The present work is an attempt to critically analyse different philosophical concepts and theories associated with Husserlian phenomenology Western philosophy has witnessed series of revolutions beginning from Socratic-Platonic tradition to Cartesian and Kantian revolution. The conceptual revolution does not terminate over here rather it is more prominently manifested in Husserl's philosophy. The originality of the author lies in interpreting Husserl's phenomenology as second Copernican revolution Phenomenology is an attempt to locate the principle of objectivity in the element of subjectivity. It (...) developed as a reaction to the trends of naturalism and historicism. It is further analysed how Cartesian, Humean and Kantian philosophy have provided intellectual stimulus to fertile Husserlian mind to develop grand phenomenology which has revolutionary impact over subsequent philosophies like existential phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. The brilliant attempt is made to compare Husserl's account of 'eide' with 'denizens' of Quantum mechanism leading to the conclusion that the holistic view of Husserl and Quantum physics maintains the correlativity of 'subject' and 'object'. The author has presented his work with conceptual clarity, lucid expression, systematic presentation and critical exposition of the subject matter in such a manner that the ponderous writing of Husserl with the assistance of this book can be easily assimilated by student community but academic standard is not at all compromised as he has consulted numerous journals, original texts, standard commentaries and recent arrivals on Husserl to make it authentic and relevant. It is a valuable and powerful contribution to contemporary thought which will evoke an enthusiastic response from the scholars and students of Philosophy. -/- Content of the Book includes -/- Chapter-l Introduction, Chapter-II Nature of Kant's Copernican Revolution, Chapter-III Nature of Husserl's Second Copernican Revolution, Chapter-IV The Central Themes of Phenomenology, Chapter-V Transcendental Idealism of Kant and Husserl, Chapter-VI A Concluding Postscript, -/- This work is Peer reviewed in JICPR, volume XXIII, No. 3, July- September, 2006 by Prof. Archana Barua, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT, Guwhati. 2. Peer reviewed again in JICPR, Volume XXV, No. 4, October-December, 2008 by Prof. S. Paneerselvam, Department of Philosophy, Madras University. (shrink)

Proponents of Veritism believe that truth is the sole non-instrumental epistemic good. This view is often taken to entail that all truths should be of equal epistemic value. Hence, it is put under stress by the presence of trivial truths: truths to which we attach relatively little or no epistemic value. Pritchard, in the defense of Veritism, has tried to argue that the best way to understand the implications of Veritism is to think in terms of how an intellectually virtuous (...) inquirer would pursue truth. Furthermore, he thinks that such an inquirer would prefer weighty truths and set aside trivial ones. As such, he thinks that our epistemic disregard for trivial truths is just to be expected given Veritism. We argue that Pritchard’s defense of Veritism fails, and the problem of trivial truths remains a significant challenge for Veritism. (shrink)

This essay examines the ways in which postcoloniality and autoethnography can be integrated to create a space of scholarly inquiry that disrupts the colonialist enterprise prevalent in the academy. By utilizing González's four ethics of postcolonial ethnography, this essay presents an ethics for postcolonial autoethnography as a mode to build a body of scholarly research that disrupts scientific imperialism.

The objective of this article is to study the relationship between men, women and nature in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’ by using ecofeminist perspectives. The cultural and moral vision of J...

This article proposes that feminist phenomenology offers an essential set of conceptual tools for analysing forms of violence which destroy the body beyond the point of death. To illustrate the potential utility of this approach, I apply this lens to the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City. I identify several distinct modes of bodily transformation from the attack, grouped into three broad categories: vaporised bodies, intermingled remains, and hidden fragments. I describe how (...) these transformations unsettled the relationships between bodies and contexts, and occasioned the formation of new relationships in ways that heightened and extended the violence of the attack. I end with a discussion of attempts to resettle and repair these relationships through the creation of fictive bodies. These fictive bodies aim to repair the specific harms caused by the derangement of bodily relations by re-establishing firm boundaries between heroic, national bodies, and the monstrous body of the attacker. Through rigorous engagement with this case, I illustrate the unique potential of feminist phenomenology to account for the relationships between bodies, objects, and spaces as the site of political meaning-making in the aftermath of violence. (shrink)

The paper attempts to evaluate whether corporate social responsibility can contribute towards achievement of inclusive growth in India. Using content analysis of annual reports belonging to 42 non-financial companies across 8 years, the study identifies company disclosures under areas that fall within the purview of both inclusive growth, as conceptualised by the Indian government and themes of CSR subject indices mentioned in corporate social disclosure literature. The study is unique in its attempt to address the relation between CSR and inclusiveness (...) through a longitudinal analysis of 322 annual reports, in a timeframe when governmental intervention regarding CSR was negligible and the disclosures were primarily voluntary. The findings revealed that company CSR efforts are in congruence with some requirements for inclusive growth, like CSR activities in areas such as health, education, infrastructure, environment and energy and can contribute to the welfare of special interest groups such as women, children and backward sections. Apart from contributing to CSR literature in India, the paper will be of interest to corporations, government and other stakeholders of the CSR process. (shrink)

Theories of relations between language and conceptual development benefit from empirical evidence for concepts available in infancy, but such evidence is comparatively scarce. Here, we examine early representations of specific concepts, namely, sets of dynamic events corresponding either to predicates involving two variables with a reversible, asymmetric relation between them (such as the set of all events that correspond to a linguistic phrase like “a dog is pushing a car,”) or to comparatively simpler, one-variable predicates (such as the set of (...) events corresponding to a phrase like “a dog is jumping.”). We develop a non-linguistic, anticipatory eye-tracking task that can be administered to both infants and adults, and we use this task to gather evidence for the formation and use of such one-and two-place-predicate classes (which we refer to as event sortals) in 12–24-mo-old infants, and in adults with and without concurrent verbal prose shadowing. Using visually similar stimuli for both the simpler (one-place) and the more complex (reversible, asymmetric, two-place) concepts, we find that infants only show evidence for forming and generalizing one-place event sortals, and, while adults succeed with both kinds in the absence of verbal shadowing, shadowing hampers their ability to form and use the asymmetric two-place event sortals. In a subsequent experiment with adults, we find that if the shadowing material is grammatically impoverished, adults now succeed in forming and using both one- and two-place event sortals. We discuss implications of these results for theories of concept acquisition, and the role of language in this process. (shrink)

This mini-review provides a detailed outline of studies that have used multimodal approaches in non-invasive brain stimulation to investigate the pathophysiology of the three common movement disorders, namely, essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease, and dystonia. Using specific search terms and filters in the PubMed®database, we finally shortlisted 27 studies in total that were relevant to this review. While two-thirds (Brittain et al., 2013) of these studies were performed on Parkinson’s disease patients, we could find only three studies that were conducted in (...) patients with essential tremor. We clearly show that although multimodal non-invasive brain stimulation holds immense potential in unraveling the physiological mechanisms that are disrupted in movement disorders, the technical challenges and pitfalls of combining these methods may hinder their widespread application by movement disorder specialists. A multidisciplinary team with clinical and technical expertise may be crucial in reaping the fullest benefits from such novel multimodal approaches. (shrink)

This book offers the first comparative account of the changes and stabilities of public perceptions of science within the US, France, China, Japan, and across Europe over the past few decades. The contributors address the influence of cultural factors; the question of science and religion and its influence on particular developments (e.g. stem cell research); and the demarcation of science from non-science as well as issues including the incommensurability versus cognitive polyphasia and the cognitive (in)tolerance of different systems of knowledge.

In this paper, we study the performance of baseline hidden Markov model (HMM) for segmentation of speech signals. It is applied on single-speaker segmentation task, using Hindi speech database. The automatic phoneme segmentation framework evolved imitates the human phoneme segmentation process. A set of 44 Hindi phonemes were chosen for the segmentation experiment, wherein we used continuous density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) with a mixture of Gaussian distribution. The left-to-right topology with no skip states has been selected as it is (...) effective in speech recognition due to its consistency with the natural way of articulating the spoken words. This system accepts speech utterances along with their orthographic “transcriptions” and generates segmentation information of the speech. This corpus was used to develop context-independent hidden Markov models (HMMs) for each of the Hindi phonemes. The system was trained using numerous sentences that are relevant to provide information to the passengers of the Metro Rail. The system was validated against a few manually segmented speech utterances. The evaluation of the experiments shows that the best performance is obtained by using a combination of two Gaussians mixtures and five HMM states. A category-wise phoneme error analysis has been performed, and the performance of the phonetic segmentation has been reported. The modeling of HMMs has been implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (C++), and the system is designed to work on Windows operating system. The goal of this study is automatic segmentation of speech at phonetic level. (shrink)

Understanding phenomenology as a philosophical approach in which human-world relationships are analysed, as well as the constitution of subjectivity and objectivity within these relationships, this paper addresses some issues related to the transcendental dimension in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. An attempt is also made to re-address some issues related to phenomenology and its transcendental dimension as understood by adherents of hermeneutical phenomenology such as Paul Ricoeur. In essence, the focus of the paper is on exploring the following issues: what (...) is this transcendental turn in Husserl’s philosophy? Is this an ‘unfortunate turn’ toward a neo-Kantian brand of transcendental idealism? What is the significance of this transcendental dimension in Husserl’s phenomenology? Is there any distinctive phenomenological programme that, despite their differences, is common to both Husserl and Heidegger? This line of questioning proceeds from the observations made by Paul Ricoeur that, “with the development of his ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, Heidegger rejected Husserl’s neo-Kantian brand of transcendental phenomenology in favour of a de-transcendental and historicized way of doing philosophy, that Heidegger understood the subject to be ‘factic’, in contrast to Husserl’s pure ego as the source of the world constitution”(Hahn, 1995). Ultimately, however, the thrust of this exploration is towards understanding the transcendental way of doing philosophy and the so-called historicized way of philosophizing as two distinct ways to reach one common goal, the transcendental dimension of meaning. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 1 May 2007. (shrink)

In the case of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging, image processing is crucial. In the medical industry, MRI images are commonly used to analyze and diagnose tumor growth in the body. A number of successful brain tumor identification and classification procedures have been developed by various experts. Existing approaches face a number of obstacles, including detection time, accuracy, and tumor size. Early detection of brain tumors improves options for treatment and patient survival rates. Manually segmenting brain tumors from a significant (...) number of MRI data for brain tumor diagnosis is a tough and time-consuming task. Automatic image segmentation of brain tumors is required. The objective of this study is to evaluate the degree of accuracy and simplify the medical picture segmentation procedure used to identify the type of brain tumor from MRI results. Additionally, this work suggests a novel method for identifying brain malignancies utilizing the Bagging Ensemble with K-Nearest Neighbor (BKNN) in order to raise the KNN’s accuracy and quality rate. For image segmentation, a U-Net architecture is utilized first, followed by a bagging-based k-NN prediction algorithm for classification. The goal of employing U-Net is to improve the accuracy and uniformity of parameter distribution in the layers. Each decision tree is fitted on a little different training dataset during classification, and the bagged decision trees are effective since each tree has minor differences and generates slightly different skilled predictions. The overall classification accuracy was up to 97.7 percent, confirming the efficiency of the suggested strategy for distinguishing normal and pathological tissues from brain MR images; this is greater than the methods that are already in use. (shrink)

Much has been said about the potential of digital health technologies for democratizing health care. But how exactly is democratization with digital health technologies conceptualized and what does it involve? We investigate debates on the democratization of health care with digital health and identify that democratization is being envisioned as a matter of access to health information, health care, and patient empowerment. However, taking a closer look at the growing pool of empirical data on digital health, we argue that these (...) technologies come short of materializing these goals, given the unequal health outcomes they facilitate. Building on this evidence, we argue that not only debates on democratization need to be connected to concerns of social determinants of health but also debates on the impact of digital health need to go far beyond democratization and engage with concerns of health justice. (shrink)

Out of the wide variety of themes covered by Husserl's phenomenology and later developed by Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and others in different possible directions, the present work attempts to indicate the few features of the method that derives from Edmund Husserl's basic themes of the phenomenological movement and its methodology. Barua explores the manner in which this method has been applied to the study of art and religion by other phenomenologists and accordingly introduces the problem of this profound bulk, namely, (...) the phenomenological approach to religion, mostly in their terms. (shrink)

Chiefly history of Vaishnavism in Assam, with special reference to Sankaradeva, 1449-1569.

This paper discusses the utilization of pilots' physiological indications such as electroencephalographic signals, ocular parameters, and pilot performance-based quantitative metrics to estimate cognitive workload. The study aims to derive a non-invasive technique to estimate pilot's cognitive workload and study their correlation with standard physiological parameters. Initially, we conducted a set of user trials using well-established psychometric tests for evaluating the effectiveness of pupil and gaze-based ocular metrics for estimating cognitive workload at different levels of task difficulty and lighting conditions. Later, (...) we conducted user trials with the NALSim flight simulator using a business class Learjet aircraft model. We analyzed participants' ocular parameters, power levels of different EEG frequency bands, and flight parameters for estimating variations in cognitive workload. Results indicate that introduction of secondary task increases pilot's cognitive workload significantly. The beta frequency band of EEG, nearest neighborhood index specifying distribution of gaze fixation, L1 Norm of power spectral density of pupil diameter, and the duty cycle metric indicated variations in cognitive workload. (shrink)

Most businesses in India undergo disproportionate development as their focus is on making more and more profit. They seem to have no concern for the environment, the welfare of their employees or the unethical practices they follow. This has resulted in problems such as an increase in business rivalry, a widening employer–employee gap, a disconnect with environmental concerns as well as a general disinterest in the well-being of the world. The need of the hour therefore is to weave value-based business (...) models for India based on its rich philosophical thought, deep culture and evolved knowledge systems. This paper proposes to meet this need by initiating value-based consultancy based on ancient Indian philosophical thought. It proposes that it should be done with a focus on the human values approach as reflected in the theory of Purusarthas, different dimensions of Yoga and Vedanta philosophy to improve businesses and business practices from a holistic perspective. This philosophical intervention will certainly help businesses to develop more clarity about unethical practices and the ways to control them. (shrink)

Regional food is grounded in local practices and heritage. With industrialization and post-green revolution threat to food produced within specific region and the associated knowledge has become imminent. Scholars have analyzed the revival of regional foods in different parts of the world. However, there have been limited studies focusing on the revival of regional food from the perspective of food as commons. The paper fills this gap by analyzing the efforts of Morarka-GDC Foundation along with farmers collective in Nawalgarh, India. (...) Employing the framework of commons, we examine how the foundation along with the collective is reviving Shekhawati region’s foods. We used primary and secondary sources to capture the social activities undertaken to sustain the commons. It was found that adopting organic agricultural practices helped in reviving the regional foods by creating and using stock of local resources. Further, social dilemma associated with culinary commons was avoided by creating networks between producers and consumers through _Shekhawati_ festival and Morarka Organics. These practices have resulted in rebuilding the local food system, local tourism, and intergenerational transmission strengthening the local gastronomic identity. However, linking regional food with gastronomic tourism can threaten the local gastronomic culture and survival of authentic regional food. We also find that for a sustained management of the regional foods, scaling-up plays an essential role which has further limitations. (shrink)

In this systematic review, we aim to describe the association between temporal lobe epilepsy and sleep, with bidirectional links in mechanisms and therapeutic aspects. Sleep stages may variably impact seizure occurrence, secondary generalization and the development, frequency and distribution of interictal epileptiform discharges. Conversely, epilepsy affects sleep micro- and macroarchitecture. TLE, the most frequent form of drug resistant epilepsy, shares an enduring relationship with sleep, with some intriguing potential mechanisms specific to anatomic localization, linking the two. Sleep characteristics of TLE (...) may also inform localizing properties in persons with DRE, since seizures arising from the temporal lobe seem to be more common during wakefulness, compared to seizures of extratemporal origin. Polysomnographic studies indicate that persons with TLE may experience excessive daytime somnolence, disrupted sleep architecture, increased wake after sleep onset, frequent shifts in sleep stages, lower sleep efficiency, decreased rapid eye movement sleep, and possibly, increased incidence of sleep apnea. Limited literature suggests that effective epilepsy surgery may remedy many of these objective and subjective sleep-related concerns, via multipronged effects, apart from reduced seizure frequency. Additionally, sleep abnormalities also seem to influence memory, language and cognitive-executive function in both medically controlled and refractory TLE. Another aspect of the relationship pertains to anti-seizure medications, which may contribute significantly to sleep characteristics and abnormalities in persons with TLE. Literature focused on specific aspects of TLE and sleep is limited, and heterogeneous. Future investigations are essential to understand the pathogenetic mechanisms linking sleep abnormalities on epilepsy outcomes in the important sub-population of TLE. (shrink)

Considering the Hegelian master–slave dichotomy over the exchange of the gaze, the paper focuses on the issue of vision and visibility, reinterpreted in Sartre’s phenomenological discussions in different ways. The Hegelian emphasis on recognition finds reflection in the treatment of vision as force expressed through visibility in Sartre and as an issue of self recognition in Lacan. Drawing the Hegelian tag with a comparative argument between Sartre and Lacan, the paper focuses on the different perspectives over the concept of gaze (...) or look. It argues that even sharing the same Hegelian legacy regarding the notion of gaze and recognition Sartre and Lacan differs to a considerable extent in their treatment of the impact of gaze. While emphasising more on the phenomenological-existential analysis of the issue of individual recognition Sartre presents gaze as a strong alienating force released from another powerful subject affecting the intersubjective power relation, Lacan, stands on a non-reciprocal relation between seeing and seen by making a difference between the eyes of the subject that looks at and the gaze which is on the side of the object without having any capacity to become a subject. The paper concentrates on these issues over a broader argument on Sartre’s concept of intersubjective gaze. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But (...) a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

As we live in a culture where “everything can be commodified, measured and calculated and can be put in the competitive market for sale, detached from its roots and purpose,” there is need to redefine our humanness in terms of the changing nature of science, technology, and their deeper impact on human life. More than anything else, it is Information Technology that now has tremendous influence on all spheres of our life, and in a sense, IT has become the destiny (...) of our life. And this is where the real trauma lies. On the one hand, our being in the cyberspace opens up new and exciting horizons before us; on the other hand, we ourselves are changed and transformed in the process. The virtual world transforms human users to a problem-solver technocrat. The speed at which Information Technology is changing the way that youth around the world are socializing, playing, and researching, it is the common practice now for a 15-year old to go home and update their MySpace page, followed by playing online games, or looking up the new trendy YouTube video. These forms of technology are often the topic of adolescent conversations as YouTube, blogs, e-magazines, Face book, MySpace, iPhones, and iPods dominate the commercial and social networking market. Some researchers refer to this phenomenon as ubiquitous technology drawing attention to the fact that ubiquitous technology acknowledges the speedy adoption of day-to-day use of technology as a global phenomenon. In this background, this article aims at revisiting the question, “What is to be human in the era of Ubiquitous Technology?” From a feminist perspective, one can still redefine the boundaries between femininity and masculinity in the context of IT and its impact on our lifestyle and thought style. While examining the ways in which our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment, Elizabeth Lane Lawley observes that we cannot fix a single center from which the experiences of women with computer and communication systems can be viewed and that such fixity would only serve to deepen inequities rather than exposing and removing them. She finally submits, “It is possible to use new theoretical perspectives on the shifting boundaries of gender definitions to rethink a previously deterministic view of the effect of new technologies on society, and particularly the effect of those technologies on women. While the gradual absence of the subject from the field of Artificial Intelligence leads to the invisibility of feminine care along with social and relational nature of man, some feminists dismiss the biological sex distinction on such issues and encourage females to ‘imitate man’ and to become more aggressive, assertive and dominating” (Lawley 1993 ). What are the possible impacts of this new technology on the so-called feminine traits of our human nature? How far our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment? This is what this article seeks to explore. (shrink)

The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language . New York: Columbia University Press. Hardcover (208 pages). ISBN: 978-0-231-13350-2 Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008.