Education, which is as old as humanity, has existed in various personal forms in non-western societies, where an osmotic exchange of wisdom, values and life skills within families, tribes and communities was instrumental in the formation and continuation of diverse wisdom traditions all over the world. A personal system of education, called Gurukula (Sanskrit guru, teacher; kula, family) education, thrived in pre-colonial South Asia for centuries before it was replaced by colonial education. This article discusses the philosophy and science behind (...) Gurukula education, where education was a personal process involving an osmotic exchange of essences between teacher and taught, giving wide scope for the celebration of the natural diversity and variability of human behaviour and personality leading to an education that provides equal opportunity in the real sense—as an equal fit between individuals and their environment(s), giving rise to a practical democracy. (shrink)

This appreciation of Meera Nanda's book 'Prophets Facing Backwards' deals primarily with the contemporary socio-political relevance of her work. This essay highlights the significance of the book in the study of the Hindu fundamentalist stance towards the natural sciences and its roots in the construction of the world view of neo-Hinduism. It also situates the emergence of the post-modernist critique of science in India, that has made ideological common cause with Hindu fundamentalim on the question of science, in the context (...) of a long tradition of political debate about the relevance and significance of the role of science and technology for India's socio-economic development. This essay also deals with some major lacunae in Nanda's reding of the ground realities of the intellectual space in Indian society today and the manner in which this is reflected in her analysis of Hindu fundamentalism and the sciences. (shrink)

Ethics in Business organizations is a multidimensional process involving decision-making, leadership and institution building. The relatively simpler ethics of day-to-day decisions has to be reflected upon in the context of corporate desire for continuity, embedded in the values of a progressive society. At the operating level, the multivalence of decision situations is emphasized in place of the simple good — bad or cost — benefit dichotomies. A decision tree framework is presented to reflect the richness of the decisions. At the (...) corporate level, the concept of responsive strategy as a synthesis of vision, power, and responsibility is proposed. In this, the crucial role of leaders cannot be over-emphasized. Finally, at the societal level, the evolution of capitalism and its corporate forms is seen as a milestone in people''s search for enlightened ways to achieve refined ends. As more businesses assert their rightful roles in society, progressive institutional forms more in tune with the values of the twenty-first century should emerge. (shrink)

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major finding (...) from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

In Indian knowledge traditions, Vyākaraṇa describes the rules for the formation (prakṛti-pratyaya-vibhāga) and use of correct words (sādhuśabda). The Vākya (sentence) is postulated as the primary unit of communication. “śābdabodha” deals with the cognition of sentential meaning. Similarly, in Indian music, every rāga has a lexicon and grammar (rāga-lakṣaṇa): a rāga only allows some notes and not others, and it has rules for constructing phrases—notes to be highlighted, notes to end phrases on, ornamentation, etc. These phrases of the rāga are (...) comparable to “vākya” which when presented with due regard to certain other considerations generate an apprehension of the rāga (rāgabodha). During presentation of a rāga, an artist aims to evoke the rāga-cchāyā or rāga-svarūpa and also an emotive state in the listener. There is a cognitive aspect to the informed listening of a rāga that is parallel to linguistic communication. We seek to understand how these parallels work between śābdabodha and rāgabodha. We postulate that the conditions of expectancy (ākāṅkśā), logical consistency (yogyatā) and proximity (sannidhi) in combination with the theory of sphoṭa provide a framework to explain how a rāga is expounded and cognised. (shrink)

Ocherk 1. Voprosy ontologii -- Ocherk 2. Voprosy ėtiki i ėstetiki -- Ocherk 3. Voprosy gnoseologii i aksiologii.

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes (...) simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

Study of Hans-Georg Gadamer's and Julius Stenzel's interpretations of Plato.

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory - providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

Study of Tārkikarakṣā of Varadarāja Miśra, 11th cent., work on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy.

The first major work in the history of philosophy to bear the title "Metaphysics" was the treatise by Aristotle that we have come to know by that name. But Aristotle himself did not use that title or even describe his field of study as 'metaphysics'; the name was evidently coined by the first century C.E. editor who assembled the treatise we know as Aristotle's Metaphysics out of various smaller selections of Aristotle's works. The title 'metaphysics' -- literally, 'after the Physics' (...) -- very likely indicated the place the topics discussed therein were intended to occupy in the philosophical curriculum. They were to be studied after the treatises dealing with nature (ta phusika). In this entry, we discuss the ideas that are developed in Aristotle's treatise. (shrink)

Introduction -- Tending the dark fire: the Boehmian notion of drive -- The night-side of nature: the early Schellingian unconscious -- The speculative psychology of dissociation: the later Schellingian unconscious -- Schellingian libido theory.

Marshall and colleagues (2024) contribute to the literature on autonomy and decision-making capacity by focusing on the case of individuals with opioid use disorder who refuse to remain in the hosp...

Walter Glannon argues that our proposal for routine recovery of transplantable cadaveric organs is unacceptable After carefully reviewing his counterarguments, we conclude that, although some of them have merit, none are sufficiently strong to warrant abandoning this plan. Below we respond to each of Glannon's concerns.