The Lingayat movement led by Basava, Allama, Mahadevi and many others in Karnataka in the twelfth century stands as one of the important movements that challenged, protested and, to a major extent,...

Modern Indian nationalist thought has dealt with political ideas such as freedom, equality, liberty, democracy, so on and so forth. The idea of freedom received enough attention on the part of most of the modern Indian political thinkers. However, the idea of freedom as envisaged by the nationalist thinkers did not receive positive response from the other stream of modern Indian thought. Dalit-Bahujan political thinkers questioned the narration of freedom as propagated by the nationalist thinkers. Nationalist thinkers aspired for universal (...) values and at the same time reaffirmed ancient religious principles. Such effort was questioned and doubted by the other thinkers of modern India. Thus, one can find different narrations of freedom, such as social, economic and political. The social categories such as caste, class and gender became bases for their narration on the idea of freedom. The ideas and arguments of B. G. Tilak, M. K. Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar E. M. S. Namboodripad and others would help in larger understanding of the idea of freedom. (shrink)

Medical ethics in the Indian context is closely related to indigenous classical and folk traditions. This article traces the history of Indian conceptions of ethics and medicine, with an emphasis on the Hindu tradition. Classical Ayurvedic texts including Carakasamhita and Susrutasamhita provide foundational assumptions about the body, the self, and gunas, which provide the underpinnings for the ethical system. Karma, the notion that every action has consequences, provides a foundation for medical morality. Conception, prolongation of one's blood-line is an important (...) ethical aim of life. Thus a wide range of practices to further conception are acceptable. Abortion is a more complex matter ethically. At the end of life death is viewed in the context of passage to another life. Death is a relief from suffering to be coped with by the thought of an eternal atman or rebirth. Keywords: India, Hindu, karma, conception, death CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Natural language meaning has properties of both (embodied) cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. This article argues that how properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning can be united remains one of the puzzles in cognitive science. That is primarily because formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning are abstract, logical, and truth‐conditional properties, whereas cognitive/conceptual representations are embodied and grounded in sensory‐motor systems. After reviewing the (...) current progress, this work offers, in outline, the general formulations that show how these two different kinds of representations for semantic structures can (potentially) be unified and also proposes three desiderata for testing, in brain dynamics, the mathematical equivalence between formal symbolic representations (and their transitions), and neuronal population codes (and their transitions). (shrink)

Das Denken des Advaita und des Tantra führt auf je eigenem Wege zur Wahrheit vom Eins-Seienden und zielt damit auf jene Einsicht ab, die den Menschen dazu befähigt, aus ihr heraus zu handeln. Getragen wird der Erkenntnisweg vom individuellen Leib. Der Leib rückt ins Zentrum als Mittel zur Einsicht sowie als unmittelbarer Bezugspunkt des Handelns des Individuums: Metaphysik steht in0enger Beziehung mit Moralität. Man darf, mit anderen Worten, von "embodied cognition" reden, die jedoch auf einem kontrollierbaren Weg, den die Meditation (...) vorgibt, zu vollziehen ist. Dieser Gedankengang wird in Auseinandersetzung mit den Vorsokratikern, Platon und Aristoteles entwickelt."-Back cover. (shrink)

Mitochondrial ATP synthesis, calcium buffering, and trafficking affect neuronal function and survival. Several genes implicated in mitochondrial functions map within the genomic region associated with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS), which is a key genetic cause of neuropsychiatric diseases. Although neuropsychiatric diseases impose a serious health and economic burden, their etiology and pathogenesis remain largely unknown because of the dearth of valid animal models and the challenges in investigating the pathophysiology in neuronal circuits. Mouse models of 22q11DS are becoming valid tools (...) for studying human psychiatric diseases, because they have hemizygous deletions of the genes that are deleted in patients and exhibit neuronal and behavioral abnormalities consistent with neuropsychiatric disease. The deletion of some 22q11DS genes implicated in mitochondrial function leads to abnormal neuronal and synaptic function. Herein, we summarize recent findings on mitochondrial dysfunction in 22q11DS and extend those findings to the larger context of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric diseases. (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)

This paper revisits the conception of intelligence and understanding as embodied in the Turing Test. It argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items in a natural language and framed in terms of syntax-free relations in linguistic texts can help ground linguistic inferences in a manner that can be taken to be 'understanding' in a mechanized system. Understanding in this case is a matter of running through the relevant inferences meaning relations allow for, and some of (...) these inferences are plain deductions and some can serve to act as abductions. Understanding in terms of meaning relations also supervenes on linguistic syntax because such understanding cannot be simply reduced to syntactic relations. The current approach to meaning and understanding thus shows that this is one way, if not the only way, of framing Alan Turing's original insight into the nature of thinking in computing systems. (shrink)

This paper approaches the question of how to describe the higher-level internal structures and representations of cognitive systems across various kinds of nonhuman (neuro)cognitive systems. While much research in cognitive (neuro)science and comparative cognition is dedicated to the exploration of the (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes with a focus on brain-behavior relations across different non-human species, not much has been done to connect (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes and the associated behaviors to plausible higher-level structures and representations of distinct kinds of cognitive (...) systems in non-humans. Although the study of (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes can certainly be revealing, (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes are underspecified with respect to internal structures and representations of non-human cognitive systems because multiple such mechanisms can target, or be mapped onto, the same internal structure or vice versa. This paper outlines a biosemiotic approach to this linking problem in order to bridge the gap between functions of (neuro)cognitive systems in different species and the higher-level cognitive structures and representations. It is contended that the higher-level internal structures and representations of various cognitive systems are biosemiotic constraints on the (biological) functions of (neuro)cognitive systems that serve to restrict the range of functions (neuro)cognitive systems have or are selected for. This turns out to have implications for issues on the convergent evolution of cognitive traits. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with discourses and (...) practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/south binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis. (shrink)

This book explores the cognitive constraints and principles of variation in structures of linguistic meaning across languages. It unifies cognitive-semantic representations with formal-semantic representations to make a unique contribution to the study of typological generalizations and universals in natural language semantics. This unified approach not only helps reveal why semantic structures have the observed variation they have, but also sheds light on the compelling cognitive and formal regularities and patterns in the variation of linguistic semantics. The book also advances the (...) general principles of a cognitively-oriented semantic typology. Lucid and topical, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of language typology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and semantics. It will also be of interest to theoretical linguists of both cognitivist and formalist schools. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that properties of cognitive/conceptual representations and formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning can be inter‐translated, recast, transformed into one another, and so united together, even though cognitive/conceptual representations and formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning are apparently distinct in ontology and divergent in their form or character. While cognitive/conceptual representations are ultimately rooted in sensory‐motor systems, formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning are abstractions detached from and independent of the actualized world. This paper sketches out the foundations of (...) how representations of linguistic meaning in terms of cognitive/conceptual structures in Cognitive/Conceptual Semantics can be unified with those in terms of formal‐logical structures in Formal Semantics. This is done by recasting cognitive/conceptual representations in terms of formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning and re‐encoding formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning in terms of cognitive/conceptual representations. Then, these two types of semantic representations, thus shown representationally equivalent, will be related to a series of derivations across levels in neuronal networks and dynamics. The general discussion on unifying cognitive/conceptual representations of linguistic meaning with formal‐logical structures is contextualized within the broader context of theorizing in cognitive science. (shrink)

This article will provide a unifying perspective on perception and cognitionviathe route of linguistic representations of emotion. Linguistic representations of emotions provide a fertile ground for explorations into the nature and form of integration of perception and cognition because emotion has facets of both perceptual and cognitive processes. In particular, this article shows that certain types of linguistic representations of emotion allow for the integration of perception and cognition through a series of steps and operations in cognitive systems, whereas certain (...) other linguistic representations of emotion are not so representationally structured as to permit the unity of perception and cognition. It turns out that the types of linguistic representations of emotion that readily permit the desired unity of perception and cognition are exactly those that are linguistically encoded emotive representations of everyday objects, events, and things around us. It is these ordinary objects, events and things that provide the scaffolding for task-dependent or goal-oriented activities of cognitive systems including autonomous systems. In this way, cognitive systems can be saliently tuned to the outer world by being motivated and also subtly governed by emotion-driven representations. This helps not only tie together perceptual and cognitive processesviathe interface between language and emotive representations, but also reveal the limits of emotive representations in amalgamating perceptual and cognitive processes in cognitive systems. (shrink)

Porter and Kramer :78–92, 2006; Harv Bus Rev 89, 62–77, 2011) introduced ‘shared value’ as a ‘new conception of capitalism,’ claiming it is a powerful driver of economic growth and reconciliation between business and society. The idea has generated strong interest in business and academia; however, its theoretical precepts have not been rigorously assessed. In this paper, we provide a systematic and thorough analysis of shared value, focusing on its ontological and epistemological properties. Our review highlights that ‘shared value’ has (...) spread into the language of multiple disciplines, but that its current conceptualization is vague, and it presents important discrepancies in the way it is defined and operationalized, such that it is more of a buzzword than a substantive concept. It also overlaps with many other concepts and lacks empirical grounding. We offer recommendations for defining and measuring the concept, take a step toward disentangling it from related concepts, and identify relevant theories and research methods that would facilitate extending the knowledge frontier on shared value. (shrink)

Discourse on the nature of the emotions and their role in moral life has been at the vortex of discussion in both Indian and Western philosophy for a long time. The concept of emotion has taken the centre stage in recent debates, connecting it with morality. In Indian philosophy, emotion plays a vital role in moral judgement and desire. The main aim of this article is to analyse whether there is any possibility of intentional intervention in an emotional state or (...) are we simply slaves to our emotions, which control our physical and mental activities. The main aim of this article is to analyse the concept of emotion in Vasubandhu’s text, Abhidharmakos´abhāyam. (shrink)

The World Social Forum —a global gathering of social movements and a process of global change—has come to signify the global justice movements. Since its inception in 2001 in Brazil it has traveled across the Global South, with the 2016 WSF in Montreal. As the WSF has traveled across the world, it has reflected the particular geographies and histories of movement politics in each place. Yet everywhere it has demonstrated what I have called the gendered geographies of struggle. By gendered (...) geographies I mean the epistemic, spatial, and praxis divisions along gender lines evident in the marginalizing of feminist insights about the global political economy and global justice; low representation of women activists in public plenaries and private decision-making structures; and outsourcing of gender issues to women’s activists and movements. Without addressing these gendered geographies, I argue, there can be no global justice. (shrink)

This paper seeks to understand machine cognition. The nature of machine cognition has been shrouded in incomprehensibility. We have often encountered familiar arguments in cognitive science that human cognition is still faintly understood. This paper will argue that machine cognition is far less understood than even human cognition despite the fact that a lot about computer architecture and computational operations is known. Even if there have been putative claims about the transparency of the notion of machine computations, these claims do (...) not hold out in unraveling machine cognition, let alone machine consciousness (if there is any such thing). The nature and form of machine cognition remains further confused also because of attempts to explain human cognition in terms of computation and to model/simulate (aspects of) human cognitive processing in machines. Given that these problems in characterizing machine cognition persist, a view of machine cognition that aims to avoid these problems is outlined. The argument that is advanced is that something becomes a computation in machines only when a human interprets it, which is a kind of semiotic causation. From this it follows that a computing machine is not engaged in a computation unless a human interprets what it is doing; instead, it is engaged in machine cognition, which is defined as a member or subset of the set of all possible mappings of inputs to outputs. The human interpretation, which is a semiotic process, gives meaning to what a machine does, and then what it does becomes a computation. (shrink)

This paper explores the link between rules of grammar, grammar formalisms and the architecture of the language faculty. In doing so, it provides a flexible meta-level theory of the language faculty through the postulation of general axioms that govern the interaction of different components of grammar. The idea is simply that such an abstract formulation allows us to view the structure of the language faculty independently of specific theoretical frameworks/formalisms. It turns out that the system of rules, axioms and constraints (...) of grammar cannot beexplicitlyrepresented in a general architecture of the language faculty — which circumvents the ontological mismatch of mental representations and formal/axiomatic properties of language. Rather, the system of rules, axioms, constraints of grammar isintentionallyprojected by humans, and this projection realizes/instantiates what Dascal (1992) calls ‘psychopragmatics’. Relevant implications for linguistic theory, learnability and (computational) models of language processing are also explored. (shrink)

This paper aims to characterize the relationship between information as defined in the information-theoretic approach and linguistic meaning by way of formulation of computations over the lexicon of a natural language. Information in its information theoretic sense is supposed not to be equivalent to linguistic meaning, whereas linguistic meaning has an intrinsic connection to information as far as the form and structure of the lexicon of a language (in a non-lexicological sense) is concerned. We argue that these two apparently conflicting (...) aspects of the relationship between information and linguistic meaning can be unified by showing that information conserves linguistic meaning, only insofar as computations of a certain kind are defined on the symbolic elements of a lexicon. This has consequences not merely for the nature of lexical learning – natural or artificial or otherwise – but also for the conservation of information in axiomatic systems. (shrink)