The deeper teachings of yoga state that "We are a soul, and have a body," but how do yogis respond when confronted with death-with their own time of passing? In Transitioning in Grace (based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi), Nalini Graeber presents true accounts of how longtime yogis and meditators have left their bodies. Some struggled with pain or illness. Others passed suddenly or unexpectedly. Most of these accounts are inspiring; (...) all have something to teach about the transitioning experience. More than just a collection of uplifting stories, this work can serve as a handbook for individuals helping family or friends to leave this world-for those soon to make the transition themselves-and for all thoughtful souls who recognize the wisdom of gaining important insights into early preparation for "Life's Final Exam." Included in these pages: How to prepare for death. A yogic "astral ascension" ceremony (funeral/memorial service) that can be adapted for your particular needs. A description, by a great master of yoga, of what we experience during the moments when we leave our bodies. A simple meditation technique that can help greatly to bring calmness to the event. Stories, descriptions, and poems that offer helpful insights and inspiration. (shrink)

The essays, written by both chemists and philosophers, adopt distinctive philosophical perspectives on chemistry and collectively offer both a conceptualization ...

Minds Without Fear is an intellectual and cultural history of India during the period of British occupation. It demonstrates that this was a period of renaissance in India in which philosophy--both in the public sphere and in the Indian universities--played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively Indian modernity. The book is also a history of Indian philosophy. It demonstrates how the development of a secular philosophical voice facilitated the construction of modern Indian society and the consolidation of (...) the nationalist movement. (shrink)

Sri Lanka, once a colony of Britain, gained independence in 1948. However, especially the health sector continues to use English as its main medium of communication. Such language bias leads to marginalization of those less fluent in English, and hinders achieving a higher level of health literacy. Discrimination of people or social groups based on their language is termed linguicism. Tackling linguicism requires an understanding of its historic roots and an exploration of potential links to colonial racial prejudices. Published literature (...) presents evidence that traces linguicism to language policies of the British colonial government. Though an exhaustive survey of historical records is not presented, there is reasonable evidence to suggest a close link. British colonial rule derived its justification from supremacist and racist ideology. As a result, English became the medium in all forms of official communications, a situation that persisted after independence. A similar situation exists in many parts of the worlds. We should recognize language-based discrimination and linguicism as public health issues. They are detrimental to health of vulnerable groups and have the potential to worsen health disparities. (shrink)

This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule.

The well-known classifier support vector machine has many parameters associated with its various kernel functions. The radial basis function kernel, being the most preferred kernel, has two parameters to be optimized. The problem of optimizing these parameter values is called model selection in the literature, and its results strongly influence the performance of the classifier. Another factor that affects the classification performance of a classifier is the feature subset. Both these factors are interdependent and must be dealt with simultaneously. Following (...) the multiobjective definition of feature selection, we have applied a multiobjective genetic algorithm, NSGA II, to optimize the feature subset and model parameters simultaneously. Comparison of the proposed approach with the grid algorithm and GA-based method suggests that the MOGA-based approach performs better than the grid algorithm and is as good as the GA-based approach. Moreover, it provides multiple solutions instead of a single solution. The users can prefer one feature subset over the other as per their requirement and available resources. (shrink)

Of Minds and Molecules is the first anthology devoted exclusively to work in the philosophy of chemistry. The essays, written by both chemists and philosophers, adopt distinctive philosophical perspectives on chemistry and collectively offer both a conceptualization of and a justification for this emerging field.

The Book Presents The Practical Side Of Hindu Philosophy As Manifested In The Different Religiouns Systems Of The Hindus. It Shows The Essential Connection Between Theory And Practice, And To Point Out The True Significance Of The Course Of Discipline Prescribed By The Different Religious Systems For The Attainment Of Spiritual Realisation. A Highly Inteteresting And Important Work To The Literature Of Hindu Thought And Religion. Condition Good.

Racial bias and language discrimination are recognized in the health sector in countries such as Sri Lanka. This may extend to images used in health communication and educational literature. We analyzed the racial and ethnic representation in a sample of newspapers and websites related to health obtained over a period. Most of the human figures in health-related messages in newspapers had an overrepresentation of Caucasians. This trend was absent in websites where 73% of the images of Sri Lankans. The reasons (...) for this pattern could be due to the availability of image-quality photographs and exposure to a norm that is racially biased. For example, a majority of images in medical textbooks and prestigious journals are of white Caucasians. A predominance of such images could have two impacts. At an individual level, it would affect acquiring skills of visual diagnoses. At a societal level, it may reinforce a view that most forms of health-related knowledge are created in the West and could add to existing discrimination based on skin color (i.e., colorism). The latter is a known psychosocial stressor that contributes to psychological distress among socially disadvantaged populations and promotes behaviors adverse to health and residential segregation. These may contribute to poorer physical, mental, and infant health outcomes in dark-skinned individuals compared to lighter-skinned in the USA and Canada. Such discrimination within the health system would compromise basic human dignity, disempower patients, and violate the principle of autonomy. Sri Lankan media, the healthcare profession, and educationists need to recognize the relevance and importance of using images that appropriately reflect the realities of their own environment, its people, and patients. (shrink)

Sponsorship of medical conferences by the pharmaceutical industry has led to many ethical issues, especially in resource-poor developing countries. The core issue in these instances is to reduce or avoid conflicts of interests. COI is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgment or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by secondary interests. Disruption of social trust should also be considered. This deontological approach should be complemented by a consequentialist approach. Towards this, the concept (...) ofdistal interests is introduced. DI lies beyond the immediately visible COIs and the consequences of immediate decisions. They are ‘distal’ in time or place: ‘DI in time’ means consequence of the decision in future scenarios, while ‘DI in space’ means those that impinge on other institutions or bodies. In judging the consequences, it is also necessary to consider the reality of the existing relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and organisers of conferences. In more developed countries, these relationships are governed by stricter regulations, adherence to codes of conduct by both parties and stronger institutional oversights. In contrast, developing countries such as Sri Lanka the regulatory environment is lax and the demarcation of interests between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession is considerably blurred. Therefore, establishing clear rules of engagement between the stakeholders should be considered as an attempt to clear the muddy waters. The paper proposes a set of guidelines to capture these approaches. (shrink)

Baumard et al. make a good case that a sense of fairness evolved and that showing this requires reciprocity games with choice of partner. However, they oversimplify both morality and the evolution of morality. Where fairness is involved in morality, other things are, too, and fairness is often not involved. In the evolution of morality, other things played a role. Plus, the motive for being fair originally was self-interest, not anything moral.

Facial expressions have communicative properties that bear some importance to perceivers. Such expressions are informative with respect to the future behavior of the expressing individual and with respect to the conditions of the broader social environment. This article argues that appropriate responses to facial expressions are an important means by which people adapt to their social ecology. The immediate responses to facial expressions depend on contextual factors. It is more important for individuals to adapt to the ingroup than to other (...) groups, for this reason people should exhibit special sensitivity to ingroup facial expressions. It reviews the literature regarding the role of context in the recognition of facial expressions and regarding group membership and emotion recognition, with a special emphasis on the role of culture. It focuses on facial expressions of emotion if only because of available empirical literature. (shrink)

Abstract:Subject As Freedom (1930) is correctly regarded as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya's magnum opus. But this text relies on a set of ideas and develops from a set of concerns that KCB develops more explicitly in essays written both before and after that text, which might be regarded as its intellectual bookends. These ideas are important and fascinating in their own right. They also illuminate KCB's engagement with Kant and with the Vedānta tradition as well as his understanding of freedom itself, including (...) its soteriological dimension. These two essays are "Sankara's Doctrine of Māyā" (1930) and "The Advaita and Its Spiritual Significance" (1936). We explore KCB's conception of philosophy and its relation to spiritual practice through a close reading of these two essays. (shrink)

The period of British colonial rule in India is typically regarded as philosophically sterile. Indian philosophy written in English during the British colonial period is often ignored in histories of Indian philosophy, or, when considered explicitly, dismissed either as uncreative or as inauthentic. The late Daya Krishna thought hard about this at the end of his life, and we have been thinking about this in conversation with him. We show that this dismissal is unjustified and that this is a fertile (...) period for Indian philosophy in which traditional Indian philosophical ideas were brought into dialogue with the West and advanced with great acumen. In this paper, we present one case study to illustrate this point. (shrink)

Daya Krishna was easily the most creative and original Indian philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. His thought and philosophical energy dominated academic Indian philosophy and determined the nature of the engagement of Indian philosophy with Western philosophy during that period. He passed away recently, leaving behind an enormous corpus of published work on a wide range of philosophical topics, as well as a great deal of incomplete, nearly-complete and complete-but-as-yet-unpublished work. Daya Krishna's thought and publications address (...) a broad range of philosophical issues, including issues of global philosophical importance that transcend considerations of particular traditions; issues particular to Indian philosophy; and issues at the intersection of Indian and Western philosophy, especially questions about the philosophy of language and ontology that emerge in the context of his Samvada project that brought together Western philosophers and Nyaya pandits to discuss questions in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. The volume editors have organized the volume as a set of ten couplets and triplets. Each draws together papers from different periods in Daya Krishna's life: some take different approaches to the same problem or text; in some cases, the second paper references and takes issue with arguments developed in the first; in still others, Daya Krishna addresses very different topics, but using the same distinctive philosophical methodology. Each set is introduced by one of the editors. These couplets are framed by two of Daya Krishna's finest metaphilosophical essays, one that introduces his approach, and one that draws some of his grand morals about the discipline. Daya Krishna's daughter, Professor Shail Mayaram of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies contributes a preface, and Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, a longtime colleague of Daya Krisha and a collaborator on some of his most important philosophical ventures has written the introduction. (shrink)

My dissertation project addresses the problem of the legitimacy of "transcendental" arguments. This is an old, familiar problem that goes all the way back to Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason. There, for the first time, we have an explicit attempt to define, characterize and develop a distinct kind of argument. This kind of argument was intended to provide a model which could be used to establish the truth of a quite distinctive sort of proposition, the synthetic apriori. ;The (...) task of this dissertation is to articulate a central paradigm for transcendental arguments, that of being a conceivability argument of a rather special kind; and to reconstruct a Davidsonian argument in the philosophy of language that has all the features that are essential to the paradigm and to show that this argument avoids the familiar sorts of problem that have been claimed to attach to transcendental arguments in general. The project, if successful, serves to illuminate the kinds of features that we ought to care about in constructing and evaluating transcendental arguments. This dissertation suggests that we need to think of the nature of the transcendental in a way that is different from how it is normally understood, but which is such that it retains what is and has always been the truly deep and substantive reasons for interest in arguments of this kind. (shrink)

India has been independent for 70 years now, and it is a good time to reflect on the political philosophy that underwrote the movement that gained that independence. When we do so, we discover the origins of a political vocabulary that is still in use today, although sadly not used with the same rigor and precision with which it was used then. We also find that those who recur to Indian political thought from the pre-independence period tend to return to (...) a single strand of that thought—the theorization of ahimsa by Mohandas K. Gandhi, as for instance in the recent essay on Indian political thought in The New York Times by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (Gandhi won’t leave India 2017). In this discussion, we hope to draw attention to some of the less well-known resources offered by pre-independence Indian philosophy and in particular the political thought of the Arya samaji Congressman, philosopher and political activist, Lajpat Rai. His political philosophy is important for understanding the theorization of and debates within the Indian independence movement; we think that it also suggests ways to think about contemporary political and revolutionary movements and merits consideration in current debates in political philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay I first articulate what I take to be an influential and for the most part persuasive model in the western psychoanalytic tradition that is a response to tragic loss, namely, the one that we find in Freud’s little essay entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). I then use a well-known Buddhist folk tale about the plight of a young woman named Kisagotami to underscore central elements from Buddhist psychology on the subject of suffering that is a consequence of (...) the loss of a young mother’s only child. Fortified by both traditions, I gather together the ingredients for a cross-cultural mental model that serves to explain and to justify as healthy a specific kind of response to a specific form of suffering, namely, the loss of ones’ loved one. I arrive at this model by asking a number of specific questions of both traditions. For instance, what constitutes a non-pathological response to this kind of suffering? What state of mind represents the cessation of such suffering? Is preoccupation with the dead beloved a way of escaping the fact that the person is dead? Is this a form of ignorance that needs to be removed? Is it a form of moral deficiency? Might certain forms and contexts of ignorance, in effect, put one on a path to enlightenment? (shrink)

Despite the currently perceived urgent need among contemporary philosophers of chemistry for adjudicating between two rival metaphysical conceptual frameworks—is chemistry primarily a science of substances or processes?—this essay argues that neither provides us with what we need in our attempts to explain and comprehend chemical operations and phenomena. First, I show the concept of a chemical property can survive the abandoning of the metaphysical framework of substance. While this abandonment means that we will need to give up essential properties, contingent (...) properties can give us all the stability we need to account for chemical continuity as well as change. I then go on to show that this attention to clusters of contingent properties does not force us into the arms of an alternative process metaphysical framework either. Finally, I sketch a view I call particularism with respect to chemical properties on analogy with moral particularism. I conclude by sketching some of the implications for the field of philosophy of chemistry of my proposal that we abandon our interest in the metaphysical question of what chemistry is primarily about in favor of a broadly scientific particularism with respect to kinds and properties. (shrink)

Canonical texts -- Philosophy -- Literature and History.