Contributed articles on Indic philosophy, Vedic grammer, and classical Sanskrit literature; includes some on the life of Kr̥ṣṇa Mādho Jha, Sanskrit scholar.

For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves (...) upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built. (shrink)

Selected works of Gorakhanātha, exponent of the Natha sect in Hinduism and Hindi poet; includes study of his life and works.

Critical study, with text and commentary of Vedāntasiddhāntamuktāvalī of Prakāśānanda, 16th cent., of Vendānta philosophy.

Polanyi’s philosophy of “man in thought,” by all appearances, chronologically and structurally, seems to be founded on his epistemology. Polanyi’s epistemology of tacit knowing as integration is teleological. By his “ontological equation,” he patterned comprehensive (and complex) entities as emergence on his epistemology. This forces him to make puzzling formulaic statements which land him in trouble with fellow scientists. The equation also lends itself to unwarranted problematic interpretations. The exploration leads me to suggest that Polanyi may be understood as a (...) “rational realist” who insisted on a tacit knowledge version of interactionist mode of mind-body relation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bucky Flies, Almost!Govinda SrinivasanOne day Bucky the monkey saw birds high up in the sky. He was looking at the Harpy Eagle soaring beautifully in the sky. He wished he too could fly like that. He knew how to get to the top of the canopy, but then how to fly free in the sky? That was the great problem. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page (...) 109]Now he looked at himself and said, “I don’t have any wings. But I do have a tail for balance.” He wagged his tail with joy. “Now how do I get wings?” He looked at the whole upper canopy. He saw some huge leaves of the teak tree. He took eight leaves, two for each limb. He tied the leaves to his arms and legs. Crossy-Cross. He felt panic and excitement. Bucky flapped his arms and leapt into the sky. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 110]The birds looked at him from the sky. Bucky flew for a quarter of a minute and then... “Aaaaaaaaeeeh! Click for larger view View full resolutionEeeeeeeeeh! Oooooooh!” cried Bucky as he desperately caught hold of a branch and hung on to it. The branch creaked and broke. Bucky was much too heavy.[End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolutionLucky Bucky. He fell through the canopy into the swamp. “SPLASH!” A Manatee took him back to the bank. Bucky said, “Thank you!” in a dizzy tone. He did not give up though. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 112]Next time he tried something different. He made friends with the Harpy Eagles. He asked four of them to carry him up in the sky and leave him high in the sky.Bucky then started flapping his leafy wings. The leaves tore away. “Aaaaah! Eeeeeh! Oooooh!” again. One of the Harpy Eagles was swift and it swooped down and held Bucky by his tail just as he was about to crash into the canopy. “Thank God!” said Bucky. “No, No, Thank you, Harpy,” Bucky corrected himself. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 113]Professor Beaver was watching, and so were all the students in his class. All the animals in the Amazon Rainforest saw Bucky. Then two Weaver birds came and told Bucky, “We can help you stitch big wings.” Then the beavers came and said, “We will help you build a big yet light frame for the wings.” They began working as a team. All kinds of spiders came and shared their super-strong silk threads. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]Soon the forest was humming with activity. Bucky got a pair of wings. Then he asked for advice from the birds. The Tawny Owl said, “You know, Bucky, why don’t you try to glide first. You can learn it from the Flying Squirrels.” Bucky said, “What a great idea! I can learn to fly from a fellow mammal.” Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 115]Bucky went in search of the squirrels dragging his wings along. He searched all day, but the Flying Squirrels were not to be found. “Well, Bucky, Flying Squirrels are nocturnal. You will have to wait until dark,” said the Tawny Owl. “OK! I shall wait then,” said Bucky. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 116]At night, the Flying Squirrels came out and started flying from tree to tree. Bucky begged them to teach him how to fly. They said, “We don’t fly. We glide. We are called Flying Squirrels, but we don’t fly.” “Oh! Dear! Let me learn to glide then. Gliding is surely better than falling like a rock,” said Bucky. He climbed to the top of trees with the squirrels and jumped across just like them. They glided to the tree trunks far far away.But Bucky fell yet again with a big thud, and a bigger scream. “Aaaah! Eeeeeh!! Ooooooh!!!” He woke up the whole forest in the middle of the night. The animals were... (shrink)

Contributed articles chiefly on the life and work of Govinda Chandra Dev, philosopher from Bangladesh; festscrift volume of lectures; includes articles on Bengali culture.

Phenomenology, as I understand it, by G. C. Deb.--Phenomenology: education and evaluation, by Kazi A. Kadir.--Phenomenology, by B. H. Siddiqi.--Phenomenology in perspective, by James L. Kinder.

According to my interpretation, based on the entirety of Michael Polanyi's epistemological works, his theory of tacit knowing is conceived of as three models tied together by the central feature of Intellectual Passions as integrator. The models are progressively refined forms of his first conception of tacit knowing: ‘we know more than we can tell’. The three models are: the Gestalt-Perception Model based on the gestalt notion of part-whole relations, the Action-Guiding Model incorporating the phenomenological-existential notion of intentional action, and (...) the Semiotic Model, an abstract conception of action directed to meaning showing that tacit knowing has a ‘from-to structure’. In the Semiotic Model integration is named by the logical term ‘inference’. Polanyi's conception of reality and his theory of truth are introduced linked to the models, to show why his epistemology is not subjectivist and his theory of truth is not relativist. (shrink)

I examine social capital’s impact on financial reports. Based on the social capital literature, I predict that the quality of the financial reports is higher when a firm is headquartered in a region with high social capital. Consistent with this prediction, I find that the firms that are headquartered in this type of region in the USA have a lower probability of committing fraud by misrepresenting financial information. Further, I find that the firms in regions with high social capital have (...) lower levels of discretionary accruals and much more readable annual reports. (shrink)

There is a major debate as to whether there are non-causal mathematical explanations of physical facts that show how the facts under question arise from a degree of mathematical necessity considered stronger than that of contingent causal laws. We focus on Marc Lange’s account of distinctively mathematical explanations to argue that purported mathematical explanations are essentially causal explanations in disguise and are no different from ordinary applications of mathematics. This is because these explanations work not by appealing to what the (...) world must be like as a matter of mathematical necessity but by appealing to various contingent causal facts. (shrink)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly widely used in psychology and neuroscience to predict how human minds and brains respond to visual images. Typically, CNNs represent these images using thousands of features that are learned through extensive training on image datasets. This raises a question: How many of these features are really needed to model human behavior? Here, we attempt to estimate the number of dimensions in CNN representations that are required to capture human psychological representations in two ways: (1) (...) directly, using human similarity judgments and (2) indirectly, in the context of categorization. In both cases, we find that low-dimensional projections of CNN representations are sufficient to predict human behavior. We show that these low-dimensional representations can be easily interpreted, providing further insight into how people represent visual information. A series of control studies indicate that these findings are not due to the size of the dataset we used and may be due to a high level of redundancy in the features appearing in CNN representations. (shrink)

Treatise on fundamentals of Yoga school in Hindu philosophy; critically edited with translations.

Group Violence Interventions combine a focused deterrence law enforcement approach with community mobilization and social services. The current study qualitatively examines Project Longevity, Connecticut's largest GVI initiative, to contribute to the limited literature on implementation of gun violence reduction strategies. Relying on interviews with 24 of Project Longevity law enforcement and non-law enforcement partners, we explore the establishment of interagency collaboration, which was viewed by study participants as the most pressing implementation challenge of Project Longevity. Our case study results offer (...) important lessons to practitioners responsible for implementing GVI strategies. (shrink)

Abstract:In contemporary debates, the materialist ethics of Cārvāka has primarily been discussed in relation to and on the backdrop of ethical schema suited for systems whose metaphysics permits the notions of God and soul. This essay elaborates on this insight and draws attention to the significance of the metaphysical backdrop of ethical theories. We also briefl y discuss two aspects of Cārvāka materialistic ethics, which attends to the metaphysics of Cārvāka justly, namely the crucial role of pain in their ethical (...) theory and the lack of inherent moral value to actions. (shrink)

YO GA-DARSHAN A Sfitras of Patafijali with Bhaisya ofVy:1sa BY Ganganatha Jha he Yoga-darshana includes the Yoga-sfitras ofPataf1jali, and the ancient commentary thereon by Vyasa. The Yoga-sfitras of Patafijali are the classic?...

It is often argued that the indispensability of continuum models comes from their empirical adequacy despite their decoupling from the microscopic details of the modelled physical system. There is thus a commonly held misconception that temperature varying across a region of space or time can always be accurately represented as a continuous function. We discuss three inter-related cases of temperature modelling — in phase transitions, thermal boundary resistance and slip flows — and show that the continuum view is fallacious on (...) the ground that the microscopic details of a physical system are not necessarily decoupled from continuum models. We show how temperature discontinuities are present in both data (experiments and simulations) and phenomena (theory and models) and how discontinuum models of temperature variation may have greater empirical adequacy and explanatory power. The conclusions of our paper are: a) continuum idealisations are not indispensable to modelling physical phenomena and both continuous and discontinuous representations of phenomena work depending on the context; b) temperature is not necessarily a continuously defined function in our best scientific representations of the world; and c) that its continuity, where applicable, is a contingent matter. We also raise a question as to whether discontinuous representations should be considered truly de-idealised descriptions of physical phenomena. (shrink)