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)

The study aims to unravel the impact of green performance and green initiatives on corporate financial performance, and also to explore and establish the relationship between specific components of green performance and financial performance. This study considers a panel dataset comprising 224 nonfinancial companies listed on NSE 500 index for the period of eight consecutive years, i.e., from 2014–2015 to 2021–2022. This study adopts both the static and dynamic panel estimations to explore the link between these variables. The estimation shows (...) green initiatives have a positive impact on financial performance. In addition, this estimation also documents a positive impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) productivity and energy productivity (specific measure of green performance) on corporate performance. This finding provides several important suggestions for Indian companies and policymakers towards adopting more green initiatives along with improving green performance to enhance higher financial performance. This study may also help to implement green policies, which will help to minimize pollutions, and is ultimately beneficial for the whole of society as well as the environment. The novelty of the study is to provide deep understanding and bridge the knowledge gap about the relationship by considering key functional dimensions of Indian firms. In addition, specially by incorporating dynamic panel estimation, this study has controlled for potential endogeneity bias and also the dynamic effects, which are scarce in earlier literature. (shrink)

This article empirically examines how the performance of Indian manufacturing corporations is affected by corporate governance practices. The study has used panel data comprising of 76 manufacturing companies listed in BSE, for a consecutive six-year period, from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021. The study has applied panel data regression model to enquire the impact of ownership structure variables; and also board composition variables on firm performance using Tobin's Q and ROA. The findings reveal that ownership structure variables, board size and multiplicity of (...) the board positively affect both ROA and Tobin's Q. While independent board and women director show positive effect on Tobin's Q, the CEO-duality is negatively associated with Tobin's Q. The study suggests policymakers to enhance the multiplicity of directors and gender diversity, to maintain the right proportion of board independency, and to increase the size of board. Policymakers may also restrict the CEO to play dual role.Keywordsboard composition, ownership structure, CEO-duality, Tobin's Q. (shrink)

Concept of Bhakti in Hindu religion and philosophy.

Dictionary of terminology of Yoga philosophy.

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)

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)

According to Interest-Relative Invariantism, whether an agent knows that p, or possesses other sorts of epistemic properties or relations, is in part determined by the practical costs of being wrong about p. Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI. We discuss our results in light of complementary findings by other theorists, and address the challenge posed by a (...) leading intellectualist alternative to our view. (shrink)

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much (...) hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will. (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)

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)

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)

There is an ongoing debate about loss of control in addiction: Some theorists say at least some addicts’ drug-directed desires are irresistible, while others insist that pursuing drugs is a choice. The debate is long-standing and has essentially reached a stalemate. This essay suggests a way forward. I propose an alternative model of loss of control in addiction, one based not on irresistibility, but rather fallibility. According to the model, on every occasion of use, self-control processes exhibit a low, but (...) non-zero, rate of failure due to error. When these processes confront highly recurrent drug-directed desires, the cumulative probability of a self-control lapse steadily grows. The model shows why the following statement—which has an air of paradox—can in fact be true: Each drug-directed desire the addict faces is fully resistible, but the addict nonetheless has significantly diminished control over eventually giving in. (shrink)

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not (...) to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...) together a systematic defence of Frankfurt’s position. (shrink)

It is widely thought that people sometimes act as their own worst enemy in that they engage in irrational actions that hinder achievement of their own (sincerely held) aims. It is also widely thought “aims-irrationality” of this kind is something for which people can be held morally responsible and blamed. It is here argued that, given a certain plausible picture of human agent architecture, we must reject the second claim. An epistemic regress argument is put forward in which aims-irrational actions (...) are necessarily accompanied by a certain serious form of ignorance, and, furthermore, this ignorance cannot be something for which the person is culpable. It follows from this argument that no person can ever be morally responsible for steering their agency in an aims-irrational direction. The argument is not merely “philosophical”; it has significant real-world implications. It underscores that people overattribute moral responsibility, and it offers theorists a new vantage point to inquire into the factors at work in producing irrationality. (shrink)

The problem of moral compliance is the problem of explaining how moral norms are sustained over extented stretches of time despite the existence of selfish evolutionary incentives that favor their violation. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of solutions that have been offered to the problem of moral compliance, the reciprocity-based account and the punishment-based account. In this paper, I argue that though the reciprocity-based account has been widely endorsed by evolutionary theorists, the account is in fact deeply implausible. I (...) provide three arguments that suggest that moral norms are sustained by punishment, not reciprocity. But in addition to solving the problem of moral compliance, the punishment-based account provides an additional important theoretical dividend. It points the way for how theorists might build an evolutionary account of a feature of human groups that has long fascinated and troubled social scientists and moral philosophers – the existence of moral diversity. (shrink)

What are the distinctive psychological features that explain why humans are free, but many other creatures, such as simple animals, are not? It is natural to think that the answer has something to do with unique human capacities for decision-making. Philosophical discussions of how decision-making works, however, are tellingly incomplete. In particular, these discussions invariably presuppose an agent who has a mentally represented set of options already fully in hand. The emphasis is largely on the selective processes that identify the (...) options most worth doing and then execute them. But where do mentally represented sets of options come from in the first place? Once we focus on this constructive aspect of decision-making, an important fact becomes apparent: While the option sets of simpler animals are sharply limited, humans have a number of striking psychological powers—including remarkable powers of prospection and creativity—that enable them to construct option sets of unparalleled size and diversity. As a result, humans can express themselves in countless ways. This latitude for self-expression is, I argue, the distinctive feature that explains why humans are free. (shrink)

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.

According to a standard picture of agency, a person’s actions always reflect what they most desire, and many theorists extend this model to mental illness. In this chapter, I pin down exactly where this “volitional” view goes wrong. The key is to recognize that human motivational architecture involves a regulatory control structure: we have both spontaneous states (e.g., automatically-elicited thoughts and action tendencies, etc.) as well as regulatory mechanisms that allow us to suppress or modulate these spontaneous states. Our regulatory (...) abilities, however, are bounded. Mental illnesses, I argue, arise precisely where these bounds are reached, thus allowing inappropriate spontaneous states to regularly manifest in thought and action. I conclude that the volitional view of mental illness is wrong: when a person with mental illness reaches the limits of control, what they do often does not reflect what they most prefer. (shrink)

:Reasons-responsiveness theories of moral responsibility are currently among the most popular. Here, I present the fallibility paradox, a novel challenge to these views. The paradox involves an agent who is performing a somewhat demanding psychological task across an extended sequence of trials and who is deeply committed to doing her very best at this task. Her action-issuing psychological processes are outstandingly reliable, so she meets the criterion of being reasons-responsive on every single trial. But she is human after all, so (...) it is inevitable that she will make rare errors. The reasons-responsiveness view, it is claimed, is forced to reach a highly counterintuitive conclusion: she is morally responsible for these rare errors, even though making rare errors is something she is powerless to prevent. I review various replies that a reasons-responsiveness theorist might offer, arguing that none of these replies adequately addresses the challenge. (shrink)

Contextualising biblical teaching entails the adoption of certain forms, terms or thought patterns that might confuse the original message, especially if the effort takes place in a Javanese culture context that is full of subtlety and indirect communication. This study analyses a Javanese poetry form that contains the narrative of Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman. The indigenous poems are widely sung by the adherents of Javanese indigenous religions. However, only a few studies are conducted on such indigenous poems that (...) contain Christian messages. This study examines whether or not the poetry form and religious terms that the writer used could serve as a vehicle to convey the good news message of the narrative of John 4:4–42 instead of creating impediment. Through literary form analysis followed by content analysis, the results showed that the Javanese poem contains several cantos, each with an embedded meaning. Finally, it intends to demonstrate how a combination, instead of contestation, of the indigenous, Islam and Christian terms is effective for the writer’s purpose. Thus, the writer’s choice was suitable in his effort to communicate the original teaching.Contribution: This study contributes to inter-religious communication by identifying the Javanese indigenous communication pattern, particularly the placement of their messages inside their poem’s structure and in various terminologies. Strengthening inter-religious communication to create a mutual understanding in Indonesian pluralistic society is needed especially as the Javanese indigenous religions are often misunderstood. (shrink)

This article takes direction from the transnational feminist lesbian encounter that took place between the Dutch collective Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the 1980s to reflect on the role of archives within transnational feminist research. Drawing on archival materials from the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) at Atria (Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, I consider how (...) fragmented archives offer stories on kinship, intimacy and loss. Taking into account the ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ (Lewis, 2017) produced in this archival research project, I propose an archival research methodology that is rooted in a practice of ‘orientation’ (Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003). (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

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)

Towards Infinity is Ram Chandra’s seminal work on the chakras of the human system and the soul’s journey back to the Source. Its implications are far-reaching – for the first time in thousands of years he sheds new light on human spiritual anatomy by going beyond the seven traditional chakras. The author does not discuss the lower chakras, instead, he starts with the heart and its qualities of love, compassion, courage and empathy as the centre of our humanity. He (...) guides us through the experience of thirteen chakras, from the heart up to the final chakra at the back of the head. He describes the level of consciousness at each chakra and reveals the way to expand our consciousness to embrace each new stage along the way. Towards Infinity is a map of the journey to the ultimate destination, which sincere seekers of spirituality can then experience through their own practice with the support of Yogic Transmission. (shrink)

In computational cognitive science, a valuationist picture of human agent architecture has become widespread. At the heart of valuationism is a simple and sweeping claim: Every time an agent acts, they do so on the basis of value representations, which are, roughly, representations of the expected value of one’s response options. In this essay, I do three things. First, I give a systematic, philosophically rich account of the valuationist picture of agency. I also highlight the generality of the model in (...) explaining diverse forms of person-level agency. Second, I discuss connections between the valuationist model and two traditional models in philosophy, the belief/desire model and the decision-theoretic model. Third, I canvas the wide-ranging implications of valuationism for philosophical inquiry. Among other things, valuationism illuminates the elusive boundary between activity and passivity; it flips the standard philosophical view of decision around, with decision being a source of, rather than a product of, one’s agency; it understands motivation as, in part, a representational phenomenon; it challenges a philosophical dogma holding that control over action is more extensive than control over belief; and it highlights an underappreciated connection between deviations from rational agency and inaccurate value representations. (shrink)

The theme of essential futility, absurdity, utter incomprehensibility of life and death is stressed in almost allthe writings of Albert Camus. Like Buddha he was shocked by the sight of human misery and mortality. Yet, paradoxically was attracted to the essential desirability of it. Although completely ruffled by the consciousness of an ambiguous and silent God, he was not unaware of “that strange joy that comes from a tranquil conscience”, a perfect inner harmony one experiences on attaining true knowledge. Upanishads (...) are a search for this very reality underlying the flux of things. Malraux, Sartre, and others had already developed this line of thought before Camus. What is essential and original in him is, firstly, that the world’s absurdity not a cause for despair, but on the contrary, a spur to happiness. And secondly, that , mortality and suffering actually enhance the value of life: they invite men to live more intensely. In addition to absurdity another subject the Upanishads insistently deal with is ethics, the purity of human conduct. Very much in the manner of the Existentialists, the Upanishads, aeons before, hold man himself responsible for his actions. Dr. Radhakrishnan, very aptly says that Existentialism is a new name for an ancient method. In Albert Camus and India Sharad Chandra has put forward a convincing comparative study of the two philosophies as expounded in their respective literatures. Her argument is that the parallel ideas found in the two views are not mere fortuitous conclusions but, either the result of seminal influence, or emanation of a common, deeper vision. Reading of the book will help the reader to form a firm opinion. Camus had read the Gita and had attended the lectures given by Swami Shraddhananda of the Ramakrishna Mission in Paris. (shrink)

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

It is often thought that if an adaptationist explanation of some behavioural phenomenon is true, then this fact shows that a culturist explanation of the very same phenomenon is false, or else the adaptationist explanation preempts or crowds out the culturist explanation in some way. This chapter shows why this so-called competition thesis is misguided. Two evolutionary models are identified — the Information Learning Model and the Strategic Learning Model — which show that adaptationist reasoning can help explain why cultural (...) learning evolved. These models suggest that there will typically be a division of labor between adaptationist and culturist explanations. It is then shown that the Strategic Learning Model, which has been widely neglected by adaptationist thinkers, has important and underappreciated implications for a question that has long been contentious in the behavioural sciences — the question of the malleability of human nature. (shrink)

For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20^th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a (...) fundamental role in rational decision making. When the systems underlying the emotions don’t function properly, Damasio maintains, rational decision-making breaks down. Other theorists, most notably Robert Frank (1988), have argued that if we view the emotions through the longer lens of evolutionary theory, we can see that much of what looked to be irrational in the emotions is actually part of an effective strategy for achieving agents’ goals and maximizing their reproductive success. In the wake of this and other recent work, the pendulum of received opinion has swung in the other direction. The emotions are now increasingly regarded as inherently rational, as Frank maintains, and as important components of other rational processes. (shrink)

Pornographic content is harmful to children's psychological and mental development. In Indonesia, many children are involved in activities and access pornographic content through social media. In some cases, children exposed to pornography will experience a decrease in IQ and mental disorders in terms of sexuality. This type of research is descriptive-qualitative identifying, explaining, and analysing a phenomenon based on variables and primary and secondary data. The purpose of this research is to find out the impact of pornographic content on social (...) media for children's psychology and how the Indonesian government's policy addresses the problem. The results of this study show that the psychological impact of child victims of pornography include: anxiety and stress disorders, sexual perception deviations, identity and body image disorders, decreased social interaction skills, difficulty concentrating on learning and poor self-image. The Indonesian government's policy to protect children from pornography is carried out through penal means using criminal law enforcement instruments, as well as non-penal means, namely cooperation between countries and global child protection organisations, blocking content, and educating understanding of using a healthy internet. (shrink)

Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides (...) a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

Is it possible to justify requiring that I respond adequately to the other’s vulnerability? I contend that insofar as I value my own personal identity it is consistent to respond adequately to the vulnerability of the other. Part one provides a break down of vulnerability in terms of its fundamental indeterminacy. Part two illustrates how the ability to respond either adequately or inadequately to the other’s vulnerability is implied by the fundamental co-constitution of personal identity. I understand myself as a (...) self only insofar as I stand in relation to other selves that see me as a self. If the relationship between recognition and identity also holds for the other, my response to her vulnerability founds her identity as well. In part three the relationship developed in part two is employed to justify the obligation to respond adequately to the vulnerable other. If I value my own personal identity, then I require an adequate response from others, because that response plays an integral role in the foundation of my personal identity. The other cannot respond adequately to my vulnerability unless her own identity is assured. Only if I respond adequately to the vulnerability of the other will she be in a position to assure my identity. Therefore, I ought to respond adequately to the vulnerability of others if for no other reason than it puts the other in a position where she can assure the personal identity that I value. (shrink)

Research articles presented in various projects of Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Non-governmental organisations have been playing a significant role in the formation and implementation of global climate change policies. The incremental participation of non-governmental organisations in climate change negotiations is significant for two reasons: 1) they provide governments with expertise and information; and 2) they help to bridge the lack of democracy and legitimacy in global environmental governance. The fulfilment of these two functions, however, is surrounded by doubts, as very little progress has been made so far in combating climate change. (...) Many non-governmental organisations themselves lack democratic legitimacy in their formation and structures, and international climate change agreements are often fragile, not because the negotiators lack information but because they lack political will. This paper examines and outlines the areas for identifying how non-governmental organisations could contribute more to produce effective climate policies, in order to mitigate and manage climate change in the absence of more democratic international climate-change policy-making processes. (shrink)

An anti-representationalist view of language and a deflationary view of truth, key themes in contemporary pragmatism and especially Richard Rorty, do not undermine the notion, in critical theory, of ideology as 'false consciousness'. Both Foucault and Marx were opposed to what Marxists call historical idealism and so they should be seen as objecting to forms of ideology-critique that do not sufficiently avoid such an 'Hegelian' perspective. Foucault's general views on the relations between truth and power can plausibly be construed in (...) a way that makes them compatible with a Marxian critical theory. (shrink)