We examine the impact of employing a female, versus a male, leader on future (t + 1) donations and operating margin using a sample of 4387 unique nonprofit organizations (NPOs) between 2011 and 2014. Using two-stage and matched sample designs, we find that NPOs headed by female leaders report higher future operating margins but lower future donations. We interpret these findings to mean that female leaders are more focused on fiscal responsibility than fundraising. We also find that female leaders with (...) past fundraising experience attenuate lower future donations, and at commercial nonprofits, female leaders with prior for-profit experience contribute to even higher operating margins. Moreover, while female leaders identified as the founder of the organization increase future donations, they have no effect on future operating margins. Collectively, the results of our study should increase nonprofit boards’ confidence in hiring female leaders thereby narrowing the gender disparity in leadership in the nonprofit sector. This study expands the extant literature by providing initial evidence on the effects of female leaders in NPOs thereby contributing to research exploring gender, diversity, management, and nonprofit executives. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within (...) everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

Starting from the early decades of the twentieth century, evolutionary biology began to acquire mathematical overtones. This took place via the development of a set of models in which the Darwinian picture of evolution was shown to be consistent with the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel. The models, which came to be elaborated over the years, define a field of study known as population genetics. Population genetics is generally looked upon as an essential component of modern evolutionary theory. This (...) article deals with a famous dispute between J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of population genetics, and Ernst Mayr, a major contributor to the way we understand evolution. The philosophical undercurrents of the dispute remain relevant today. Mayr and Haldane agreed that genetics provided a broad explanatory framework for explaining how evolution took place but differed over the relevance of the mathematical models that sought to underpin that framework. The dispute began with a fundamental issue raised by Mayr in 1959: in terms of understanding evolution, did population genetics contribute anything beyond the obvious? Haldane's response came just before his death in 1964. It contained a spirited defense, not just of population genetics, but also of the motivations that lie behind mathematical modelling in biology. While the difference of opinion persisted and was not glossed over, the two continued to maintain cordial personal relations. (shrink)

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

This article argues that contemporary philosophers have unduly ignored Sri Ramakrishna’s pioneering views on religious pluralism. The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) taught the harmony of all religions on the basis of his own spiritual experiences and his diverse religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. Part I reconstructs the main tenets of Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism. Part II explores how Sri Ramakrishna addresses the problem of conflicting religious truth-claims. Part III addresses some of the major criticisms leveled against (...) Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious pluralism. (shrink)

This paper establishes a dialogue between the later works of Wittgenstein, those of Cavell and the novels of J. M. Coetzee concerning the problem of violence, authority and the authoritative voice. By drawing on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year, the paper discusses lessons and insights on the nature of violence and the ways in which it can be accepted as “normal.” The term “normalization” is used in order to show how violence and (...) cruelty can become a “form of life” that develops according to its own actors, cultural practices and legitimacies. (shrink)

We examined whether the N400 Event-Related Potential component would be modulated by dispositional affect during sentence processing. In this study, 33 participants read sentences manipulated by direct object type and object determiner type. We were particularly interested in sentences of the form: The connoisseur tasted thewineon the tour vs. The connoisseur tasted the #roof… We expected that processing incongruent direct objects vs. congruent objects would elicit N400 effects. Previous ERP language experiments have shown that participants in positive and negative moods (...) were differentially sensitive to semantic anomaly, resulting in different N400 effects. Presently, we ask whether individual dispositional affect scores would modulate N400 effects as shown previously. Namely, previous results showed larger N400 effects associated with happy moods and attenuated amplitudes associated with sad moods. Results revealed significant N400 effects, driven by the #roof vs. the wine, where larger amplitude differences were found for individuals showing smaller negative affect scores, thus partially replicating previous findings. We discuss our results in terms of theories of local inhibition, such that low NA promotes stronger lexico-semantic links in sentences. Finally, our results support accounts of language processing that include social and biological characteristics of individuals during real-time sentence comprehension. (shrink)

Conventional medical training offers little help to students to resolve the ethical dilemmas they face as healthcare professionals. Public awareness of the ethical behavior of medical practitioners has been growing. Aim of this study was to assess knowledge of, practice in and attitudes of healthcare ethics among medical, dental and physiotherapy postgraduate students. A cross-sectional analysis based on a questionnaire was performed at a hospital and dental institution of the medical college. The present study included 60 postgraduate students. The questionnaire (...) on health care ethics is a 44-point self-administered standardized questionnaire that poses ethical dilemmas in 5 vignettes with closed-ended questions to test awareness, attitude and experience in the area of healthcare ethics. In the first half of the questionnaire, knowledge and attitude were assessed using 5 case scenarios representing ethical dilemmas and the participants answered the questions using the 5 point likert scale. The second half assessed the practice of Ethics in research and clinical practice. The expected time to fill each questionnaire was about 10–15 min. 62 questionnaires were distributed. 60 completed questionnaires were returned. The response rate was 96%. The mean age of the postgraduates was 26.23 ± 2.33. Among the participants 28 were male and 32 female. 20 completed questionnaires from each, medical, dental and physiotherapy postgraduate students were collected. The multiple group comparison showed that the difference in the knowledge scores were statistically significant between dental and physiotherapy and between medical and physiotherapy but no significant difference between medical and dental. Study suggests that abstract knowledge cannot be converted into practical knowledge automatically. There is a major lack of knowledge of the ethics of health care among graduate students. The postgraduate curriculum must include a good mix of both theoretical concepts and practical application of multidisciplinary healthcare ethics ethical principles and guidelines. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna and brings him into dialogue with Western philosophers of religion, primarily in the recent analytic tradition. Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, opens up an entirely new paradigm for addressing central topics in the philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious diversity, the nature and epistemology of mystical experience, and the problem of evil.

Critical study of categories (padārthas) described in Vaiśeṣikasūtra by Kaṇāda.

This paper interrogates the routine and unproblematic use of terms such as in biomedical and anthropological discourse. A typical depiction of the social factors that explain the practice of in India is to put together the supply side factors (such as protection offered by the government for the production of generic drugs, especially in the small scale sector, and expansion of the number of drug store outlets), with the increasing demand for allopathic drugs. The paper provides an ethnographic account of (...) the intricate connections between households and biomedical practitioners in urban neighbourhoods in Delhi. It breaks away from the conventional opposition drawn between the practices of physicians and the beliefs of their patients, and suggests that what constitutes the medical environments of these neighbourhoods is the product of medical practices, household economies and concepts of disease. Thus pharmaceutical use is determined as much by practices of dispensation and by how practitioners understand what constitutes therapy as by household understanding of the normal and the pathological. This paper uses both quantitative data and narrative interviews to provide an in-depth understanding of the circulation of pharmaceuticals within the life worlds of the urban poor. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary collection brings Gandhi's ideas into conversation with issues seldom discussed in Gandhi studies. The contributors engage with cross-cultural and cross-historical time periods, contributing in important ways to the ever-expanding field of Gandhi studies.

This handbook brings together a distinguished team of scholars from philosophy, theology, and religious studies to provide the first in-depth discussion of Vedanta and the many different systems of thought that make up this tradition of Indian philosophy. Emphasizing the historical development of Vedantic thought, it includes chapters on numerous classical Vedantic philosophies as well as the modern Vedantic views of Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and Romain Rolland. The volume offers careful hermeneutic analyses of how Vedantic texts have been interpreted, (...) and it addresses key issues and debates in Vedanta, including religious diversity, the nature of God, and the possibility of embodied liberation. Venturing into cross-philosophical and cross-cultural territory, it also brings Vedanta into dialogue with Saiva Nondualism as well as contemporary Western analytic philosophy. Highlighting current scholarly controversies and charting new paths of inquiry, this is an indispensable research guide for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of Vedanta and Indian philosophy. (shrink)

This paper problematizes the concept of individual autonomy in the on-going project of attempting to understand and construct global principles of bioethics. We argue that autonomy as it is commonly defined and interpreted, and the emphasis that is placed on it, presupposes an individualistic concept of the self, family, and community that arises out of a Euro-Western liberal tradition and that is often in tension with various non-Western perspectives. We conclude that a more globally dialogical approach to bioethics is required.

While numerous commentators have discussed Kant’s views on mysticism in general, very few of them have examined Kant’s specific views on different types of mystical experience. I suggest that Kant’s views on direct mystical experience differ substantially from his views on indirect mystical experience (IME). In this paper, I focus on Kant’s complex views on IME in both his pre-critical and critical writings and lectures. In the first section, I examine Kant’s early work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, where he defends (...) the possibility that the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s alleged visions of the spirit-world are veridical cases of IME. In the second section, I discuss Kant’s views on IME during his critical period. I first argue that the epistemology of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason accommodates the possibility of IME. I then examine Kant’s views on Swedenborgian visions in his lectures from the 1770s to the 1790s and argue that his critical views on Swedenborg are largely continuous with his pre-critical views in Dreams. Finally, I examine passages in Kant’s late works, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone and The Conflict of the Faculties, where he discusses three non-Swedenborgian types of IME. In the final section, I explore briefly how Kant’s views on IME relate to contemporary debates among analytic philosophers of religion regarding the nature and possibility of mystical experience. (shrink)

The Bhagavad Gītā has inspired more interpretive controversy than any other religious scripture in India’s history. The Gītā, a philosophical and spiritual poem of approximately seven hundred verses, is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata. In the Gītā, the Lord Kṛṣṇa, who appears in the form of a charioteer, imparts spiritual teachings to the warrior Arjuna and convinces him to fight in a just war that entails the slaughter of many of Arjuna’s own relatives and loved ones. Śaṅkara, (...) the great eighth-century champion of the Advaita school of philosophy, wrote the first extant commentary on the Gītā. In this commentary, Śaṅkara interpreted the Gītā strictly in accordance with Advaita.. (shrink)

How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every element of language from one place to another whether within a word, a character, a (...) sentence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is internal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe’s understanding of itself. (shrink)

This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition—Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno—attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. The aesthetic speculations of these thinkers, Maharaj argues, provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”— art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. The book has two interrelated aims. First, it provides new interpretations of the (...) aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in both Anglo-American and German scholarship. Second, it attempts to demonstrate that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. (shrink)

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the “oceanic feeling,” a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote (...) just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud—intentions less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda—were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical “science of the mind” that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science. (shrink)

This paper examines Swami Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s unique interpretation of smṛti as “mindfulness” (samanaskatā) in Patañjali’s Yogasūtra I.20. Focusing on his extended commentary on Yogasūtra I.20 in his Bengali magnum opus, the Pātañjaljogdarśan (1911), I argue that his interpretation of smṛti is quasi-Buddhistic. On the one hand, Hariharānanda’s conception of smṛti as mindfulness resonates strongly with some of the views on smṛti advanced in classic Buddhist texts such as the Satipaṭṭhānasutta and Buddaghośa’s Papañcasūdanī. On the other hand, he also builds into (...) his complex account of the practice of smṛti certain fundamental doctrines of Sāṃkhyayoga—such as mindfulness of the Lord (“īśvara”) and mental identification with the Puruṣa, the transcendental “Self” that is wholly independent of nature—which are incompatible with Buddhist metaphysics. I will then bring Hariharānanda’s quasi-Buddhistic interpretation of smṛti of Yogasūtra I.20 into dialogue with some of the interpretations of smṛti advanced by traditional commentators. Whereas many traditional commentators such as Vācaspati Miśra and Vijñānabhikṣu straightforwardly identify smṛti of I.20 with “dhyāna” (“concentration”)—the seventh limb of the aṣṭāṇgayoga outlined in Yogasūtra II.28-III.7—Hariharānanda argues that smṛti is the mental precondition for the establishment of dhyāna of the aṣṭāṇgayoga. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the sophisticated views on free will and determinism of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna and brings them into dialogue with the views of three western philosophers—namely, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Lord Kames and the contemporary analytic philosophers Saul Smilansky and Derk Pereboom. Sri Ramakrishna affirms hard theological determinism, the incompatibilist view that God determines everything we do and think. At the same time, however, he claims that God, in His infinite wisdom, has endowed ordinary unenlightened people (...) with the illusion of free will for the sake of their moral and spiritual welfare. Kames, I suggest, defends a theological determinist position remarkably similar to Sri Ramakrishna’s. However, I argue that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical orientation puts him in a better position than Kames to explain why a loving God would implant in us the illusion of free will in the first place. I then show how certain aspects of the views of Smilansky and Pereboom resonate with those of Sri Ramakrishna. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a burgeoning of interest in the relationship between Schopenhauer's philosophy and Indian thought.1 One major reason for this trend is the growing conviction among scholars that a careful understanding of Schopenhauer's complex—and evolving—engagement with Indian thought can help illuminate crucial aspects of Schopenhauer's own philosophy.2 The late nineteenth-century German scholars Paul Deussen and Max Hecker are widely acknowledged to be the pioneers in the field of Schopenhauer's relation to Indian thought. Deussen, thoroughly trained in both indology (...) and Western philosophy, was the first to bring Schopenhauer's philosophy into dialogue with Indian thought... (shrink)

This essay identifies salient points of affinity and divergence in the monistic metaphysics and skeptical methodologies of the German idealist Hegel and the Indian Advaitin Śrī Harṣa. Remarkably, both Śrī Harṣa’s Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (c. 1170) and Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) attempt to defend a monistic standpoint exclusively by means of a sustained critique of non-monistic philosophical positions. I will argue, however, that Śrī Harṣa and Hegel diverge sharply in their specific views on the powers and limits of philosophy and on (...) the precise nature of monistic reality. In stark contrast to Hegel, Śrī Harṣa rejects the very possibility of a philosophical justification of monism, since he claims that the non-dual reality of Brahman lies beyond reason. Moreover, while Hegel drives a wedge between thought and empirical praxis, Śrī Harṣa insists that how we think and reason depends on the nature of our mind, which is itself conditioned by how we live. (shrink)