SS RAMA RAO PAPPU PROFESSOR PT RAJU: EVOLUTION OF HIS PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT "In India (PT Raju) represents and is really the original initiator of, ...

"No other work treating Indian philosophy on a comparable scale contains the illuminating comparisons between doctrines of Indian schools and the thought of Western philosophy ranging from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein...It will, moreover, contribute to the understanding of Western philosophy by Indian thinkers and vice versa...Raju has an intimate acquaintance with a remarkable range of Western thinkers and this distinguishes his work from most of what has gone before...Raju, moreover, is himself a critical thinker and consequently, although (...) he has written a history, he treats the ideas and doctrines in a philosophical mode and his assessments of positions are often original and illuminating." -- John E. Smith, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Purpose: To deal with Indian philosophy in a fashion reflecting the way the best German historians of philosophy deal with Western philosophy...The book is remarkable for its comprehensiveness in combination with extensive critical discussions...Raju's book...is more critical than Radhakrishnan's and more philosophical than Dasgupta's. Radhakrishnan's comments are far less philosophically sophisticated and interesting than Raju's....a monument to a senior Indian philosopher's lifelong study and thoughtful critical consideration of the great classical systems of his tradition." -- Karl H. Potter, Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington "Raju's credentials are impeccable. He is one of the few scholars in the world who could presume to write a major work on Indian thought. Accordingly, his knowledge of the Indian schools is accurate and impressive. To the extent that one of his intentions is to cast those schools in terms which make them more intelligible to western readers, his work measures up very well." -- Harold H. Oliver, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. (shrink)

We numerically solve the functional differential equations (FDEs) of 2-particle electrodynamics, using the full electrodynamic force obtained from the retarded Lienard–Wiechert potentials and the Lorentz force law. In contrast, the usual formulation uses only the Coulomb force (scalar potential), reducing the electrodynamic 2-body problem to a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The ODE formulation is mathematically suspect since FDEs and ODEs are known to be incompatible; however, the Coulomb approximation to the full electrodynamic force has been believed to be (...) adequate for physics. We can now test this long-standing belief by comparing the FDE solution with the ODE solution, in the historically interesting case of the classical hydrogen atom. The solutions differ. A key qualitative difference is that the full force involves a ‘delay’ torque. Our existing code is inadequate to calculate the detailed interaction of the delay torque with radiative damping. However, a symbolic calculation provides conditions under which the delay torque approximately balances (3rd order) radiative damping. Thus, further investigations are required, and it was prematurely concluded that radiative damping makes the classical hydrogen atom unstable. Solutions of FDEs naturally exhibit an infinite spectrum of discrete frequencies. The conclusion is that (a) the Coulomb force is not a valid approximation to the full electrodynamic force, so that (b) the n-body interaction needs to be reformulated in various current contexts such as molecular dynamics. (shrink)

In normative decision theory, the weight of an uncertain event in a decision is governed solely by the probability of the event. A large body of empirical research suggests that a single notion of probability does not accurately capture peoples' reactions to uncertainty. As early as the 1920s, Knight made the distinction between cases where probabilities are known and where probabilities are unknown. We distinguish another case –- the unknowable uncertainty –- where the missing information is unavailable to all. We (...) propose that missing information influences the attractiveness of a bet contingent upon an uncertain event, especially when the information is available to someone else. We demonstrate that the unknowable uncertainty –- falls in preference somewhere in between the known and the known uncertainty. (shrink)

In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life. In particular, I will show how this idea has been explored by William James in his seminal essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML), by far his most clear-cut piece of moral philosophy. I will claim that the dialectics of the essay cannot be apprehended independently from the understanding of the moral psychology and epistemology James elaborates in his writings on pragmatism (...) and the philosophy of mind. In fact, once framed in the relevant perspective, the essay conveys a very different and more radical position that the one usually acknowledged. In MPML James engages in an inquiry into the nature of moral thought and its ability to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address. The essay criticizes a certain image of moral reflection by questioning its underlying assumptions about the nature of mindedness and the place of truth in the moral life. I shall thus articulate the discussion of James’ essay along two directions, one methodological and one substantive. They are, respectively, the anti-foundational and anti-theoretical character of moral reflection, and the rethinking of the relationship we have with our interiority that is relevant for ethics as informed by the notion of truth. (shrink)

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The history of 20th-century philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both of these schools, as well as their overt or covert mutual hostility. What is often left out of this history, however, is the relationship between the two European schools and a third significant philosophical event: the birth and development of pragmatism, the indigenous (...) philosophical movement of the United States. Through a careful analysis of seminal figures and central texts, this book explores the mutual intellectual influences, convergences, and differences between these three revolutionary philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume aim to show the central role that pragmatism played in the development of philosophical thought at the turn of the twentieth century, widen our understanding of a seminal point in the history of philosophy, and shed light on the ways in which these three schools of thought continue to shape the theoretical agenda of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Marchetti offers a revisionist account of James's contribution to moral thought in the light of his pragmatic conception of philosophical activity. He sketches a composite picture of a Jamesian approach to ethics revolving around the key notion and practice of a therapeutic critique of one's ordinary moral convictions and style of moral reasoning.

To eliminate racist prejudices, it is necessary to identify the root cause of racism. American slavery preceded racism, and it was closely associated with genocide. Accordingly, we seek the unique cause of the unique event of genocide + slavery. This was initially justified by religious prejudice, rather than colour prejudice. This religious justification was weakened when many Blacks converted to Christianity, after the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The curse of Kam, using quick visual cues to characterize Blacks as inferior Christians, was (...) inadequate. Hence, the church fell back on an ancient trick of using false history as secular justification for Christian superiority. This trick had resulted in a false history of science during the Crusades when scientific knowledge in translated Arabic texts was indiscriminately attributed to the early Greeks, without evidence. This false history enabled belief in religious superiority to mutate into a secular belief in White superiority. After colonialism, and the Aryan race conjecture, the belief in White superiority further mutated into a belief in Western civilizational superiority, openly propagated today by colonial education. Hence, to eliminate racist prejudice, it is necessary to engage simultaneously with the allied prejudices about Christian/White/Western superiority, based on the same false history of science. (shrink)

In this article I address a number of issues raised by Colin Koopman, Alex Livingston, and Michael Slater to my reading of James’s ethics as defended in my 2015 book having to do with, in turn, the relationship between ethics and politics, ethics and psychological types, and ethics and religion. In accounting for these charges, I vindicate and further qualify my interpretation of James as a moral therapist.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume by Alessio VaccariSarin MarchettiAlessio Vaccari. Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume. Firenze : Le Lettere, 2012. Pp. 320. ISBN 9788860876324, Paper, €29.00.Alessio Vaccari’s volume represents a major achievement in Hume scholarship as well as in contemporary reflection on philosophical ethics. Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume (Virtue (...) Ethics: From Hume Onwards) will be of much value to both historians of moral philosophy and contemporary ethicists who are versed in the ongoing discussions over the nature and point of moral thought. In an intellectual landscape dominated by a legalistic conception of ethics, Vaccari’s investigation is a historiographically committed and theoretically inspired inquiry into (and re-evaluation of) the health of and current regard for the paradigm of the virtues. On the one hand, the author is interested in challenging the influential narrative—voiced by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981)—according to which modern moral philosophy has been characterized by the most unfortunate eclipse of the language of the virtues; on the other, he aims at reconstructing an effective, viable understanding of virtue ethics along those Humean lines best suited to address the distinctive difficulties facing our contemporary progressive societies. (The challenge of environmental sustainability and future generations is taken as exemplary.) Against Anscombe and MacIntyre, and following the lesson of Jerome B. Schneewind (1990 Jerome B. Schneewind (1998), Vaccari argues that in the post-Enlightenment moral debate, we have not paid enough attention to distinctively modern articulations of the central features of [End Page 123] virtue ethics, including the cultivation of one’s character as a prime moral goal, an enriched understanding of the qualitative dimension and intrinsic value of human happiness, and the acknowledgement of the moral significance of both personal and social relationships for the realization of the good.These historiographical and theoretical concerns represent two sides of the same coin, as Vaccari compellingly argues that the oversight (if not disregard) of the typically modern conception of the virtues finely elaborated by Hume in his works—partly reprised and further refined by John Stuart Mill—deprives us of precious analytical resources to resolve some general impasses that are features of contemporary moral reflection (for example, the demandingness of duty based ethics and the limits of impartial accounts of moral principles) as well as the tensions internal to virtue ethics, especially of neo-Aristotelean and neo-Kantian sorts, (for example, their conflicting pictures of the virtuous agent and the experiential unsoundness of their accounts of the stabilization of moral responses). Humean virtue ethics is depicted, in the first instance, as a radical approach to—and style of—moral philosophy: descriptive and yet normative, explicative without being prescriptive. It is thus Vaccari’s claim that by re-discovering neglected and yet central aspects of Hume’s practical philosophy, illuminated by Mill’s romantic utilitarianism and contrasted to both Kant’s rationalism and (partly) Nietzsche’s perfectionism, we would gain access to a fresh conceptual possibility about how best to reflect on the moral life. This operation also opens up a fertile space for a metaphilosophical investigation of the very character and stakes of moral thought itself, whose lack of reflexivity upon its philosophical credentials is often at the basis of the aforementioned difficulties.The two tasks are brilliantly coordinated, resulting in a volume that is a gold mine of both historical and speculative details that provide a critical store of intellectual resources for thinking through these issues. Besides firmly mastering the primary sources, Vaccari digests an impressive body of secondary literature, which is clearly explained and skillfully assessed. Targeted at scholars of Hume and virtue ethics, Le etiche della virtù is highly recommended for advanced undergraduate courses as well as for graduate seminars both on the history of modern moral philosophy and on contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethics. An English translation of the volume would surely widen its audience and boost its circulation.The volume comprises a preface, five chapters, and an exhaustive bibliography. In the preface, Vaccari sets the stage for his defense of a sentimentalist version of virtue... (shrink)

1. In his compelling article American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives, Richard Bernstein quotes a perceptive line by Alasdair MacIntyre that goes [A] tradition not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only recovered by an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings. Bernstein, in the essay mentioned, works through MacIntyre’s passage in order to “engage in the ‘argumentative retelling’ of a metanarrative –...

The aim of this paper is not to enter into a detailed discussion of the nature of the Absolute and the Individual, but to show that on the Hegelian conception of the Absolute the individual self is not saved. Hegel is fond of reiterating that his Absolute is not a bare one, but a one in many, an organic whole, a perfect and harmonious system of an infinite number of individual selves. The individual, as in Spinoza and Schelling, does not (...) lose itself in the Absolute. The latter is not a lion's den into which all animals enter but from which none returns, not a mere darkness in which all cows are black, but a system of different individuals. (shrink)

A subject such as the present one, covering as it does most of the philosophies of the East and West, is so encompassing that one can mention all the philosophers seriously concerned with it only with difficulty. The issues deriving from our subject are also numerous; and every earnest philosopher who attempts to understand Being and its relations to Becoming and Essence faces one of the most complex of philosophic problems. Unless one is satisfied with dictionary meanings of these terms, (...) one is taken, as it were, beyond thought or at least to the limits of thought. Even if one understands Being, Becoming, and Essence through the familiar formula that x becomes y through the act of Becoming by incorporating some Essence, one finds oneself perplexed in attempting to relate the formula to our common experiences. (shrink)

I once wrote to Daya ji about what seemed to me a paradox in contemporary Indian philosophy. It is one thing that Indian philosophers in academia do not engage with science, or even with its history and philosophy. It is quite another thing that they do not engage with ethics. Ethics, after all, is at the core of philosophy. Without an ethical principle one often does not know how to respond to something fundamentally new, such as the bewildering variety of (...) new developments in science and technology that impinge on our daily life. I was disappointed that Indian philosophers remain engaged in the study of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and the like, or are immersed in Sanskrit texts—neither of which provide much guidance .. (shrink)

Previously we saw that racist prejudice is supported by false history. The false history of the Greek origins of mathematics is reinforced by a bad philosophy of mathematics. There is no evidence for the existence of Euclid. The “Euclid” book does not contain a single axiomatic proof, as was exposed over a century ago. Such was never the intention of the actual author. The book was brazenly reinterpreted, since axiomatic proof was a church political requirement, and used in church rational (...) theology adopted during the Crusades, as a counter to Islamic rational theology. Deductive proofs are MORE fallible than inductive or empirical proofs. Even a validly proved mathematical theorem, such as the “Pythagorean” theorem, is invalid knowledge in the real world. There is no concept of approximate truth in formal mathematics. Nevertheless, the myth of “superior” axiomatic proofs in the “Euclid” book continues to be reiterated by Western historians, and colonial education teaches axiomatic mathematics. Actually, superior practical value comes from the two “Pythagorean” calculations well known toIndian/Egyptian tradition, but unknown to Greeks. The advantage of related decolonized courses in mathematics has been pedagogically demonstrated. But understanding and political will are needed to change colonial/church education. (shrink)

I examine the foundations of a just society using the lens of decision theory. The conception of just society is from an individual’s viewpoint: where would I rather live if I have an equal chance of being any individual? Three alternative designs for a just society are examined. These are: laissez-faire, maximin and social minimum. Two assumptions about human nature clarify the distinction among three societies. The first assumption is that a representative individual’s utility function is concave. The second assumption (...) recognizes that redistribution to achieve equality reduces total wealth. A rational individual would prefer a society where one is free to maximize one’s expected utility. A social minimum that includes both the provision of essential human needs and equality of opportunity (education, healthcare, access to capital) for a flourishing life emerges as a candidate solution for the basic structure of society. (shrink)

Visit the author's Web site at www.11PicsOfTime.com Time is a mystery that has perplexed humankind since time immemorial. Resolving this mystery is of significance not only to philosophers and physicists but is also a very practical concern. Our perception of time shapes our values and way of life; it also mediates the interaction between science and religion both of which rest fundamentally on assumptions about the nature of time. C K Raju begins with a critical exposition of various time-beliefs, (...) ranging from the earliest times through Augustine, Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking and current notions of chaos and time travel. He traces the role of organised religion in subverting time beliefs for its political ends. The book points out how this resulted in a facile dichotomy between 'linear' and 'cyclic' time, thereby inaugurating a confusion which, according to the author, has handicapped Western thought ever since, eventually influencing the content of science itself. Thus, this book daringly asserts that physical theory, traditionally regarded as amoral and objective, has depended on cultural beliefs about time. The author points out that time beliefs are again being manipulated today as the credibility of science is being exploited to promote a picture of time and, hence, a pattern of human behaviour which is convenient to the agenda of globalisation of culture. The linkages between modern theology and this 'brave new physics' are traced against the wider context of the so-called 'clash of civilisations', and the attempts to remake the world order. The conclusions point to the need to de-theologise time. The author challenges Einstein's understanding of relativity theory and suggests that a 'tilt in the arrow of time', or a small tendency towards cyclicity, will help repair the prevalent confusion about time. A 'tilt' also enables a physics that permits both memory and creativity, so that purpose and spontaneous growth of order are returned to human life. The book ends with a vision of Man as Creator, surprising God. Extensive research in physics, the history of science, comparative religions, and sociology lend weight to the important and challenging conclusions reached by the author. Written as a rejoinder to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, this book goes much further and, unlike any previous book, it gives a critical exposition of various world religions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Jainism-while exploring their intricate links, through time beliefs, to current physics on the one hand, and to global political and economic trends, on the other. This book will appeal to scholars and laypersons equally. It will fascinate anyone who reads it and will teach its readers to question the unquestionable. (shrink)

Those philosophers who gave a negative answer to all four questions were called "eel-wrigglers" by the Buddhists. It was impossible to fix their position either for approval or for rejection. They would criticize any view, positive or negative, but would not themselves hold any. And it was difficult for a serious person to enter into any controversy with them.

Covers the major aspects of James's thought, from his early influences to his legacy, with over 40 chapters by an outstanding roster of international contributors. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching James's philosophy.

The present issue of the EJPAP hosts a symposium on the theme of Pragmatist Ethics: Theory and Practice, exploring the many ways in which the contribution of pragmatism to moral philosophy and the moral life has been thought of and argued for. In particular, the symposium explores the distinctive nature, reaches, and limits of a pragmatist mindset in moral matters: the plurality of voices represented showcases the extent of approaches possible, within pragmatism, to the very question of how m...

The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together philosophers and sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, our (...) limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habituate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely... (shrink)

The editors of this collection aim to fill a notable gap in the scholarship on Gilles Deleuze, pragmatism, and their reciprocal relations. This task is approached along two main lines, corresponding roughly to the volume’s two parts: on the one hand, by reconstructing Deleuze’s direct or potential engagements with classical pragmatism, while on the other hand by investigating the real or virtual exchanges between Deleuze’s rich philosophical production and most contemporary varieties of pragmatism. As the editors explain in their useful (...) stage-setting introduction to the volume, it is a telling fact that, despite Deleuze’s deep interest in pragmatism and an overlapping of concerns and themes, no work has yet... (shrink)

Far from offering a comprehensive overview or a definitive statement of James’s philosophical style, the aim of this entry is to articulate the intertwinement of James’s unique way of writing and lecturing with his reflection on, and thus his use of, style. I shall take James’s writings on pragmatism as exemplary. In these metaphilosophical works we find articulated a picture of philosophy as a critical, transformative activity, one in which the way one expresses oneself gets itself rubricated as a central (...) philosophical issue. In his characterization of pragmatism as a philosophical method, and consistently with his understanding of philosophical activity as a practice of reflective engagement with oneself, James offers his readers sophisticated and yet intimate instructions rather than prescriptions or descriptions dressed in a specialized, dry language. James is surely not the sole author who professed a close relationship between what is said, how it is said, and why it is so said along precisely these lines—Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are other notable examples. In what follows, I aim at depicting James’s distinctive way of formulating this insight and putting it to work. (shrink)

Because of his unwavering commitment to fight disciplinary and mental closure, William James is an author who has invited scholars from the most disparate fields to review aspects of his eclectic and far-reaching body of work. Not only philosophers, psychologists, historians of medicine and religion, but also artists, political theorists, and social activists have productively engaged James’s rich and variegated writings with the goal to reconstructing seminal portions of our intellectual, cu...