There has been in recent decades very substantial work done on the concept of a nation, nationality and nationalism. In spite of the world coming together on many fronts—particularly, economy and a multicultural habitat formations especially in Europe and North America—these ideas remain politically volatile. In modern times, the idea of a nation has become powerfully associated with the idea of the state and the two notions are frequently used almost interchangeably. If among the emotional ties that form the basis (...) of the idea of a nation, we add a strong sense of belonging to a specific culture with its own history, traditions and the sharing of ethical and aesthetic values—it may quite naturally lead to the idea of one-nation, one-state and one culture. Such indeed has been a trend in the European concept of the idea of a nation of the 18th, 19th and partly of the twentieth century. However, same cannot be said about Indian nation. If we closely look at the growth of Indian nationalism in the backdrop of anti-colonial movement and formation of Indian state after gaining independence, we find lack of unanimity among thinkers. This paper explores the growth of Indian Nationalism and formation of Indian Nation through the eyes of one of the most seminal contemporary Indian thinkers Sri Aurobindo. (shrink)

SummaryExamining waiting time to birth among newlywed couples is likely to provide insights into the desire for spacing births among newlywed husbands and wives. Data from the Indian National Family Health Survey of 2005–06 are used to examine the desired waiting time to birth among newlywed couples. The dependent variable is spousal concordance on desired waiting times. Overall 65% of couples have concordant desired waiting times. Among discordant couples, wives were more likely to want to wait longer than their husbands. (...) Couples from richer wealth quintiles were more likely than couples from the poorest quintile to have concordant desired waiting times. Muslims were less likely than Hindus to have concordant desires. There is a need for spacing contraceptive methods among newlyweds in India. This may have implications for the Indian Family Planning Programme, which to date has largely focused on sterilization. Programmes need to include newlywed husbands to promote use of spacing methods. (shrink)

Most of the theories of rights propounded by philosophers, right from the beginning till the twentieth century, conceive rights either as a claim against the state or an obligation upon the state. Certainly such a conception has had something to do with the prevailing social, political and economic systems of the time concerned. Social, political and economic systems also had a particular relationship amongst them. Change in individual and social perspectives, values, priorities and beliefs has affected the philosophy of right. (...) From the ages of Locke and Hobbes when natural right was taken in obvious terms to the times of communitarians like Michael Sandel and thinkers like Ronald Dworkin the term “Right” has earned many dimensions. Progress and changing arrangements of systems complicates the status of a philosophical theory of rights propounded at a particular time, in the sense that its losses its teeth in any new found milieu. This paper evaluates the notion of abstract universalism of individual rights in the light of Gandhian notion of duty. (shrink)

This study provides a bibliometric analysis of the DESIDOC journal of library and information technology during 2012–2022. Research data for this study has been exported from the SCOPUS database. A total of 638 articles published during the study period were analyzed to determine the most cited articles, most prolific author, growth of publication, occurrence of keywords, citation pattern, and authorship pattern. To visualize the occurrence of keywords and the co-citation of the author network, Vosviewer software was used. This study also (...) reveals that bibliometric, scientometrics, e-resource, and citation analysis are the most prolific research areas. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an account of the reasons for which we act, believe, and so on for any Ф such that there can be reasons for which we Ф. Such reasons are standardly called motivating reasons. I argue that three dominant views of motivating reasons (psychologism, factualism and disjunctivism) all fail to capture the ordinary concept of a motivating reason. I show this by drawing out three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and demonstrating how each view (...) fails to satisfy at least one of these constraints. I then propose and defend my own account of motivating reasons, which I call the Guise of Normative Reasons Account. On the account I defend, motivating reasons are propositions. A proposition is the reason for which someone Ф‐s when (a) she represents that proposition as a normative reason to Ф, and (b) her representation explains, in the right way, her Ф‐ing. As I argue, the Guise of Normative Reasons Account satisfies all three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and weathers several objections that might be leveled against propositionalist views. (shrink)

The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evokes sympathetic joy. It establishes the protagonist as an ideal cooperative partner pursuing a goal, appealing to mechanisms (...) for helping. When the protagonist succeeds, they receive rewards, and audiences feel sympathetic joy, an emotion normally triggered when beneficiaries triumph. The capacities underlying the sympathetic plot evolved for learning and cooperation before being co-opted for entertainment. (shrink)

Business ethics has been described as a prime academic growth industry. This paper reports the findings of a survey aimed at establishing the status of ethics in the curricula of Canadian Schools of Management and Administrative Studies. It was found that twenty-three of the forty-two responding schools offer courses in business ethics and that they offer a total of twenty-five ethics courses, twenty of which are offered as electives. Forty-two percent of the schools not offering a course in business ethics (...) plan to offer such a course by 1989. This means that by 1989 seventy-four percent of the responding schools should have a business ethics component in their curricula. (shrink)

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno discusses the progressive spiritualization of art over the course of two centuries. By excluding natural beauty, art established itself as a realm of freedom created by the autonomous subject. Yet, similar to the process of rationalization that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, spiritualization also exposes the autonomy of art to the return of the repressed. In this paper, I establish a distinction in Adorno's work between spiritualization in its traditional sense, which designates (...) this cycle of repression and return, and spiritualization in its radical sense, as the process that turns art against its history of domination. Spiritualization in this latter sense is the basis for an encounter with the repressed that exhibits a non- dominating stance toward otherness. (shrink)

This book critically analyses the "mutual illuminations" between literature, religion, architecture, films, performative arts, paintings, woodworks, memes and masks cutting across time and space. In architecture for example, the eventual success of a project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building material, the local climate, and awareness of cultural sensibilities. This volume affirms that aesthetics and arts are deeply linked through existential issues of who I am. The essays in this volume present (...) diverse discursive structures showcasing the in-between spaces between various art forms and mediums, such as, architecture, literature and memory, Kafka in SoHo; Kafka and Bernhard, Kirchner's woodcuts; pictorial and stage representations of E.T.A Hoffmann, Hesse's fairy tales; translations of Pañcatantra; Nietzsche, ritual arts and face masks; martyrdom in La chanson de Roland, Goethe and Hafiz, Indian thought in Martin Buber; Rhythms of the 'Third' across cultures; Dadaism and contemporary memes This book examines these sublime linkages in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. Engaging and intersectional, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of arts and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sociology, translation studies and readers who are interested in cultural, intertextual, intermedial, and comparative studies. (shrink)

Conversations with The Universe: How the World Speaks to Us reveals how repetitions, coincidence and synchronicity are part of a personal conversation from the Universe, intended to provide ease and guidance. We are not alone, nor have we been creating life experiences on our own. There is a co-creative Universal Intelligence who is very much involved and continually seeking a dialogue. The problem is not so much the life challenges, but our own individual lack of communication with our co-creator.

An attempt has been made in this paper to trace Gandhi's principle of 'nonviolence' in the context of 'Enlightenment Rationality' on the one hand and 'Globalization' on the other. The ideas of freedom/independence, autonomy, sovereignty, property, maturity/adulthood, public and private, tolerance, scientific rationality, secularism, humanism, democracy, nation/ state, universality of moral actions, humanity as an end in itself, critique of religion, etc., are the most operative terms of European Enlightenment of the 19th century. Though these ideas evolved and developed in (...) Europe, yet they proliferated beyond Europe to other continents and subcontinents. Gandhi appreciated these ideas and like a genius, he interpreted them into indigenous concepts and principles such as truth, simplicity, faith, brahmacharya, purushartha, satyagraha, swaraj, karma, compassion, trusteeship, vegetarianism/fruitarianism and above all nonviolence with the aim of attaining swaraj - victory over one's passions, lusts, greed, etc., and independence and sovereignty of the country. I may point out, though I shall not be in a position to develop it here, that the basic concepts of the Enlightenment were questioned and repudiated by Marx, Engels and Lenin on the one hand and the critical theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas on the other. In the era of globalization, the Enlightenment concepts have become almost obsolete. But Gandhi's principles are still valid. These are the only viable principles to resolve moral dilemmas that everybody faces, being constantly confronted by equally valid alternatives in globalization. Hence I'll propose a modest critique of the Enlightenment and the globalization from Gandhi's perspective of nonviolence. (shrink)

Along with political, economic, ethical, rehabilitative and military dimensions, psychopathological sequelae of war and terrorism also deserve our attention. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre ( W.T.C.) in 2001 and the Gulf War of 1990-91 gave rise to a number of psychiatric disturbances in the population, both adult and children, mainly in the form of Post-traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). Nearly 75,000 people suffered psychological problems in South Manhattan alone due to that one terrorist attack on the WTC in (...) New York and the Pentagon in Washington. In Gulf War I, more that 1,00,000 US veterans reported a number of health problems on returning from war, whose claims the concerned government has denied in more than 90% cases. Extensive and comprehensive neurological damage to the brain of Gulf War I veterans has been reported by one study, as has damage to the basal ganglia in another, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in a third, possibly due to genetic mutations induced by exposure to biological and chemical agents, fumes from burning oil wells, landfills, mustard or other nerve gases. The recent Gulf War will no doubt give rise its own crop of PTSD and related disorders. In a cost-benefit analysis of the post Gulf War II scenario, the psychopathological effects of war and terrorism should become part of the social audit any civilized society engages in. Enlightened public opinion must become aware of the wider ramifications of war and terrorism so that appropriate action plans can be worked out. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the vernacular science periodical emerged as a key medium for building science-literate publics in colonial South Asia. This article argues that the Hindi science monthly Vigyan became a discursive laboratory for experiments with language, literary genres, narrative plots, and settings to create culturally grounded science lessons for Hindi readers in the mid-1910s. I focus on the writings of Prem Vallabh Joshi, a pandit, science graduate, and small town teacher, who experimented with distinct literary genres to (...) create a sensibility for science – an experimental temper – amongst Vigyan’s readers. Through his strategic use of scientific experiments in the “history of” a particular branch of knowledge, detective mysteries, and the genre of the fictionalized dialogue, Joshi inducted colonial readers into experimental culture and global scientific modernity. As a reflexive participant in the ongoing confrontation between “Western” science and Hindu śāstra in colonial society, Joshi staged a fictional encounter between the experimental demonstration of the iconic air-pump and the textual authority of śāstra. This article examines the encounter between sastric commitments and scientific sensibilities and their conjoined mobilization in Vigyan in the era of linguistic nationalism. In this colonial vernacular publishing culture, the serial possibilities of the periodical and the history of science itself became critical resources in the ontological confrontations between experimental science and traditional authority. (shrink)

This study examines on the basis of historical evidence the ethical perceptions of the Sikh community at the turn of the last century.

This book portrays the Supreme Reality in five facets, discusses the issues of Divine Ordinance and Grace, humanism and peace, suffering and death from Sikh perspective.

The relationship between ethical ideology and job stress appears to be complex. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39:175, 1980), showing two dimensions (idealism and relativism) that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Based on a survey of 561 employees of hotel industry in India, ethical ideologies were found to be negatively associated with job stress. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and multiple regressions. The result (...) showed that relativism is negatively correlated with job stress. Further, it has been established that idealism and relativism interacted in such a way that there is a negative relationship between idealism and job stress when relativism is low and positive relationship when relativism is high. The findings imply that ethical ideology adversely influences the job stress in the organization. (shrink)

Dennett (_Synthese,_ _53_(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, _Journal of Consciousness Studies,_ _10_(9–10), 19–30, 2003, _Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _6_, 247–270, 2007 ) proposes and defends a method called _heterophenomenology_. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness _from a third-person objective point of view_ as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett’s schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this (...) paper, I attempt to present a limited critique of the method of heterophenomenology. The objection raised in this paper is limited to one of the steps involved in the method, i.e., the interpretation of the heterophenomenological text as analogous to novelist fiction. I attempt to show that the assumptions made by Dennett about the interpretation of fiction are contradictory in nature and therefore the same cannot be applied to the interpretation of a heterophenomenological text. The assumptions fail in justifying the interpretation of fiction itself and hence exporting them by analogy to interpret a heterophenomenological text is a mistake. (shrink)

Observational discrepancies in galactic rotation curves and cluster dispersion data have been interpreted to imply the existence of dark matter. Numerous efforts at its detection, however, have failed to turn up any positive result. As a dynamical theory is always operative on the assumed mass distribution to predict kinematic observations, some scientists see the discrepancy as telling against General Relativity. Among the many theories that seek to modify gravity, those that are built on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), or yield MOND (...) behaviour at appropriate scales, achieve remarkable empirical success without assuming dark matter. The continued non-detection of dark matter and the empirical success of MOND supports the claim that the current evidential and theoretical context underdetermines General Relativity. In this article, I clarify the kind of underdetermination that can be said to threaten General Relativity. Specifically, I argue that the present evidential and theoretical context increase the possibility of an unconceived alternative to GR which would be just as well supported by the available evidence. (shrink)

The capacity to generate recursive sequences is a marker of rich, algorithmic cognition, and perhaps unique to humans. Yet, the precise processes driving recursive sequence generation remain mysterious. We investigated three potential cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. We developed a Bayesian mixture model to quantify the extent to which these three cognitive mechanisms contribute to adult humans’ performance in a sequence generation task. We further tested whether recursive rule discovery depends upon relational (...) information, either perceptual or semantic. We found that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and drives the generation of recursive sequences across novel depths of center embedding. In the absence of relational information, the use of ordinal reasoning predominates. Our results suggest that hierarchical reasoning is an important cognitive mechanism underlying recursive pattern processing and can be deployed across embedding depths and relational domains. (shrink)

Recent advances in genomic and imaging techniques have revealed the complex manner of organizing billions of base pairs of DNA necessary for maintaining their functionality and ensuring the proper expression of genetic information. The SMC proteins and cohesin complex primarily contribute to forming higher‐order chromatin structures, such as chromosomal territories, compartments, topologically associating domains (TADs) and chromatin loops anchored by CCCTC‐binding factor (CTCF) protein or other genome organizers. Cohesin plays a fundamental role in chromatin organization, gene expression and regulation. This (...) review aims to describe the current understanding of the dynamic nature of the cohesin‐DNA complex and its dependence on cohesin for genome maintenance. We discuss the current 3C technique and numerous bioinformatics pipelines used to comprehend structural genomics and epigenetics focusing on the analysis of Cohesin‐centred interactions. We also incorporate our present comprehension of Loop Extrusion (LE) and insights from stochastic modelling. (shrink)

I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be beneficial for science as a whole. However, such a change can come at the cost of looking beyond the categories of the disciplines of logic, philosophy and physics. It is through self-inquiry that such a change is possible, along with the realization of the (...) essence of the middle that is otherwise excluded by choice. The logician, who generally holds a reverential attitude towards the physicist, can then actively contribute to the betterment of physics by improving the language through which the physicist expresses his experience. The philosopher, who otherwise chooses to follow the advancement of physics and gets stuck in the trap of sophistication of language, can then be of guidance to the physicist on intellectual grounds by having the physicist’s experience himself. In course of this commentary, I provide a glimpse of how a truthful conversion of verbal statements to physico-mathematical expressions unravels the hitherto unrealized connection between Heisenberg uncertainty relation and Cauchy’s definition of derivative that is used in physics. The commentary can be an essential reading if the reader is willing to look beyond the categories of logic, philosophy and physics by being ‘nobody’. (shrink)

Physical dimensions like “mass”, “length”, “charge”, represented by the symbols [M], [L], [Q], are not numbers, but used as numbers to perform dimensional analysis in particular, and to write the equations of physics in general, by the physicist. The law of excluded middle falls short of explaining the contradictory meanings of the same symbols. The statements like “m tends to 0”, “r tends to 0”, “q tends to 0”, used by the physicist, are inconsistent on dimensional grounds because “m”, “r”, (...) “q” represent quantities with physical dimensions of [M], [L], [Q] respectively and “0” represents just a number—devoid of physical dimension. Consequently, due to the involvement of the statement “q tends to 0'', where q is the test charge” in the definition of electric field leads to either circular reasoning or a contradiction regarding the experimental verification of the smallest charge in the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. Considering such issues as problematic, by choice, I make an inquiry regarding the basic language in terms of which physics is written, with an aim of exploring how truthfully the verbal statements can be converted to the corresponding physico-mathematical expressions, where “physico-mathematical” signifies the involvement of physical dimensions. Such investigation necessitates an explanation by demonstration of “self inquiry”, “middle way”, “dependent origination”, “emptiness/relational existence”, which are certain terms that signify the basic tenets of Buddhism. In light of such demonstration I explain my view of “definition”; the relations among quantity, physical dimension and number; meaninglessness of “zero quantity” and the associated logico-linguistic fallacy; difference between unit and unity. Considering the importance of the notion of electric field in physics, I present a critical analysis of the definitions of electric field due to Maxwell and Jackson, along with the physico-mathematical conversions of the verbal statements. The analysis of Jackson’s definition points towards an expression of the electric field as an infinite series due to the associated “limiting process” of the test charge. However, it brings out the necessity of a postulate regarding the existence of charges, which nevertheless follows from the definition of quantity. Consequently, I explain the notion of undecidable charges that act as the middle way to resolve the contradiction regarding the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. In passing, I provide a logico-linguistic analysis, in physico-mathematical terms, of two verbal statements of Maxwell in relation to his definition of electric field, which suggests Maxwell’s conception of dependent origination of distance and charge ) and that of emptiness in the context of relative vacuum. This work is an appeal for the dissociation of the categorical disciplines of logic and physics and on the large, a fruitful merger of Eastern philosophy and Western science. Nevertheless, it remains open to how the reader relates to this work, which is the essence of emptiness. (shrink)