This essay serves as an intellectual biographical introduction to the special issue devoted to one of the leading Russian contemporary philosophers, Vyacheclav S. Stepin. The essay discusses Stepin's philosophical works and his chief contributions to such fields as philosophy and methodology of science, epistemology, and philosophical ontology among others. The authors also reflect on Stepin's academic leadership and his role as an organizer of research in philosophy in the contemporary Russia.

The author presents the previously unknown text of the outstanding Soviet philosopher and historian of science Boris Mikhailovich Hessen. The author analyzes the report of Boris M. Hessen at the Second international Congress on the history of science and technology in London (1931). He considers as well some published works of B.M. Hessen, mainly his book on the philosophical interpretation of the theory of relativity. He argues that it is time to start introducing unpublished texts by B.M. Hessen into scientific (...) circulation. This will make the study of his work more thorough and increase the reliability of conclusions made by specialists in Hessen’s legacy. This publication offers the reader the text of B.M. Hessen, extracted from the archive: the report of B.M. Hessen at a meeting of the Presidium of the Communist Academy about the trip to the London Congress. (shrink)

Biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1895-1986, Indian philosopher.

Life and works of Vācaspatimiśra, fl. 976-1000, Hindu philosopher; with special reference to his contribution to the Advaita school.

Study of Śivasvarodaya, work on yoga; includes original Sanskrit text with English translation.

In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of medical classification, arguing for stronger recognition of those links in a liberal model of medical practice. All judgments of medical or psychiatric "dysfunction," I argue, are fundamentally evaluative, reflecting our collective willingness or reluctance to tolerate and/or accommodate the conditions in question. Illness, then, is "socially constructed." But the relativist worries that this loaded phrase evokes are unfounded; patients, doctors, and communities will agree in (...) the vast majority of cases about what counts as illness. Where they cannot come to agreement, however, we are faced with precisely the sort of dispute about values and ways of life that the institutions of the liberal state are designed to accommodate. I accordingly sketch a model of medical practice, based loosely on Jürgen Habermas's political theories, designed to maximize both our awareness and our understanding of these disputes. (shrink)

?Emergence? can be analyzed into evolutionary and developmental kinds. The latter can be further analyzed into intensional and extensional kinds of emergence. Evolutionary emergence occurs each time a uniqueness enters the world. Intensional emergence (supervenience) explicitly involves the categories of an observer. Extensional emergence (cohesion) is constructed as an attempt to see developmental emergence as a result of the imposition of larger scale constraints on a system. In all cases there is a sudden jump from pre?emergent to post?emergent stages so (...) that the transformation may be said to defy continuous description, which is also hampered by the fact that knowledge of properties of the pre?emergent condition alone does not allow us to predict post?emergent properties. (shrink)

Treatise with auto-commentary on Dvaita philosophy.

Individual semiotic systems interpreting their environment are not well understood from the externalist approach typical of the scientific method. Science constructs probabilities describing large populations of systems, not individuals. The Umwelt, as the individually experienced/created aspects of the habitat aspect of its population’s ecological niche, is given an internalist understanding within the framework of the compositional hierarchy. Vagueness is an important aspect of the internalist condition. It is selectively reduced momentarily by creative choices that can have a Peircean semiotic formulation, (...) and which are often unpredictable externally, thereby appearing to be chance events. (shrink)

v. 1. Aesthetic beauty & bliss in Indian literature & philosophy -- v. 2. Two streams of Indian Art. pt. 1. History, thoughts, and canon of Indian iconography -- pt. 2. The Tāntrika iconography -- pt. 3. Indian gesturology -- pt. 4. Primitive arts, crafts, and ālpanā.