Comparative study of the aesthetic ideas of Ram Chandra Shukla, 1884-1941, Hindi critic, Benedictus de Spinoza, 1632-1677, and Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, philosophers.

What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines it meets in me. Stanley Cavell.

In this article, I survey four key questions about willpower: How is willpower possible? Why does willpower fail? How does willpower relate to other self-regulatory processes? and What are the connections between willpower and weakness of will? Empirical research into willpower is growing rapidly and yielding some fascinating new findings. This survey emphasizes areas in which empirical progress in understanding willpower helps to advance traditional philosophical debates.

Humans are unique in the animal world in the extent to which their day-to-day behavior is governed by a complex set of rules and principles commonly called norms. Norms delimit the bounds of proper behavior in a host of domains, providing an invisible web of normative structure embracing virtually all aspects of social life. People also find many norms to be deeply meaningful. Norms give rise to powerful subjective feelings that, in the view of many, are an important part of (...) what it is to be a human agent. Despite the vital role of norms in human lives and human behavior, and the central role they play in explanations in the social sciences, there has been very little systematic attention devoted to norms in cognitive science. Much existing research is partial and piecemeal, making it difficult to know how individual findings cohere into a comprehensive picture. Our goal in this essay is to offer an account of the psychological mechanisms and processes underlying norms that integrates what is known and can serve as a framework for future research. (shrink)

This book addresses a perennial challenge for product planners and designers alike: how to objectively specify and quantify the aesthetics of products. It provides automotive product planners with a framework for the grammar of aesthetics and a tool for quantifying the aesthetics of an intended product. Further, it equips styling designers with a tool for connecting engineering and aesthetics. Given the author’s extensive experience in motorcycle design, the motorcycle has been chosen as the frame of reference for automobiles. Specifically in (...) the field of automobile design, where engineering and aesthetics go hand in hand, it also becomes important to clearly and objectively define the relationship between engineering design and aesthetics. Accordingly, this book clearly establishes the objective parameters of aesthetics, puts forward a method for quantifying aesthetics, identifies the engineering design parameters affecting aesthetics, and determines the relationship between parameters of aesthetics and engineering design. As such, it offers a useful guide not only for design professionals, but also for students and researchers of design. (shrink)

The paper seeks to understand India’s evolving rights framework in the backdrop of cow vigilantism. To that end it discusses the human right to food and nutrition, international discussion on minority rights issues in India and the relevant legal and constitutional discussion in India. It finds that India’s rights framework has evolved since proclamation of India as a Republic in 1950 based on the supremacy of its written constitution containing fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy interpreted finally by (...) its Supreme Court. The government took a wise step by not challenging a judicial rebalancing of the rights framework in response to certain executive measures and the Supreme Court interpreted the right to life to include not only the right to the choice of food but also the right to privacy and thereby underscored the obligation of the State to compensate the victims of cow vigilante violence. However, a constitutional polity and secular state would do all well if it did any further necessary to better guard against any recurrence of the breach of civil peace, much less violence, on purely secular issues, including by strengthening and increasing dialogue with all representative communities in all its decision-making on such matters. (shrink)

We compute the model-theoretic Grothendieck ring, \\), of a dense linear order with or without end points, \\), as a structure of the signature \, and show that it is a quotient of the polynomial ring over \ generated by \\) by an ideal that encodes multiplicative relations of pairs of generators. This ring can be embedded in the polynomial ring over \ generated by \. As a corollary we obtain that a DLO satisfies the pigeon hole principle for definable (...) subsets and definable bijections between them—a property that is too strong for many structures. (shrink)

On the philosophy of Ghāsīdāsa, b. 1756, Hindu religious leader and social worker.

Along with economic strength, space technology and software expertise, India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research. The problem is worsened by vested interests working in concert for their own benefits. These self-promoting cartels, together with biased evaluation methods and weak penal systems, combine to perpetuate scientific misconduct. Some of these issues are discussed in this commentary, with supporting examples and possible solutions.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is gaining increasing legitimacy as a form of ethical business practice and a solution to various societal challenges. Despite the burgeoning interest in SE in the realms of ethical business scholarship and business ethics education, new pedagogical developments have been limited. To advance SE pedagogy, we produced a new multimedia-based tool consisting of two SE-focused comics and evaluated their efficacy in “winning the hearts and shaping the minds” of learners in an experimental setting. We tested the effects (...) of the two comics individually. Comic #1, a story of a gambling addict who transforms into a social entrepreneur, was used to examine the effects of using a comic on learners’ engagement and cognitive enhancement, while comic #2, a story of a teenage academic misfit who finds her passion in crafting objects and establishes a social enterprise, was used to interrogate the effects of using a comic on the relationship among SE self-efficacy, SE intent, and entrepreneurial passion. We also collected qualitative feedback in the form of learners’ comments about the second comic. Our results supported the two proposed models and suggested that comics show promise in enhancing SE teaching and learning. Our new contribution consists of the theoretical relationships examined in the models, our insights into why comics can be beneficial to learners, the scholarly artistic contribution of the comics, and the use of an experimental approach. We end the article with suggestions for designing, implementing, and evaluating future multimedia-based pedagogy in SE and ethical business teaching and learning. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

The relationship between ethical ideology and job stress appears to be complex. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39:175, 1980), showing two dimensions (idealism and relativism) that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Based on a survey of 561 employees of hotel industry in India, ethical ideologies were found to be negatively associated with job stress. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and multiple regressions. The result (...) showed that relativism is negatively correlated with job stress. Further, it has been established that idealism and relativism interacted in such a way that there is a negative relationship between idealism and job stress when relativism is low and positive relationship when relativism is high. The findings imply that ethical ideology adversely influences the job stress in the organization. (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)

In highly routinised service encounter interactions, communication is often guided by service scripts that are the material embodiment of institutional expectations of how the service interaction is to be conducted. However, counter to common belief that scripted communication is well-controlled and homogeneous in its execution, observation of actual talk reveals interesting patterns and variations that reflect the ways in which participants make meaning of and perform their respective roles within the interaction towards achieving the overall goal of the service communication. (...) Applying the analysis of speech functions and sequential order of talk in audio-recorded verbal exchanges between servers and customers at the service counter of a fast-food restaurant, acts in the fast-food service interaction are interpreted and explained in relation to management-prescribed service script, servers’ script-in-use and customers’ script within an institutional discourse framework. Findings from the study have important implications for service management and training as it addresses the tension between the practices on the ground and those sanctioned by the organisation. (shrink)