Bhattacharya, K.C. Swaraj in ideas.--Seal, B. The neo-romantic movement in literature.--Tagore, R. The religion of an artist.--Sri Aurobindo. The ideal spirit of poetry.

The Mahabharata, one of the major epics of India, is a sourcebook complete by itself as well as an open text constantly under construction. This volume looks at transactions between its modern discourses and ancient vocabulary. Located amid conversations between these two conceptual worlds, the volume grapples with the epic's problematisation of dharma or righteousness, and consequently, of the ideal person and the good life through a cluster of issues surrounding the concept of agency and action. Drawing on several interdisciplinary (...) approaches, the essays reflect on a range of issues in the Mahabharata, including those of duty, motivation, freedom, selfhood, choice, autonomy, and justice, both in the context of philosophical debates and their ethical and political ramifications for contemporary times. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers engaged with philosophy, literature, religion, history, politics, culture, gender, South Asian studies, and Indology. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in South Asian epics and the Mahabharata. (shrink)

Govind Chandra Pande’s interest ranged over a wide area. His early works were on Buddhism, and the very first of his publications established a secure reputation for him as a leading scholar of Buddhism.1 Other works on Buddhism and other śramaṇa traditions followed to reinforce his reputation.2 It is therefore not surprising that, to many, this still remains his primary identity. By training and profession he was a historian. And he encouraged some of his early research scholars to undertake (...) research in one area that turned out in many respects to be breaking new ground. The area we are referring to is the socioeconomic history of early India.3 It has now become a very coveted field. During the early phase of his .. (shrink)

Humans are unique in the animal world in the extent to which their day-to-day behavior is governed by a complex set of rules and principles commonly called norms. Norms delimit the bounds of proper behavior in a host of domains, providing an invisible web of normative structure embracing virtually all aspects of social life. People also find many norms to be deeply meaningful. Norms give rise to powerful subjective feelings that, in the view of many, are an important part of (...) what it is to be a human agent. Despite the vital role of norms in human lives and human behavior, and the central role they play in explanations in the social sciences, there has been very little systematic attention devoted to norms in cognitive science. Much existing research is partial and piecemeal, making it difficult to know how individual findings cohere into a comprehensive picture. Our goal in this essay is to offer an account of the psychological mechanisms and processes underlying norms that integrates what is known and can serve as a framework for future research. (shrink)

This article takes direction from the transnational feminist lesbian encounter that took place between the Dutch collective Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the 1980s to reflect on the role of archives within transnational feminist research. Drawing on archival materials from the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) at Atria (Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, I consider how (...) fragmented archives offer stories on kinship, intimacy and loss. Taking into account the ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ (Lewis, 2017) produced in this archival research project, I propose an archival research methodology that is rooted in a practice of ‘orientation’ (Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003). (shrink)

The institutional change literature has predominantly focused on successful changes and sparsely on failed changes, but the idea of institutional fields reverting to their pre-change or near pre-change state, after change attempts, remains underexplored. Although recent studies have explored similar phenomenon from the perspective of actors resisting change and trying to restore status quo, a field-level understanding of the processes and the dynamics associated with it remains underexamined. The present study, using the case of reforms in the field of petroleum (...) exploration and production in India, examines an institutional change where the institution, once modified, gradually reverted near to its prechange state. We suggest the concept of institutional elasticity to explain such reverting of institutions, and elaborate on three boundary conditions—scope of change, pace of change, and field-level actor constellations—which have implications for the relationship between institutional elasticity and reverting of institutions. (shrink)

Philosophers routinely invoke self‐control in their theorizing, but major questions remain about what exactly self‐control is. I propose a componential account in which an exercise of self‐control is built out of something more fundamental: basic intrapsychic actions called cognitive control actions. Cognitive control regulates simple, brief states called response pulses that operate across diverse psychological systems (think of one's attention being grabbed by a salient object or one's mind being pulled to think about a certain topic). Self‐control ostensibly seems quite (...) different because it regulates complex, temporally extended states such as emotions and cravings. But critically, these complex states also exhibit important componential structure: They rely on response pulses as a key means by which they bring about action. The overall picture is that self‐control consists of skilled sequences of cognitive control directed against extended streams of response pulses that arise from states such as emotions and cravings, thus preventing these states from being effective in action. The account clarifies the “atoms” of self‐control—the elemental units that get combined in complex ways to produce different kinds of self‐control actions. Surprisingly, the account, which is derived from research in cognitive science, aligns nicely with the commonsense conception of self‐control. (shrink)

The theme of essential futility, absurdity, utter incomprehensibility of life and death is stressed in almost allthe writings of Albert Camus. Like Buddha he was shocked by the sight of human misery and mortality. Yet, paradoxically was attracted to the essential desirability of it. Although completely ruffled by the consciousness of an ambiguous and silent God, he was not unaware of “that strange joy that comes from a tranquil conscience”, a perfect inner harmony one experiences on attaining true knowledge. Upanishads (...) are a search for this very reality underlying the flux of things. Malraux, Sartre, and others had already developed this line of thought before Camus. What is essential and original in him is, firstly, that the world’s absurdity not a cause for despair, but on the contrary, a spur to happiness. And secondly, that , mortality and suffering actually enhance the value of life: they invite men to live more intensely. In addition to absurdity another subject the Upanishads insistently deal with is ethics, the purity of human conduct. Very much in the manner of the Existentialists, the Upanishads, aeons before, hold man himself responsible for his actions. Dr. Radhakrishnan, very aptly says that Existentialism is a new name for an ancient method. In Albert Camus and India Sharad Chandra has put forward a convincing comparative study of the two philosophies as expounded in their respective literatures. Her argument is that the parallel ideas found in the two views are not mere fortuitous conclusions but, either the result of seminal influence, or emanation of a common, deeper vision. Reading of the book will help the reader to form a firm opinion. Camus had read the Gita and had attended the lectures given by Swami Shraddhananda of the Ramakrishna Mission in Paris. (shrink)

For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20^th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a (...) fundamental role in rational decision making. When the systems underlying the emotions don’t function properly, Damasio maintains, rational decision-making breaks down. Other theorists, most notably Robert Frank (1988), have argued that if we view the emotions through the longer lens of evolutionary theory, we can see that much of what looked to be irrational in the emotions is actually part of an effective strategy for achieving agents’ goals and maximizing their reproductive success. In the wake of this and other recent work, the pendulum of received opinion has swung in the other direction. The emotions are now increasingly regarded as inherently rational, as Frank maintains, and as important components of other rational processes. (shrink)

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much (...) hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will. (shrink)

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the (...) desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models. (shrink)

According to Interest-Relative Invariantism, whether an agent knows that p, or possesses other sorts of epistemic properties or relations, is in part determined by the practical costs of being wrong about p. Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI. We discuss our results in light of complementary findings by other theorists, and address the challenge posed by a (...) leading intellectualist alternative to our view.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions (...) to the agent. In a second study, we examined people's judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the critical features problem, the problem of figuring out which among the myriad features present in hypothetical cases are the critical ones that our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers. (shrink)

Creativity is the hallmark of human cognition, yet scientific understanding of creative processes is limited. However, there is increasing interest in revealing the neural correlates of human creativity. Though many of these studies, pioneering in nature, help demystification of creativity, but the field is still dominated by popular beliefs in associating creativity with "right brain thinking", "divergent thinking", "altered states" and so on (Dietrich and Kanso, 2010). In this article, we discuss a computational framework for creativity based on Baars' global (...) workspace theory (Baars, 1988) enhanced with mechanisms based on information theory. Next we propose a neurocognitive architecture of creativity with a strong focus on various facets (i.e., unconscious thought theory, mind wandering, spontaneous brain states) of un/pre-conscious brain responses. Our principal argument is that pre-conscious creativity happens prior to conscious creativity happens prior to conscious creativity and the proposed computational model may provide a mechanism by which this transition is managed. This integrative approach, albeit unconventional, will hopefully stimulate future neuroscientific studies of the inscrutable phenomenon of creativity. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not (...) to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes. (shrink)

Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides (...) a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about loss of control in addiction: Some theorists say at least some addicts’ drug-directed desires are irresistible, while others insist that pursuing drugs is a choice. The debate is long-standing and has essentially reached a stalemate. This essay suggests a way forward. I propose an alternative model of loss of control in addiction, one based not on irresistibility, but rather fallibility. According to the model, on every occasion of use, self-control processes exhibit a low, but (...) non-zero, rate of failure due to error. When these processes confront highly recurrent drug-directed desires, the cumulative probability of a self-control lapse steadily grows. The model shows why the following statement—which has an air of paradox—can in fact be true: Each drug-directed desire the addict faces is fully resistible, but the addict nonetheless has significantly diminished control over eventually giving in. (shrink)

Many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method, and the models of disability developed in accordance with it, inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people to preserve the integrity of the definition of disability that a given model provides. A hermeneutic investigation and critique of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will provide (...) an epistemological tool that makes it possible both to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...) together a systematic defence of Frankfurt’s position. (shrink)

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

The problem of moral compliance is the problem of explaining how moral norms are sustained over extented stretches of time despite the existence of selfish evolutionary incentives that favor their violation. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of solutions that have been offered to the problem of moral compliance, the reciprocity-based account and the punishment-based account. In this paper, I argue that though the reciprocity-based account has been widely endorsed by evolutionary theorists, the account is in fact deeply implausible. I (...) provide three arguments that suggest that moral norms are sustained by punishment, not reciprocity. But in addition to solving the problem of moral compliance, the punishment-based account provides an additional important theoretical dividend. It points the way for how theorists might build an evolutionary account of a feature of human groups that has long fascinated and troubled social scientists and moral philosophers – the existence of moral diversity. (shrink)

According to a standard picture of agency, a person’s actions always reflect what they most desire, and many theorists extend this model to mental illness. In this chapter, I pin down exactly where this “volitional” view goes wrong. The key is to recognize that human motivational architecture involves a regulatory control structure: we have both spontaneous states (e.g., automatically-elicited thoughts and action tendencies, etc.) as well as regulatory mechanisms that allow us to suppress or modulate these spontaneous states. Our regulatory (...) abilities, however, are bounded. Mental illnesses, I argue, arise precisely where these bounds are reached, thus allowing inappropriate spontaneous states to regularly manifest in thought and action. I conclude that the volitional view of mental illness is wrong: when a person with mental illness reaches the limits of control, what they do often does not reflect what they most prefer. (shrink)

Due to the highly visible nature of the disease, smallpox received a lot of attention from the colonial and independent Indian governments. An assessment of the changing official views about the impact of geographical and environmental factors on modes of variola causation and control presents insights into themes that are generally ignored in the existing historiography. Rather than being synchronised efforts, imposed top-down, provincial level officials in charge of running vaccination programmes were able to retain a great degree of autonomy (...) and shape the nature of local immunisation drive. As a result, vaccination work in the country was often disjointed, marked by official disagreements about the usefulness of certain strategies and technological inputs, with these trends being most noticeable in rural areas. Thus, this study seeks to highlight the importance of recognising — and studying — the fractured nature of medical and public health administration in the South Asian sub-continent. (shrink)

Dasabodhisattuppattikatha Edited and translated into English with an introduction by Dr. H. Saddhatissa. Pali Text Society, London. 166pp. £10.50.

____Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic__ ____Futures__ provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides (...) a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

Samkhya is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, system of classical Indian philosophy. This book traces its history from the third or fourth century B. C. up through the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia as a whole will present the substance of the various Indian systems of thought to philosophers unable to read the Sanskrit and having difficulty in finding their way about in the translations (where such exist). This volume includes a lengthy introduction by Gerald James Larson, which (...) discusses the history of Samkhya and its philosophical contours overall. The remainder of the book includes summaries in English of all extant Sanskrit texts of the system. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)