This book introduces the theory of graded consequence and its mathematical formulation. It also compares the notion of graded consequence with other notions of consequence in fuzzy logics, and discusses possible applications of the theory in approximate reasoning and decision-support systems. One of the main points where this book emphasizes on is that GCT maintains the distinction between the three different levels of languages of a logic, namely object language, metalanguage and metametalanguage, and thus avoids the problem of violation of (...) the principle of use and mention; it also shows, gathering evidences from existing fuzzy logics, that the problem of category mistake may arise as a result of not maintaining distinction between levels. (shrink)

The paper explores the fundamental thoughts of ancient India, specifically Vedic and Upanishadic ideologies, which believed that man has no authority to dominate the Earth at the expense of his/her benefits. Each and every one ought to protect, preserve, take care and show genuine concern for the Earth to whom he/she has ascribed divine motherhood. We shall also observe that western anthropocentrism is itself facing a great challenge, and as a consequence, a new shade of ethical consciousness coined as „environmental (...) ethics‟ has emerged. Environmental ethics mainly a non–anthropocentric ethics in its approach recognises that nature and her beings should not be exploited and dictated by man, since nature is thought to be an end in itself which should be treated with love, care and respect. One of the major off–shoots of this new shade of non–anthropocentric ecological ethics is deep–ecology which has unlike anthropocentric attitude, of the mainstream–European tradition ascribed intrinsic value to nature. Finally, the paper will try to arrive at a conclusion by making a critical yet comparative analysis, between the basic and positive observations of the Indian classical thought as well as central doctrines of deep ecology of Western environmental thought by relating both of them. Such an attempt intends to relate both of them by pointing out striking similarities between them, in spite of the difference in time and cultural milieu in which they emerged. (shrink)

Buddhist account of consciousness provides a new way of looking into contemplation, where absorption into meditation does not only bring in changes in the neural level but in the very personality of the individual, turning him into a good human being. The Buddhists recommend the practice of vipassanā, literally meaning insight but actually standing for the realization of the supreme enlightenment breaking off all the internal fetters through the practice of seven different types of purity, such as purity of morals, (...) mind, views, and insight, etc. In early and later Buddhist literature, it has been categorically emphasized that one should not practice solitary mindfulness but should practice enriching the higher qualities of the mind such as compassion, friendliness, etc. The point is that the contemplated individual, the Bodhisattva, should possess the perfection of wisdom and be equipped with the skill of upāyas. The practice of these upāyas, however, will not create any new bondage for the contemplative mind. When the individual is able to attain this broad outlook, he will be said to achieve the highest contemplation – this is the ultimate objective of Buddhist meditation. Meditation is needed for this change of outlook – transition from “I” to “we”. This is the only way to bring peace of mind and peace to the whole world. (shrink)

Study done under the aegis of Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University.

On the negative theory of meaning (Apohavāda) in Buddhist logic; critical edition with text and translation.

Neural crest cells are multipotent progenitors, capable of producing diverse cell types upon differentiation. Recent studies have identified significant heterogeneity in both the fates produced and genes expressed by different premigratory crest cells. While these cells may be specified toward particular fates prior to migration, transplant studies show that some may still be capable of respecification at this time. Here we summarize evidence that extracellular signals in the local environment may act to specify premigratory crest and thus generate diversity in (...) the population. Three main classes of signals–Wnts, BMP2/BMP4 and TGFβ1,2,3–have been shown to directly influence the production of particular neural crest cell fates, and all are expressed near the premigratory crest. This system may therefore provide a good model for integration of multiple signaling pathways during embryonic cell fate specification. BioEssays 22:708–716, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, (...) a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners. (shrink)

In July 2021, a series of gruesome videos exposed a case of brutal torture perpetrated by a guru or leader of the trans feminine hijra community in eastern India. This guru was allegedly of a Bangladeshi Muslim background, and various community members used the case as an alibi to target hijras of such national and religious origin, sometimes even demanding their expulsion from India. This phenomenon paralleled increasing affiliations between certain sections of trans/hijra communities and the Hindu Right. This article (...) situates this case within the broader rise of queer and trans Hindutva or Hindu nationalism and locates it as indicative of Hindutva’s expansion to its erstwhile ‘elsewheres’: areas outside its traditional strongholds such as eastern India and communities such as hijras who are known for their mixed religious practices and have been historically stigmatised by Hindu society. However, the article also analyses the case to show how hijras and related communities evidence contingently wavering political alliances and complex dynamics of intra-community power and resistance that remain irreducible to typical equations of Hindu right-wing politics. Queer/trans Hindutva might become disrupted by its potential constituents themselves, showing how Hindutva’s ‘elsewheres’ trouble its assimilationist capacities. (shrink)

Contemporary Artificial Intelligence methods, especially their subset-deep learning, are finding their way to successful implementations in the detection and classification of intrusions at the network level. This paper presents an intrusion detection mechanism that leverages Deep AutoEncoder and several Deep Decoders for unsupervised classification. This work incorporates multiple network topology setups for comparative studies. The efficiency of the proposed topologies is validated on two established benchmark datasets: UNSW-NB15 and NetML-2020. The results of their analysis are discussed in terms of classification (...) accuracy, detection rate, false-positive rate, negative predictive value, Matthews correlation coefficient and F1-score. Furthermore, comparing against the state-of-the-art methods used for network intrusion detection is also disclosed. (shrink)

A major requirement for humans is a breathable atmosphere. In microgravity, despite environmental life support systems regulating air exchange, astronauts complain about air quality, with elevated CO2-levels resulting in detrimental health and performance effects. We extend extant accounts of human respiration to include the role of gravity and buoyancy. Using computational fluid dynamics, we demonstrate that the absence of biothermal convection in microgravity reduces airflow around the human body. This impairs gas exchange by creating an environmental breathing deadspace in front (...) of the face, leading to significant CO2-rebreathing, with implications for astronaut health and countermeasures. In 1g, increasing ambient air temperature can also reduce efficient respiratory exchange, resulting in breathing conditions equivalent to those in microgravity, with implications for treating respiratory disease on Earth. (shrink)

The human species' adaptive advantage is driven by its ability to build new material structures and artefacts. Engineering is the modern manifestation of this building instinct, and its advent has made the construction and use of technologies the central pattern of human life. In parallel, efficiency, the overarching narrative driving technology and related life practices, has pervaded most occupations as a value, forming a cultural backdrop that implicitly guides decisions and behaviour. We examine the process through which this backdrop has (...) developed, and argue that it emerged through the constant presence and use of built artefacts and structures, which function as manifestations of the engineering value of efficiency. The constant presence and use of built structures leads to the slow percolation of their building values into society, forming a cultural narrative that emphasises efficiency. This narrative then feeds back, to further reinforce efficiency-driven engineering processes. This loop creates a runaway building system that is highly resistant to change, even when faced with the prospect of the species going extinct. Any effort towards sustainability can be successful only when this all-pervading - and hence invisible - building loop is made explicit, and compensated for, through a counter-loop where building manifests sustainable engineering values. As a first step in revealing this structure, we characterise the emergence of the efficiency value as a cultural narrative, and analyse its wide-ranging environmental effects. We then present the design principle of 'Solving for Pattern' (SfP) as an illustrative contrast case. SfP, first articulated by Wendell Berry, focuses on interconnectedness and flourishing of all species as central design principles. We argue that these ecological principles can be extended to engineering, and can thus support the development of a robust operational-level building movement that manifests value systems oriented towards sustainability. To ground this proposal in actual practice, we outline two case studies of technology design that illustrates SfP. We also discuss three cases that illustrate SfP at a larger scale, and examine how these extend existing design approaches such as systems engineering. We conclude with a proposal to include SfP in engineering education curricula, to facilitate a faster cultural shift towards flourishing, which is required given the limited time window available to move to sustainable building practices. (shrink)

Study of philosophy of self in Sāṅkhyakārikā by Īśvarakr̥ṣṇa and Essay concerning human understanding by John Locke, 1632-1704.

In the search for the ontic existence of man and curiosity about his ultimate destiny, the supreme wisdom(Prajñā) has been the origin and surge of the philosophical analysis of Vedāntic perspective. That is why Vedānta has been established as a spiritual religion in the cultural life and philosophical mind of India. Vedānta is the most dynamic philosophy of the Indian tradition and a philosophy of life with corresponding cultural scope. If India's spiritual-philosophical pride in world history and the possibility of (...) world-wide cultural emergence lies in any philosophy, then it could be visualised only in the monistic worldview of Vedānta. Vedāntic philosophy, which provides the supreme basis for religious tolerance, has always rescued this country from cultural crises and in every moment of crisis, it has accepted new forms by becoming the "Philosophy of India's Swaraj". In this book, Vedāntic philosophy was presented in an encyclopedic format by integrating dimensions like philosophical analysis of Nature of Consciousness, Vedāntic investigation regarding the ontological status of Absolute, God and world comes to the forefront, different shades of Advaitic philosophical tradition, different facets of religion, culture and values theme is brought under discussion. The book is published in the national language Hindi, is useful in many ways for philosophy students, researchers and teachers and is definitely a 'must collect' for the libraries of higher education institutions. (shrink)

Does there exist any equivalence between the notions of inconsistency and consequence in paraconsistent logics as is present in the classical two valued logic? This is the key issue of this paper. Starting with a language where negation ( ${\neg}$ ) is the only connective, two sets of axioms for consequence and inconsistency of paraconsistent logics are presented. During this study two points have come out. The first one is that the notion of inconsistency of paraconsistent logics turns out to (...) be a formula-dependent notion and the second one is that the characterization (i.e. equivalence) appears to be pertinent to a class of paraconsistent logics which have double negation property. (shrink)

From the literature study, it was observed that there are significantly fewer studies that review ontology- based narrative models. This motivates the current work. A parametric approach was adopted to report the existing ontology-driven models for narrative information. The work considers the narrative and ontology components as parameters. This study hopes to encompass the relevant literature and ontology models together. The work adopts a systematic literature review methodology for an extensive literature selection. The models were selected from the literature using (...) a stratified random sampling technique. The findings illustrate an overview of the narrative models across domains. The study identifies the differences and similarities of knowledge representation in ontology-based narrative information models. This paper will explore the basic concepts and top-level concepts in the models. Besides, this study provides a study of the narrative theories in the context of ongoing research. It also identifies the state-of-the-art literature for ontology-based narrative information. Keywords: ontologies, narrative information, modelling. (shrink)

Building upon an ethnographic exploration of the pedagogy and alternative dispute resolution activities of an Islamic feminist movement in India called the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement, this article speaks to the tension between Saba Mahmood’s influential account of religion and gendered agency, and a liberal feminist conception of gender equality. Anthropological explorations of Muslim women’s pious commitments as well as liberal feminist engagements with religion and culture are premised upon a presumed dichotomy between ethical engagements with religion, and a commitment (...) to gender equality. Yet there is little analysis in existing scholarship of how gender equality is constituted by social movements premised on a religious identity, such as Islamic feminist movements. This article moves beyond thinking about gender equality merely as an abstract liberal normative good to explore how the discourse of gender equality is constituted in a movement that brings together everyday ethical commitments inspired by notions of piety and concerted everyday struggles against social and legal inequality. The ethnographic vignettes show how gender equality connotes social and legal equality between men and women premised on their equal spiritual status as God’s creations, their equal pious obligations irrespective of gender and the equal imperative of ethical conduct on both men and women based on Quranic values of compassion and justice. The pursuit of gender equality also entails reinterpretation of social norms in the light of ethical conduct, and an ethical commitment to collective struggle against gender discrimination in state and non-state forums. (shrink)

Sports officials, players, and fans are concerned about overseas player rankings for the IPL auction. These rankings are becoming progressively essential to investors when premium leagues are commercialized. The decision-makers of the Indian Premier League choose cricketers based on their own experience in sports and based on performance statistics on several criteria. This paper presents a scientific way to rank the players. Our research examines and contrasts different multicriteria decision-making algorithms for ranking foreign players under various criteria to assess their (...) performance and efficiency. The paper uses three MCDM algorithms, TOPSIS, TODIM, and NR-TOPSIS, for foreign players ranking in the Indian Premier League. Our analysis is limited to the batsmen and bowlers only. We perform the analysis using Python language, a popular high-level programming language. Finally, we perform a sensitivity analysis to determine the stability of each method when the weights of the criterion or the value of a parameter was changed. Our analysis exhibits the superiority of TODIM over TOPSIS and NR-TOPSIS. (shrink)

The European Union (EU) is known as the strongest advocate of the liberal global order. It is invested in the idea of rule-based international order, which forms part of its core identity. This adherence to the principles of the liberal global order is visible in its support for multilateral institutions and norms; open market and liberal trade regimes; approaches to security; emphasis on human rights; and democratic norms and values. With the growing uncertainty in the global order, the EU's commitment (...) to the above stated norms has become much more crucial than before. The objective of the study is to understand the shifting dynamics of the liberal world order as it was established at the end of the Second World War and how the EU is responding to these changes. (shrink)

The Sanskrit term dāya is generally understood as inheritance. This study examines an influential inheritance treatise from medieval Bengal, the Dāyabhāga, to explore how dāya conceptually overlaps with gifts, even though in inheritance, the deceased does not physically hand over the inheritance to the heir, a situation which appears remarkably distinct from gift-giving. Recent Euro-American research has explored the overlap between gift and inheritance considering primarily testate situations. However, attention has not been paid to this overlap by Indological scholarship, though (...) abundant work on Hindu inheritance exist. Apart from certain debates regarding etymology of dāya, there has not been much scholarly reflection on the conceptual understanding of dāya, perhaps due to the practical application of Hindu law during its times. This article, through a close textual study of the Dāyabhāga, attempts to fill in a small gap by demonstrating a conceptual overlap between inheritance and gifts, not just in testate, but in intestate situations as well. The study suggests that dāya is, in essence, gift-like, even though there are distinctions between gifts and inheritance. (shrink)

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation (...) of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime. (shrink)

Interpretation of the Mīmāṃsānyāyaprakāśa of Āpadeva, treatise on Mimamsa philosophy.

Comprehensive study on Sankhya philosophy with reference to Jaina and Buddhist philosophy.