Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya, a Bengali Brahmin, was born in 1875 at Serampore near Calcutta, one of eight children of an impoverished clerk Educated at Presidency College in Calcutta, he studied under B. N. Seal, who had revived the study of Indian philosophy. He was a brilliant student clearly destined for an academic career, but his unwillingness to appease British administrators prevented his obtaining an appointment commensurate with his ability, and he held a variety of teaching and administrative positions in government (...) colleges. When he reached the retirement age of 55, he was principal of small Hoogly College. After retirement, however, he became professor in the Calcutta post-graduate department, spent two years at the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner, and finally became George V Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calcutta. After final retirement in 1938 he lived at Serampore, reading little because of failing sight, but writing a great deal and discussing philosophy with his sons and his many visitors until his death in 1949. (shrink)

T. R. V. Murti is a Tamil Brahmin. He was born at Madras in 1902, and educated at Trichinopoly Christian College, which he left before graduating to commence five years of Congress Party work. He was in jail five months. In 1925 he came to Benares, where he studied the Sanskrit classics with pandits and gurus. He then completed his undergraduate course at Benares Hindu University, receiving his A.B. and M.A. together in 1929. From 1929 to 1936 he was a (...) fellow at the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner. Here he came under the influence of Professor K. C. Bhattacharya, and was considered to be, among the philosophers at Amalner, the one who best understood the Professor's teaching. In 1936 he returned to Benares Hindu University for advanced study, and later was appointed Sayaji Rao Gaekwad Professor of Indian Civilization and Culture. He has been there since, except for three years on leave as professor of philosophy at Colombo and one year as Spalding Professor of Oriental Religions at Oxford. (shrink)

Although a personal god of mixed moral character is logically possible, no personal god that has been represented as less than wholly good has gained more than a strictly local appeal. The Judaeo-Christian god is no exception. The god is represented as merciful, kind, longsuffering, forgiving, loving - in a word, wholly good. Of course, representing a god as wholly good is one thing; providing a convincing defence of his goodness is quite another. Indeed, many would contend that of all (...) the defences provided within the Judaeo-Christian system, the defence of the goodness of God is the least convincing. (shrink)

Dreyfus examines the central ideas of Dharmakīrti, one of the most important Indian Buddhist philosophers, and their reception among Tibetan thinkers. During the golden age of ancient Indian civilization, Dharmakīrti articulated and defended Buddhist philosophical principles. He did so more systematically than anyone before his time (the seventh century CE) and was followed by a rich tradition of profound thinkers in India and Tibet. This work presents a detailed picture of this Buddhist tradition and its relevance to the history of (...) human ideas. Its perspective is mostly philosophical, but it also uses historical considerations as they relate to the evolution of ideas. (shrink)

What is it to be a woman? What is it to be a man? We start by laying out desiderata for an analysis of 'woman' and 'man': descriptively, it should link these gender categories to sex biology without reducing them to sex biology, and politically, it should help us explain and combat traditional sexism while also allowing us to make sense of the activist view that gendering should be consensual. Using a Putnam-style 'Twin Earth' example, we argue that none of (...) the existing analyses in the feminist literature succeeds in meeting all of our desiderata. Finally, we propose a positive account that we believe can satisfy all the desiderata outlined. According to our theory, the genders 'woman' and 'man' are individuated not by their contemporary connections to sex biology, but by their historical continuity with classes that were originally closely connected to sex biology. (shrink)

This article presents a new criticisms of reductive approaches to knowledge-‘wh’ (i.e., those approaches on which whether one stands in the knowledge-‘wh’ relation to a question is determined by whether one stands in the knowledge-‘that’ relation to some answer(s) to the question). It argues in particular that the truth of a knowledge-‘wh’ attribution like ‘Janna knows where she can buy an Italian newspaper’ depends not only on what Janna knows about the availability of Italian newspapers, but on what she believes (...) about the matter. This dependence of Janna's knowledge-‘wh’ on her (possibly false) beliefs is incompatible with the reductive approach. (shrink)

To date, there have been few attempts to compare the thought of Confucius and Kierkegaard, and these few attempts have focused on the contrast between Kierkegaard’s stress on the individual and Confucius’s emphasis on the social aspect of human existence. In this article, I point instead to substantial agreement between the analyses of ethical existence offered by Confucius and two of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous figures, Judge William of Either/Or and Johannes Climacus of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript . I seek to use (...) this parallelism to better discern the specific character of Confucius’s religious consciousness. (shrink)

(Added April 2023: This draft is superseded by Briggs, R.A., & George, B.R. (2023). 'What Even Is Gender?'. Routledge. DOI 10.4324/9781003053330, and in particular by the first three chapters thereof. While this much earlier draft remains available for archival purposes, you are encouraged to read and cite the 2023 book and to use its terminology.) -/- This paper presents a new taxonomy of sex/gender concepts based on the idea of starting with a few basic components of the sex/gender system, (...) and exhausting the possible types of simple associations and identities based on these. The resulting system is significantly more fine-grained than most competitors, and helps to clarify a number of points of confusion and conceptual tension in academic and activist conversations about feminism, transgender politics, and the social analysis of gender. (shrink)

The passage containing this verb is in Resp. v. 450 B: χρυσοχοxs22EFσοντας οxs1F34ει τοxs22EFσδε νxs22EFν xs22EFνθxs22EFδε xs22EFφxs1FD6χθαι,xs22EFλλ’ οxs1F50 λxs22EFγων xs22EFκουσομxs22EFνους; The situation is dramatic. Socrates, to his own mind, has just finished a discussion of the one part of his ideal state, and is intending to go on to the other. Polemarchus, however, seizes him by the cloak and at the same time whispers to Adeimantus. Then Adeimantus tells Socrates that they will hold him by force, until he explains further (...) some words of his that have aroused their interest, and finally Thrasymachus adds that they are unanimous in this decision. Socrates replies that they know not what a swarm of explanations they are stirring up. ‘Seeing this swarm,’ says he, ‘I let it pass, that it might not bother us greatly.’ Then Thrasymachus replies: ‘But do you think these persons have come here for gold-hunting , and not to hear explanations?’. (shrink)

The paper develops an understanding of empathy by considering the role of time in distinct empathic situations. Beginning with a brief review of the history of the concept of empathy the argument proceeds to the notion that empathy entails the universalization of an individual's experience. This results in the domination of the experience of the other by appeal to what is termed the "always." Depth psychology, especially in its Jungian form, shows us that empathy can in fact take this highly (...) negative form by way of projection. The association of empathy and projection brings us to the question of how one confronts the death of the other in an empathic manner. Here the problem of one's individual temporality becomes crucial. In order to retain the unique and the personal experience of one's own death as a prospect in the future it is necessary to overcome any empathic relationship to the person who has died. This necessity gives rise to a hermeneutic of empathy which seeks to overcome the experience of the "always." CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper we use the contemporary example of trans youth panics to introduce the notion of hermeneutical backlash, in which defenders of an established, unjust hermeneutical regime actively work to undermine and discredit hermeneutical liberation. We argue that the strategies and tropes of the trans youth panic illustrate a general propaganda vulnerability of epistemic liberation movements, and so are troubling for reasons that go beyond their application to trans youth. This exploration of a few specific cases of hermeneutical liberation (...) and hermeneutical backlash calls attention to the need for further theoretical work on the dynamics of struggles for hermeneutical justice. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that it is required only occasionally for sanitary reasons and not legally mandatory, the practice of embalming is widespread in contemporary American society. This study explores the historical, cultural and psychological factors which gave rise to the practice of embalming and why the practice continues. Two case studies are presented in which delayed grief reactions were present; linkages with embalming are described. It is suggested that the frightening finitude of the self and a fear of (...) death in modern society have led to practices in which the corpse is viewed as looking natural, thus denying the reality of death. Embalming is seen as the final assault on the self, which can also carry with it problematic psychological consequences for the survivors. (shrink)

It is assumed that the coupling of the field quantities Dμv (x) and F αβ (x) is nonlocal. This hypothesis leads to a theory of an electromagnetic field that has the following properties.(1) The source of the field F αβ (x) exhibits a center of charge and a center of mass that do not coincide, in general.(2) The field componentF 0i=−c2Ei is regular at the origin.(3) In the first-order approximation the new field equations are equivalent to the conventional Maxwell field (...) equations.(4) The conventional cutoff procedure in momentum space as practiced in the Maxwell-Lorentz theory is equivalent to the first-order approximation in terms of an invariant length ξ2.(5) The gyromagnetic ratio of the source of F αβ (x) is equal toc/mc for a quantum of chargee and massm. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the mode of operation and aim of debates in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions. I contrast the probative form of argument that was privileged by the Indian tradition to the more agonic practice favored by Tibetan scholastics. I also examine the rules that preside over this dialectical practice, which is seen by the Tibetan tradition as essential to a proper scholastic education. I argue, however, that the practice of debates cannot be reduced to this dialectical model, (...) for it has an important performative aspect not easily encompassed by the rules. I examine this aspect of Tibetan debates, focusing particularly on the role of humor. I conclude with a few remarks on the type of rationality entailed by the importance of humor and of other rhetorical elements involved in Tibetan debates. (shrink)

This paper considers two of the most prominent kinds of evidence that have been used to argue that certain embedded questions receive weakly exhaustive interpretations. The first kind is exemplified by judgments of consistency for declarative sentences that attribute knowledge of a wh-question and ignorance of the negation of that question to the same person, and the second concerns asymmetries between the role of positive and negative information in validating question-embedding surprise ascriptions, and similar judgments for other attitudes. I argue (...) that neither type suffices to show weak exhaustivity. The first can be analyzed in terms of strong exhaustivity in combination with domain restriction effects, while the second can be analyzed in terms of a mention-some interpretation. These kinds of evidence have served as the empirical basis for many claims about weakly exhaustive readings, so the observation that they are unreliable calls into questions a large body of established work on the semantics of question embedding. (shrink)

In this article we attend to recent critiques of psychometric applications of life history theory to variance among humans and develop theory to advance the study of latent LH constructs. We then reanalyze data previously examined by Richardson et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704916666840 to determine whether previously reported evidence of multidimensionality is robust to the modeling approach employed and the structure of LH indicators is invariant by sex. Findings provide further evidence that a single LH dimension is implausible and that researchers (...) should cease interpreting K-factor scores as empirical proxies for LH speed. In contrast to the original study, we detected a small inverse correlation between mating competition and Super-K that is consistent with a trade-off. Tests of measurement invariance across the sexes revealed evidence of metric invariance, consistent with the theory that K is a proximate cause of its indicators; however, evidence of partial scalar invariance suggests use of scores likely introduces bias when the sexes are compared. We discuss limitations and identify approaches that researchers may use to further evaluate the validity of the K-factor and other applications of LH to human variation. (shrink)