Trika philosophy or Kashmir Śaivism is one of the major nondual philosophical systems of India where both esoteric and exoteric practices are included systematically and scientifically. The two aspects of manifestation viśvamaya, the immanent and viśvottīrṇa the transcendental covers this entire philosophical system as a unique all-inclusive and very practical. In this process of manifestation in Trika philosophy ‘māyā’ plays an important role both from an ontological and epistemological point of view. Furthermore ‘māyā’ clearly stands as a foremost part with (...) the point of view of a knower (pramātā). So, māyā is a quite notable concept, unlike other Indian philosophical traditions. Apart from this, it gives utmost support to artistic creations, i.e. both artist and aesthete, and because of that reason Pratyabhijñā darśan has a strong influence on Indian literary theory. This paper is an attempt to expound the major dimensions of ‘māyā’ in different levels. (shrink)

We present a framework for analyzing black hole backreaction from the point of view of quantum open systems using influence functional formalism. We focus on the model of a black hole described by a radially perturbed quasi-static metric and Hawking radiation by a conformally coupled massless quantum scalar field. It is shown that the closed-time-path (CTP) effective action yields a non-local dissipation term as well as a stochastic noise term in the equation of motion, the Einstein–Langevin equation. Once the thermal (...) Green's function in a Schwarzschild background becomes available to the required accuracy, the strategy described here can be applied to obtain concrete results on backreaction. We also present an alternative derivation of the CTP effective action in terms of the Bogolyubov coefficients, thus making a connection with the interpretation of the noise term as measuring the difference in particle production in alternative histories. (shrink)

Why do people respond emotionally to works of fiction they know are make-believe? Boruah tackles this question, which is fundamental aesthetics and literary studies, from a totally new perspective. Bringing together the various answers that have been offered by philosophers from Aristotle to Roger Scruton, he shows that while some philosophers have denied any rational basis to our emotional responses to fiction, others have argued that the emotions evoked by fiction are not real emotions at all. In response to (...) this, Boruah contends that fictional emotions are rational because they are based on the same sorts of beliefs that we form about real situations and real people. He illustrates this argument with literary examples ranging from Shakespeare to Tolstoy. (shrink)

Contemporary quasi-Cartesianism about mental phenomena is the view of the perspectival nature of consciousness and the inscrutability of phenomenal experience, both being first-person-centered. It adverts to the insusceptibility of mental phenomena to third-person-centered, scientific description and explanation, but does not sympathize with the ontology of substance dualism. This view finds its clearest manifestation in contemporary agnostic naturalism.

Rifamycin is a clinically useful macrolide antibiotic produced by the gram positive bacterium. Amycolatopsis mediterranei. This antibiotic is primarily used against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae, causative agents of tuberculosis and leprosy, respectively. In these bacteria, rifamycin treatment specifically inhibits the initiation of RNA synthesis by binding to β‐subunit of RNA polymerase. Apart from its activity against the bacteria, rifamycin has also been reported to inhibit reverse transcriptase (RT) of certain RNA viruses. Recently, rifamycin derivatives have been dis‐covered that are (...) effective against Mycobacterium avium, which is associated with the AIDS complex. Consequently, the importance of and demand for rifamycin has increased tremendously, the world over. In this article, recent trends in rifamycin research and accessability of recombinant DNA techniques to increase rifamycin production are reviewed. (shrink)

Few would deny that machines are a cultural creation of great significance. The Human race has shown extraordinary skills in achieving this glory. But this is not the glory of an unblemished modern humanity. While humankind has been admirably powerful in creatively controlling external forces, there has not been a similar display of control over the inner forces of selfish desire and the will to individual power. Education, it its true spirit, is a noble endeavour dedicated to a proper balancing (...) of the external and the internal forces operative in the human psyche. The currently overwhelming prevalence of STEM education seems to be more aligned to the 'external' end of this spectrum of human drive, whereas the disciplines of the Humanities critically address themselves to the imminent problem of imbalance and are attuned to the pursuit of the 'internal' end. Whether we can hope for a future far better than the past, or fall into a state of despair by doing worse than our past, crucially depends on the extent to which higher education in contemporary times is wedded to the virtue of attaining the balance. (shrink)

The informed-consent process should be one of meaningful information exchange between researchers and study participants. One of the responsibilities of research ethics committees is to oversee appropriate informed consent. The committee must consider various matters before deciding whether the process is appropriate, including the adequacy and completeness of the written information provided to study participants, and the process of obtaining informed consent. This study aimed to identify, quantitatively and qualitatively, consent-related issues in different types of malaria proposals submitted to the (...) Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Ethics Committee. This study reviewed proposal documentation submitted to two panels of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, from 2011 to 2015. The documentation included proposals, notifications to researchers of review outcomes and ethical issues of concern to committee members. Each element of the informed-consent process was identified and analyzed by study classification, design, and specimen use, including whether the study involved a vulnerable population. Summative content analysis was used to analyze patterns of common issues raised in reviews. Of the 112 proposals reviewed, 63 required an informed consent process. All researchers proposed communicating with their study participants; however, about two-thirds needed to improve their explanations of study procedures to participants. About 40% of the proposals attracted comments on informed-consent process elements--risk and discomfort, vulnerable status, and compensation. Studies that planned to collect or use new/linked specimens raised more issues around informed consent than studies using linked data/records. Studies that involved vulnerable populations raised more issues than those that did not. The committee usually asked researchers to clarify, elaborate, revise, or paraphrase the consent process elements that were considered to involve inadequate information exchange between researcher and study participant. This study aimed to describe lessons for malaria researchers about common informed-consent process issues in different types of malaria proposals. The information and analysis of informed-consent elements should assist the preparation of malaria-research proposals. (shrink)

The informed-consent process should be one of meaningful information exchange between researchers and study participants. One of the responsibilities of research ethics committees is to oversee appropriate inf...

Papers presented at the National Seminar on "Dharma, Virtue and Morality : the Indian Ideal of Human Perfection, held at Kanpur in 2005.

Recruiting minorities into research studies requires special attention, particularly when studies involve “extra-vulnerable” participants with multiple vulnerabilities, e.g., pregnant women, the fetuses/neonates of ethnic minorities, children in refugee camps, or cross-border migrants. This study retrospectively analyzed submissions to the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Tropical Medicine (FTM-EC) in Thailand. Issues related to the process and outcomes of proposal review, and the main issues for which clarification/revision were requested on studies, are discussed extensively.

The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that construals of our emotional responses to fictions as irrational or merely pseudo-emotional are not the only explanations available to us, and that necessary and sufficient conditions for an emotional response to a fiction can be established without abandoning either its intentionality or the assignment of a causal role to our beliefs. ;Colin Radford's claim that our emotional responses to fictions are irrational and inconsistent is challenged in two ways. First, distinctions can (...) be drawn between our reactions to fiction and indisputably irrational emotional reactions which preclude arriving at Radford's conclusion via an argument from analogy. Further, the conditions for rationality put forward in several analyses of emotion, ranging from that of David Hume to that of Ronald de Sousa, are not violated by our emotional responses to fictions. ;Kendall Walton's contention that such affective reactions are merely quasi-emotions is contested on the ground that the absence of the existentially committed beliefs which Walton allies with all genuine emotional responses does not demonstrate an absence of cognitive content. Existentially uncommitted evaluative beliefs, thoughts, and even beliefs about the world can be linked to our emotional experience of fictions, and can serve a function necessary to the identification of the emotion, a function which Walton assigns to the existentially committed belief. ;In our experience of fictions, the objects of our emotion are various. However, a direct response to a fictional entity or event is characterized in terms of Peter Lamarque's account: as a response to the content of a thought, a response to what has been thought or imagined rather than to the thought itself. The roles played both by evaluative beliefs and beliefs about what can occur in the world are investigated and found to constitute necessary conditions for an emotional response to a fiction. An account of the role of the imagination, which borrows from Boruah, David Novitz, and Susan Feagin, provides another condition which, together with the two preceding, appears sufficient for such a response. (shrink)

This book examines the performance of Bauls 'folk' performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer 'joy' and 'spirituality', thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 (...) speech had identified as 'reclamation of human personality'. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of 'folk' as a fixed classification or an origin point, and fractures homogeneous historical representations of the Baul as a 'folk' performer and a wandering mendicant exposing the complex heterogeneity that characterizes this group. Establishing 'folk-ness' as a performance category, and 'folk festivals' as sites of performing 'folk-ness', contributing to a heritage industry that thrives on imagined and recreated nostalgia, Chakrabarti examines different sites that produce varied performative identities of Bauls, probing the limits of such categories while simultaneously advocating for polyvocality and multifocality. While this project has grounded itself firmly in performance studies, it has borrowed extensively from fields of postcolonial studies and subaltern histories, literature, ethnography and ethnomusicology, and cosmopolitan studies. (shrink)

This is a competent book about a rich and tantalizing topic, the nature and status of the emotions aroused by fictional characters and events. The problem, simply stated, is how a person--say, a member of a theater audience--can be emotionally moved by a scene which he or she fully knows to be play-acted, the suffering on stage merely feigned. The underlying assumption, of course, is that emotions have certain cognitive presuppositions, one of which, presumably, is the actual existence of the (...) facts or states of affairs that provoke them. This suggests what the author calls "a paradox of belief" according to which one must both believe and not believe in the reality of a certain state of affairs, and the book is devoted to the resolution of this seeming paradox. He pursues a number of suggestions, beginning with what he considers the origin of the paradox in a 1975 article by Colin Radford, who argued that such emotions involve us in incoherence and inconsistency, through a number of suggestions ranging from the "reformist" to the "radical", all of which he argues to be inadequate. Boruah's own solution--which he calls "conservative"--is to distinguish what he calls the "evaluative" from the "existential" beliefs involved in emotion, insisting that essential evaluative beliefs are common to both real-life as well as fictional examples even if the latter do not satisfy existential requirements. In such cases, it is the imagination, coupled with belief, that explains the legitimacy of what the author awkwardly calls "fictional emotions.". (shrink)