I propose in this paper to examine and analyse the concept of śūnyatā as it is expressed in the Hrdaya sūtras of the Buddhist prajñā-pāramitā literature and in the Mū1amadhyamaka-kārikās of Nāgārjuna. I shall attempt to show some of the difficulties involved in seeking an objective referent or counter part for the concept and also in trying to preserve the tension implicit in the affirmation of the middle way. I hope to indicate that the via negativa approach has positive implications (...) for the understanding of śūnyatā and that in the final analysis we may have to look for its meaning in the way it is used. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the conceptions of the self to be found in Wittgenstein, Hume and Buddhism and to draw comparisons between them. I aim to show that Wittgenstein’s arguments against the Cartesian model of the self find some parallels in the Pudgalavādin controversy within Buddhism, and that Hume’s rejection of the notion of the self as an abiding entity and his claim that the self is simply a bundle or collection of distinct (...) impressions and ideas bears a certain resemblance to the Buddhist doctrine of anatta. The motivation for propounding these notions of the self clearly differs in each case but this does not detract from or affect the way in which I have attempted to draw comparisons. For the sake of clarity the paper will be divided into three sections, but the interrelation between the sections and the unity of the whole is hopefully preserved by the comparisons I have attempted to draw. (shrink)

It is difficult to understand Gandhi's philosophy without some kind of idea of what he means by Truth. When I put the question of what he meant by Truth to some of his followers in India the replies I received showed quite clearly that his concept of Truth was linked to the concepts of dharma and rta. What this would seem to point to is that his understanding of Truth is something that is acquired within his own form of life (...) and that his experiments with Truth are ultimately determined by his understanding of the Hindu religious tradition. This is not to say that insights from other religious traditions did not influence his apprehension of Truth: his acknowledgement of those influences is sufficient in itself to substantiate that claim. But it is clear that it would not be possible to understand his concept of Truth without some understanding of the tradition in which he was nurtured and which determined his way of life. (shrink)

This in-depth study of Gandhi's philosophy of education examines the modern nature of his thought. In addition, it relates his intriguing philosophy to his views on Swaraj, religion, and reform. Sure to spark interest among readers of Gandhi, this book will undoubtedly appeal to all those wanting a better understanding of education in general, and of the attainment of knowledge.

These studies in religion, which include comparisons of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian themes, examine the spiritual insights and philosophical reflections of prominent thinkers from different religious traditions.

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In this article, we focus on the mentoring process, and we argue that the internal and external pressures extant at research universities may create a research culture that may be antithetical to appropriate mentoring. We developed a scale based on motivation theory to determine the perceived research culture in departments and research laboratories, and a mentoring scale to determine approaches to mentoring graduate students. Participants were 610 faculty members across 49 departments at a research oriented university. The findings were that (...) a mastery-oriented research climate and an outcome-oriented research climate were manifested at the university. More importantly, each research climate had its own unique impact on how the faculty approached mentoring graduate students. A mastery research climate was related to a more supportive approach to mentoring than the outcome research climate. We concluded by suggesting that the outcome research climate may have an adverse effect on effective mentoring and on maintaining research ethics. (shrink)

If all dependent expressions were adjacent some variety of immediate constituent analysis would suffice for grammar, but syntactic and semantic mismatches are characteristic of natural language; indeed this is a, or the, central problem in grammar. Logical categorial grammar reduces grammar to logic: an expression is well-formed if and only if an associated sequent is a theorem of a categorial logic. The paradigmatic categorial logic is the Lambek calculus, but being a logic of concatenation the Lambek calculus can only capture (...) discontinuous dependencies when they are peripheral. In this paper we present the displacement calculus, which is a logic of intercalation as well as concatenation and which subsumes the Lambek calculus. On the empirical side, we apply the new calculus to discontinuous idioms, quantification, VP ellipsis, medial extraction, pied-piping, appositive relativisation, parentheticals, gapping, comparative subdeletion, cross-serial dependencies, reflexivization, anaphora, dative alternation, and particle shift. On the technical side, we prove that the calculus enjoys Cut-elimination. (shrink)

\ is a 7000 line Prolog parser/theorem-prover for logical categorial grammar. In such logical categorial grammar syntax is universal and grammar is reduced to logic: an expression is grammatical if and only if an associated logical statement is a theorem of a fixed calculus. Since the syntactic component is invariant, being the logic of the calculus, logical categorial grammar is purely lexicalist and a particular language model is defined by just a lexical dictionary. The foundational logic of continuity was established (...) by Lambek while a corresponding extension including also logic of discontinuity was established by Morrill and Valentín :167–192, 2010). \ implements a logic including as primitive connectives the continuous and discontinuous connectives of the displacement calculus, additives, 1st order quantifiers, normal modalities, bracket modalities, and universal and existential subexponentials. In this paper we review the rules of inference for these primitive connectives and their linguistic applications, and we survey the principles of Andreoli’s focusing, and of a generalisation of van Benthem’s count-invariance, on the basis of which \ is implemented. (shrink)