The book intertwines several strands of scholarship in Indian Philosophy, contemporary psychology and the lived Indian psychological practice inclusive of yoga, advaita, tantra and bhakti to engage in an exploration of consciousness, cognitive science and philosophy. The book examines the characteristics of consciousness by situating it in the historical and cultural contexts of Euro-American as well as Asian, particularly Indian philosophical tradition like the Bhakti tradition and creative living. It considers methodological issues and how, various disciplines--biology, Indian philosophy and cognitive (...) neuroscience has shone a particular light on understanding consciousness. The volume decolonizes the understanding of the concept while accounting for the diverse strands which along with the traditional philosophical frameworks in the Indian context have given us a unique understanding of the mind, psychology, cognition and philosophy of the mind. This book will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of psychology, consciousness studies, cognitive science, philosophy, social psychology, yoga studies, and yoga psychology. It will also be useful for yoga professionals, social workers, therapists, and anyone who is interested to learn about consciousness. (shrink)

Description: The main purpose of writing this book is not only to explain, but also to interpret, the three phases of development of Buddhist thought in India, and how and in what manner it spread out to countries as far away from the land of its origin as Japan. Though the subject may be vast, a conscious effort has been made of explaining the complexity of Buddhist philosophical thought in as concise terms as possible. The first five hundred years, which (...) constitute the initial phase of development, is that of consolidation. The form of Buddhism that developed during this phase is at present known as Theravada, and is prevalent in countries that lie to the south of India. On account of this geographical location of Theravada countries, it is also known as the Southern Buddhism. The second phase of Buddhism is characterised by the emergence of Mahayana. All those religious features were brought into Buddhism with the inception of Mahayana that are constitutive of folk religiosity. One of the important religious elements that crept into the Buddhist fold was the doctrine of Bodhisattva. Henceforward it would be the Bodhisattva ideal that would catch the imagination of a Buddhist believer. At the philosophical level two most important schools were established, namely, the Madhyamika and the Yogacara-Vijnanavada. Great strides, in the realm of art, were also made, particularly in architecture, sculpture and painting. The final phase of development is represented by the emergence of Tantricism. At this phase of development archaic religious elements, in the shape of magic, became part and parcel of Buddhist practice. Thus begins the process of degeneration of the ideals that the Buddha had enunciated at the time of his Enlightenment. This story of rise and fall, of development and degeneration, tells its own story, which needs to be told in terms that are understandable. (shrink)

Professor Pandit, working among the admirable group of philosophers at the University of Delhi, has written a fundamental criticism and a constructive re-interpretation of all that has been preserved as serious epistemological and methodological reflections on the sciences in modern Western philosoph- from the times of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Leibniz to those of Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Popper, and, we need hardly add, onward to the troubling relativisms and reconstructions of historical epistemologies in the works of Hanson, (...) Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. His themes are intrigu ing, set forth as they are with masterly case studies of physics and the life sciences, and within an original conceptual framework for philosophical analysis of the processes, functions, and structures of scientific knowing. Pandit's contributions deserve thoughtful examination. For our part, we wish to point to some among them: (1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both problems and theories in the course of scientific development; (2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific theory and its 'resolving power', i. e. (shrink)

In this article, I trace ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the context of gendered activism under military occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on its anticolonial feminist roots, I conceptualise re-membering as practices that do not simply put together what has been severed or dismembered by coloniality but they also, in doing so, propose different frames of looking. I think through re-membering by focusing on two intertwining sites of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir: protests that re-member the disappeared and activist (...) representation under military occupation. A feminist analysis of these activist strategies grounded in anticolonial thinking suggests that re-membering in the specificity of its emergence under conditions of heightened control does multivalent work: it contests dominant claims and the coloniality of the Indian state, thereby exposing the continuum of violence including its carceral, psychic, discursive forms that co-constitute and perpetuate the occupation of Kashmir. As such, it insists on accounting for historical and contextual specificities as necessary conditions for imagining an expressly anticolonial feminist politics that can open possibilities of epistemic and political transformation towards knowing Kashmir and people’s struggles differently. It is here that the epistemic potential of re-membering lies: in overturning the terms of conversation as decolonial feminist scholarship has long insisted. (shrink)

Historical and theoretical perspectives on Yoga and Tantrism.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and human foragers share a fission-fusion social system and a mating system of joint male resource defense polygyny. Within-community skew in male strength varies among and within species. In this study, we extend a mathematical model of within-group male coalition formation among primates to derive the conditions for between-community conflicts in the form of raids. We show that the main factor affecting the presence of successful raiding is the likelihood of major discrepancies in party strength, which are set (...) by party size distributions (and thus community size) and the skew in strength. This study confirms the functional similarities between the raiding of chimpanzees and human foragers, and it supports the “imbalance of power” hypothesis for raiding. However, it also proposes two amendments to this model. First, the absence of raiding in bonobos may be attributable more to potential female involvement in defense against raids, which increases the size of defensive coalitions. Second, the model attributes some of the raiding in humans to major contrasts in instantaneous fighting ability created by surprise raids on unarmed victims; it also draws attention to the distinction between minor raids and major raids that involve multiple bands of the same community. (shrink)

On the concept of salvation in the Yoga school on Hindu philosophy and Tantric Buddhism.

This paper aims to search the question ‘whether the ethical issues of infectious disease, which has been so long considered as a problem in the discipline of bioethics, can be brought under the purview of public health ethics’. To explore the problem I begin with a brief description of the evolution of bioethics. I elaborate the six reasons of neglecting the discussion of infectious diseases in early bioethics as highlighted by Selgelid (2005). Then I analyse the view of Bayer and (...) Fairchild (2004) that how infectious diseases by its own ethical questions, make the shift from the autonomy-centred bioethics to common welfare focused public health ethics. However, I would like to conclude that although the ethical discussion of infectious diseases makes a moral shift from the discipline of bioethics to public health ethics, the latter should not always be solely guided by the principle of beneficence to avoid harm for the sake of community welfare. Public health ethics needs to be guided by the balance of the four biomedical principals, such as beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice. (shrink)

This paper is about the rationality of methodological variance, where changes in method and methodology of science may be warranted/triggered by the urgency of finding alternatives to the methodology currently in fashion that fails to address the relevant and pressing problems. It deals obliquely with Maxwell‘s criticisms of Pandit, offering only a bare sketch of appraisal of his methodological proposals of AOE, AOR and WI, not only as going beyond SR but as better alternatives to dominant methodologies such as (...) that of Karl R. Popper, without rehearsing or recycling Maxwell‘s well-known arguments in great detail. More importantly, how these proposals improve upon the eighteenth century Enlightenment idea of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social/cultural progress towards an enlightened world, i.e., a world that is sensitive to problems of living and human well-being, is discussed. Having dealt with such problems in Pandit, the present appraisal is limited to the rationality of understanding, or better of rethinking, academic inquiry within the wider contexts and reaches of wisdom inquiry, with particular reference to the pressing global problems including those problems that are traceable to ETS progress, which is itself often found to violate the principle of interconnectedness across nature. (shrink)

Chiefly on spiritual life and ethics in Hinduism, as reflected in the works of Rāmadāsa, 1608-1681, Marathi saint.

Most human societies exhibit a distinct class structure, with an elite, middle classes, and a bottom class, whereas animals form simple dominance hierarchies in which individuals with higher fighting ability do not appear to form coalitions to “oppress” weaker individuals. Here, we extend our model of primate coalitions and find that a division into a bottom class and an upper class is inevitable whenever fitness-enhancing resources, such as food or real estate, are exploitable or tradable and the members of the (...) bottom class cannot easily leave the group. The model predicts that the bottom class has a near flat, low payoff and always comprises at least half the society. The upper class may subdivide into one or more middle class(es), resulting in improved payoff for the topmost members (elite). The model predicts that the bottom class on its own is incapable of mounting effective counter-coalitions against the upper class, except when receiving support from dissatisfied members of the middle class(es). Such counter-coalitions can be prevented by keeping the payoff to the lowest-ranked members of the middle classes (through concessions) well above that of the bottom class. This simple model explains why classes are also absent in nomadic hunter-gatherers and predominate in (though are not limited to) societies that produce and store food. Its results also agree well with various other known features of societies with classes. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the principle of benevolence occupies a unique place in moral theory where duty and emotion both have equal importance, and moral philosophers generally are divided into two camps regarding the role of emotion in morality. Kant clarifies his position while introducing the deontic notion of benevolence. He only regards the moral value in which the duty of benevolence has been performed with ‘good will’. Some defenders of Kant’s ethics are Herman, McMurray, Meyers, and Tannenbaum (...) who argue that acting purely based on duty is far more superior to acting from emotions. On the other hand, several contemporary theorists such as Bernard Williams, Blum, Oakley, Stocker, Stohr, Foot, Korsgaard, Hursthouse, and Sherman refute Kant’s views towards emotion in the domain of morality. Following this Kantian and Non-Kantian debate, this article aims to explore the role of emotion and rationality in the moral context of benevolence. (shrink)

For a philosopher with an abiding interest in the nature of objective knowledge systems in science, what could be more important than trying to think in terms of those very subjects of such knowledge to which men like Galileo, Newton, Max Planck, Einstein and others devoted their entire lifetimes? In certain respects, these systems and their structures may not be beyond the grasp of a linguistic conception of science, and scientific change, which men of science and philosophy have advocated in (...) various forms in recent times. But certainly it is wrong-headed to think that one's conception of science can be based on an identification of its theories with languages in which they may be, my own alternatively, framed. There may be more than one place in book (1983: 87) where they may seem to get confused with each other, quite against my original intentiens. The distinction between the objec tive knowledge systems in science and the dynamic frameworks of the languages of the special individual sciences, in which their growth can be embedded in significant ways, assumes here, therefore, much impor tance. It must be recognized that the problems concerning scientific change, which these systems undergo, are not just problems concerning language change. (shrink)

Focusing on Nicholas Maxwell’s thesis that “science, properly understood, provides us the methodological key to the salvation of humanity”, the article discusses Maxwell’s aim oriented empiricism and his conception of Wisdom Inquiry as advocated in Maxwell’s (2009b, pp.1–56) essay entitled “How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World?” (in Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom: Studies in the Philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell 2009, edited by Leemon McHenry) and in Maxwell (2004 & 2009a).

This paper aims to develop a comparative analysis of the place of emotion from Indian and Western philosophical perspectives. Both Eastern and Indian philosophy consider three mental states as being involved with the arousal of emotions, i.e., cognitive (epistemic), conative (desire), and affective. In Indian philosophy, there is no such single term or specific equivalent definition to the Western term ‘emotion.’ Further, there is no clear dichotomy (cognitive & non-cognitive) between reason and emotion in Indian culture. In Indian scriptures, there (...) are various, at times intermingled conceptions of emotion. From a religious standpoint, emotion can be an expression of religious devotion (bhakti), and often emotions are viewed as barriers to having true knowledge and are considered a cause of attachment and an obstacle to liberation. After comparing a large amount of discussion on emotion following Western and Indian conceptions, and analyzing some real-life experiences where emotion plays various roles (intellectual, personal, and spiritual) within each philosophical tradition this paper concludes that it is critical to engage in a comparative, collaborative study of emotion. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the anger of Dhaniya, the female protagonist of Premchand's Godan. Rather than approaching it as a specifically feminist anger, it sees it more broadly as the anger of the oppressed, which signals hope that the conditions of oppression will change. Premchand is influenced by Karl Marx, and uses narrative emotion to tell the (Indian) story of labor and capital; this essay puts Panksepp's neurocognitive theory of anger in conversation with Marxist political theory, demonstrating how Marx's thoughts (...) on systemic economic injustices can elucidate the “social context” in which emotion systems (such as RAGE, PLAY, and CARE) are activated. (shrink)

: The authors suggest that it is the indeterminate limits of biotechnology that invite a multiplicity of interpretations of it. They note that incongruent interpretations of biotechnology arise from competing long-term human interests and from competing uses of language. They propose to resolve the opposition between incongruent interpretations by being more precise about what exactly is being debated in the name of biotechnology.

A brochure stating the objectives of a project initiated by the author in 1973.

Collected lectures on philosophy, society, and Indian culture.

This book critically analyses the basic questions regarding the principle of beneficence within its moral domain, to suggest and work out a more credible form of Principle of Beneficence. The Moral Quest for a More Credible Principle of Beneficence evolves from the common goodness of the three major confronting theories of ethics, i.e., Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics. After analysing and exploring the common ground of the three views, the aim is to prescribe a more convincing form of the principle (...) of beneficence. -/- The book starts with a brief discussion of the principle of beneficence and then critically analyses previous views related to the principle of beneficence, virtue of benevolence, and their relationship, and proposes a more credible form of the Principle of Beneficence. The Moral Quest for a More Credible Principle of Beneficence aims to provide a significant contribution towards the theory of beneficence. (shrink)