Discourses of Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, 1893-1994, Hindu religious leader on Hindu philosophy.

Discourses of Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, Jagatguru Sankaracharya of Kamakoti, 1893-1994 on Hinduism doctrines and Hindu philosophy.

Contributed essays on Vedanta philosophy and Sanskrit literature.

The present book is a painstaking labour of love displaying a selection of the Tamil discourses of Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal, the 68th pontiff of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, Kanchipuram, one of the great Hindu religious leaders of the last century. These discourses have been translated into English, edited, and topically arranged. The editor deserves special commendation for this marvellous work which has been culled from a transcript of more than 6,500 pages.

The date of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya has been one of the unsolved problems of Indian Philosophy. He is generally accepted to have lived from 788 to 820 CE and is thus assigned from the end of the eighth century to the beginning of the ninth century. So far scholars who have worked on this problem have consulted his hagiographies and his works to determine his date. However, they have not studied the date of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya by placing him in the context (...) of the development of religion in South India. Nor have they consulted South Indian sources, especially Tamiḻ texts, to see if there are any references to his philosophy. In this paper, I study the problem of the date of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya by consulting Tamiḻ sources and the hitherto less consulted epic Śivarahasya. I also connect his date with the emergence of Śaivism as a popular religion in South India. Based on my study, I place Ādi Śaṅkarācārya in the fifth century BCE and as a result, I emphasize the importance of redating Hindu scriptures, especially the Vedas, as Ādi Śaṅkarācārya is the earliest commentator. (shrink)

Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord was a publishing phenomenon: a mathematically sophisticated exposition of the science and the life of Albert Einstein that reached a huge audience and won an American Book Award. Reviewers hailed the book as "a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style", "an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man", and "a fine book". In this groundbreaking new volume, Pais undertakes a history of the physics of matter and of physical forces since the discovery of x-rays. (...) The book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what at the time may have seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight emerges as a logical sequence of events. Pais, a noted physicist, was personally involved in many of the developments he describes, and thus Inward Bound, like his earlier book, is filled with unique insights into the world of big and small physics. Between 1895 and 1983, the period he covers, the smallest distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold, Pais notes. Along this incompletely traveled "road inward," scientists have established markers that later generations will rank among the principal monuments of the twentieth century. In alternating technical and nontechnical sections, this magisterial survey richly conveys what has been discovered about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject, and the forces that act on them. But the advances have certainly not come smoothly. The book shows that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big money. About the Author: Abraham Pais is Detlev W. Bronk Professor of Physics at the Rockefeller University. The author of the prizewinning biography of Einstein now undertakes a history of modern physics. (shrink)

This article examines how, through militarism, masculine imaginings of Indonesian nationalism construct a ‘national feminine’. Whether through popular song, national war heroines, or the institutionalization of feminine roles in the military, the positioning of the ‘national feminine’ is always contradictory. On the one hand, it is gendered and domesticized, while, on the other, it is employed as confirmation that Indonesia has already achieved gender equality. In most instances, once the national crisis is over, and before a new crisis emerges, both (...) the rhetoric of equality and the representation of the nation used to mobilize women's participation in the popular armed struggle are once again adjusted to fit the heterosexual familial model. However, in the Indonesian military, discursive constructions of the ‘national feminine’ are not enough; the military must further define the ‘national feminine’ through institutionalized practices. (shrink)

Commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, work on Vedanta philosophy.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati visited Australia several times from 1968 to 1984 and under his care and guidance the gift of yoga and spiritual life blossomed in the hearts and minds of the Australian people. This pictorial offers a glimpse into Sri Swaniji's Australian journeys, and includes a selection of his finest satsangs of that era.

The properties of belief revision operators are known to have an informal semantics which relates them to the axioms of conditional logic. The purpose of this paper is to make this connection precise via the model theory of conditional logic. A semantics for conditional logic is presented, which is expressed in terms of algebraic models constructed ultimately out of revision operators. In addition, it is shown that each algebraic model determines both a revision operator and a logic, that are related (...) by virtue of the stable Ramsey test. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:400 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. L. Ayu Saraswati People, Professionalization, and Promises: Navigating the Politics of PhD Programs in Women’s Studies I have been housed at four different universities—all in women’s studies. My PhD is from the University of Maryland, College Park. I completed a postdoctoral program at Emory University. My first tenure track position was at the University of Kansas. (...) I am currently a tenured associate professor and graduate advisor at the University of Hawai’i. All of these places have strong women’s studies graduate programs. Yet, each program has its own vision of what a women’s studies doctoral program should look like. Some define their interdisciplinarity by asking students to master at least two disciplinary methods and methodologies as they focus on a particular major field; others offer “tracks” in other disciplines that the program has formally approved and collaborates with; and yet others ask students to credential themselves in two disciplines—the goal being students can then get hired in other disciplines, rather than simply banking only on getting a job in women ’s studies. Which model is best, one may ask? The answer, of course, depends on what one wants to do with a PhD in women’s studies. Hence, in what follows, I will lay out several factors to consider when deciding which program to choose. Then, I will share some challenges we have experienced as faculty members building women’s studies PhD programs so that university administrators can L. Ayu Saraswati 401 further build on and engage in this important conversation of shaping the future of women’s studies PhD programs. For Future PhDs: What I Have Learned as a Women’s Studies PhD Graduate The good news is that not all women’s studies PhD programs are the same. It is up to students to choose which one fits their goal. If students are wholly invested in being interdisciplinary scholars and willing to put all of their eggs in one women’s studies basket, then doctoral programs structured around areas of study or major fields may work better. The University of Maryland, for example, offers five major fields: Gender, Race, Racialization, and/or Diaspora Studies; Art, Culture, Technologies, and Social Change; Bodies, Gender and Sexualities; Gendered Labor, Households and Communities; and Women’s Movements, Global and Local. If none of these major fields fits perfectly—as the fields often reflect the faculty members’ expertise, students can create their own. After choosing or creating a major field, students will then take classes— in theories and methods—that will solidly ground their expertise in their chosen field. In this setup, students may take classes from many departments, such as history, anthropology, ethnic studies, and English, for example, that are centered around their field. The assumption (or the hope) is when students travel through and take these classes in different disciplinary locations, they will then synthesize and transform the knowledge they learn in each department to produce truly interdisciplinary knowledge. The drawback of this model, however, is that it may be harder for the students to land a job in a traditional discipline or in a discipline other than women’s studies. This may be because it is not uncommon that students end up crafting or adopting a more avantgarde method of analysis that does not simply sit neatly in one discipline, such as “literary ethnography,” for example. Many times, however, new and avant-garde methods that students design may not be perceived as innovative. Rather, they may be seen as incoherent. Indeed, as Mary Margaret Fonow and Sally Kitch argue in their article “Analyzing Women ’s Studies Dissertations: Methodologies, Epistemologies and Field Formation,” not devising and discussing a solid feminist methodology that would clearly link the argument and the evidence is one of the main 402 L. Ayu Saraswati problems found in many of these dissertations.1 Their suggestion, therefore, is to strengthen the “fundamentals of research design and writing.” (I will return to this issue later.) In cases where students would like to entertain the possibilities of securing a job in disciplines other than women’s studies, programs that offer concentrations based on... (shrink)

Spiritual discourses by Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati,, 1880-1975, chiefly on the Vedanta philosophy.

This paper examines how industrial buyers’ attributions of their suppliers’ actions of corporate social responsibility are related to both the brand advocacy and brand equity. Using a sample of 173 questionnaires gathered in Taiwan, we find that CSR perceptions of industrial buyers are more strongly and positively related to brand advocacy and brand equity when industrial buyers interpret CSR activities of their suppliers as driven more by intrinsic motives and less by extrinsic motives. Furthermore, brand advocacy mediates the interactive effects (...) of CSR and CSR attribution on industrial brand equity. (shrink)

Recently, John Bell has proposed that a specific conditional logic, C, be considered as a serious candidate for formally representing and faithfully capturing various (possibly all) formalized notions of nonmonotonic inference. The purpose of the present paper is to develop evaluative criteria for critically assessing such claims. Inference patterns are described in terms of the presence or absence of residual classical monotonicity and intrinsic nonmonotonicity. The concept of a faithful representation is then developed for a formalism purported to encode a (...) pattern of nonmonotonic inference already captured by another. In the main body of the paper these evaluative criteria are applied to assess (negatively) whether C or any conditional logic provides a faithful representation for nonmonotonic patterns of inference captured by inference operators and relations modeling the dynamics of belief change. (shrink)

We introduce two new belief revision axioms: partial monotonicity and consequence correctness. We show that partial monotonicity is consistent with but independent of the full set of axioms for a Gärdenfors belief revision sytem. In contrast to the Gärdenfors inconsistency results for certain monotonicity principles, we use partial monotonicity to inform a consistent formalization of the Ramsey test within a belief revision system extended by a conditional operator. We take this to be a technical dissolution of the well-known Gärdenfors dilemma.In (...) addition, we present the consequential correctness axiom as a new measure of minimal revision in terms of the deductive core of a proposition whose support we wish to excise. We survey several syntactic and semantic belief revision systems and evaluate them according to both the Gärdenfors axioms and our new axioms. Furthermore, our algebraic characterization of semantic revision systems provides a useful technical device for analysis and comparison, which we illustrate with several new proofs. (shrink)

An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs — dirty, dangerous and degrading — in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is (...) still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers’ violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask — who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal. (shrink)

The domestic situation of the past few years shows the practices of employees’ unpaid leave and layoffs and the constant drain on capital, talent, and technologies in hospitality. Owners expect to reduce the losses to as low as possible by saving on human costs. Nevertheless, in face of such a changing environment, hospitality has to accumulate high-quality human capital through systematic investment, sensitive development, and continuous learning and growth to discover competitive advantages through the cultivation of human capital. The pre-service (...) education of new employees could accelerate their familiarity with the operations of the company and their understanding of their job role and duties. More importantly, with good planning, it could make employees feel emphasized with and respected with the result of largely changing their thoughts and working habits. Aiming at supervisors and employees in hospitality in Zhejiang as the research objects, a total of 420 copies of our questionnaire are distributed, and 357 valid copies were retrieved, with a retrieval rate of 85%. According to the results to propose discussions, it is expected to generate systematic and proper education methods for the pre-service education in hospitality, promote the education effectiveness, and promote employees’ capability and organizational performance. (shrink)