When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures (...) can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious. (shrink)

ā no bhadrāḥ kratavo yantu viśvato ' Let good thoughts come from all around; inspired by this timeless epic of Rigveda. India has presented an excellent model of Multiculturalism to the world. The multiculturalist model of the West, as established by contemporary thinkers like Will kymlicka, is based on the separate political existence of different cultural classes. However, India's cultural nationalism has shown how diverse cultures can co-exist with a common socio-political thought over the centuries. Sakas, Huns, Kushans, Turks, Afghan, (...) Iranians, and Mughals all got absorbed in sanatan Indian culture. Not only this , it also gave place to the different cultures to come, and made the model, of coexistence alive. In the name of nationalities like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and German, Europe got divided into many nation states, but in India Gujarati, Marathi,, Telugu Oriya, Bengali, Punjabi, Assamese, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam nationalities were not divided into nation states. Instead coexistence has been made for thousands of years. India has maintained multiculturalism not only at the socio-cultural level but also at the political level. Through federal structure, universal suffrage, constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, with other constitutional, institutions and provisions, multiculturalism is being addressed at the political level for population of 13 million people. Thus, in India, multiculturalism is not only a political tool for diversity but also a socio-political concept. Therefore, Indian multiculturalism presents a comprehensive, effective and more sustainable model which have to be discussed. (shrink)

Chapter 47 contains a sentence which has been the subject of a good deal of controversy and is manifestly corrupt. In the codex it reads as follows: κα τοᾁτων πνω μαιμᾃτατον θνος Bακτριανν π βασιλα οσαν διον τπον κα 'Aλξανδρος ρμηθες π τν μερν τοᾁτων ρι τοȗ Γγγον διλθε κτλ. Attempts have been made to connect this sentence with the rulers of the Kushan dynasty. It has even been suggested that οσαν represents Kονσαν : the suggestion naturally won no (...) acceptance, but one may point out that in any case it failed to attack the real difficulty, which lies in the words διον τπον On that essential point, the views of recent editors have both varied and combined. (shrink)

This paper restores the historical context of Milindapaha. The text is unique, because it is one of the very few documents of Ancient India, in which one of the authors is considered a Greek as a participant in the dialog. To reconstruct the context of the book, the basic archeological data about the Indo-Greek Kingdom, including epigraphics, are summed up, as well as there are analyzed some references to the kingdom given in the Mahāvaṃsa, the earliest chronicle of Sri Lanka. (...) These mentions in the Mahāvaṃsa are matched with the numismatics of Ceylon. From this analysis it is concluded that the document of Milindapaha was most likely created in Gāndhārī in the interval from the beginning of the 1st century B.C. to the end of the 1st century A.D., i.e. during the period of the domination of the syncretic culture of the North of India, combining Buddhism with certain elements of Hellenism. The treatise of Milindapaha was then preserved in Sri Lanka's tradition by continuing good political contacts with the Roman Empire after 400 A.D., that is, after the collapse of the Kushan and the Western Kshatrapas, the last dynasties that had previously preserved elements of Hellenism in the Indian subcontinent. The philosophical meaning of the treatise is then considered and it is concluded that in the text we can find direct references to the proto-Nyāya with the requirement to verify premises by examples. But the logical teaching of Milindapaha is far more archaic than the teaching of Nyāyasūtra, because only two sources of true knowledge are implicitly used: paccakkha and anumāna, and instead of the two verification methods called udāhārana and upamā, only one verification method called opamma is offered. (shrink)