and the refugee, this paper juxtaposes how the ambiguous seafarers in Hölderlin’s poem and the protagonists in Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, who are all refugees, relate to the sea. This juxtaposition allows us to arrive at a philosophical distillation of the existence of the refugee, who, caught between the competing injunctions to forget and to remember, represents the entire (...) gamut of human existence. Coetzee’s novel complements Hölderlin’s poem by showing us that the refugee, in facing existential dilemmas that pertain to the very ground of all morality, is not to be seen as a victim or an eternal object of pity, but as a figure exhibiting a sovereignty of incomparable magnitude. (shrink)

The total electron content in the ionosphere widely influences Global Navigation Satellite Systems especially for critical applications by inducing localized positional errors in the GNSS measurements. These errors can be mitigated by measuring TEC from stations located around the world at various temporal and spatial scales and using them for advanced forecasting of TEC. The TEC can be used as a tool in understanding space weather phenomena such as geomagnetic storms which cause disruptions in the ionosphere. This paper examines the (...) causal relationship between perturbations in TEC caused by geomagnetic storms. The causality between two geomagnetic indices auroral electrojet and disturbed storm index and TEC is investigated using Granger causality at two low-latitude stations, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The outcomes of this study strengthen the regional understanding and modeling of ionospheric parameters which can contribute towards the global efforts for modeling and reducing the ionospheric effects on trans-ionospheric communication and navigation. The causal inferences combined with the data-driven model can be useful in identifying the correct and informative physical quantities to improve the forecasting models. (shrink)

This book focuses on moral and political education and critically engages with educational issues from a philosophical perspective. It engages with questions of moral education as well as questions about citizenship education, to address apprehensions on learning in a liberal democracy while parallelly invoking issues from within the curriculum, the school environment and teacher-student relationship. With contributions from renowned philosophers and educationists, this volume discusses themes like civic education and liberal democracy; toleration and freedom; Tagore's conception of the moral and (...) political self; key issues in moral education; cosmopolitanism, compassion, care ethics and moral purpose of schooling; to revisit and rethink some foundational questions related to education, curriculum and pedagogy. This volume will be essential reading for educationists and educators, and will be important for scholars and researchers of philosophy of education, education, teacher education and school education. (shrink)

By systematically uncovering and comprehensively examining the epistemological implications of Heidegger's history of being and Foucault's archaeology of discursive formations, Towards an Epistemology of Ruptures shows how Heidegger and Foucault significantly expand the notions of knowledge and thought. This is done by tracing their path-breaking responses to the question: What is the object of thought? The book shows how for both thinkers thought is not just the act by which the object is represented in an idea, and knowledge not just (...) a state of the mind of the individual subject corresponding to the object. Each thinker, in his own way, argues that thought is a productive event in which the subject and the object gain their respective identity and knowledge is the opening up of a space in which the subject and object can encounter each other and in which true and false statements about an object become possible. They thereby lay the ground for a new conceptual framework for rethinking the very relationship between knowledge and its object. (shrink)