Papers presented at the National Seminar on Joina Logic and Epistemology held at the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, University of Poona from 27th to 29th March 1995.

Contributed research papers presented at the National Seminar on Relations in Indian Philosophy, held during 25th-27th March 1991 at the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, University of Poona.

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the 'epistemic privilege of the oppressed' does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed 'insiders' have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving 'outsiders' who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly (...) hurt by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized. (shrink)

Polanyi’s philosophy of “man in thought,” by all appearances, chronologically and structurally, seems to be founded on his epistemology. Polanyi’s epistemology of tacit knowing as integration is teleological. By his “ontological equation,” he patterned comprehensive (and complex) entities as emergence on his epistemology. This forces him to make puzzling formulaic statements which land him in trouble with fellow scientists. The equation also lends itself to unwarranted problematic interpretations. The exploration leads me to suggest that Polanyi may be understood as a (...) “rational realist” who insisted on a tacit knowledge version of interactionist mode of mind-body relation. (shrink)

Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves (...) upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built. (shrink)

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not. Word pairs varied with respect to the linguistic relationship between the component words, forming either: phonological rhymes, lexical compounds, reversed compounds, or unrelated pairs. The degree of linguistic relationship between the words affected talker discrimination in (...) a graded fashion, revealing biases listeners have regarding the nature of words and the talkers that speak them. These results indicate that listeners expect a talker's words to be linguistically related, and more generally, indexical processing is affected by linguistic information in a top-down fashion even when listeners are not told to attend to it. (shrink)

For an educational zeitgeist so rooted, and understandably so, in measurable, scalable, and replicable results, it is difficult to entertain the idea of an unquantifiable goalpost. Although terms l...

There are a variety of discourses and practices that position Western feminists as people who have a moral and political obligation to concern themselves with the welfare, suffering, or empowerment of non-Western subjects, often women, and intervene to “do good” on their behalf. Conversely, there are virtually no discourses and practices that assign moral and political obligations to non-Western feminists to intervene in matters involving the welfare or suffering of Western subjects, including women. A central goal of my paper is (...) to make this asymmetry explicit and distinguish it from charges such as “essentialism” more commonly made against Western feminist representations of their Others. I explore the consequences of discourses and practices that construct Western subjects as entitled to and obligated to concern themselves with the world entire, while not extending this global scope of concern to non-Western subjects. I critically examine, among other things, the roles assigned Western-funded NGOs in enabling Western subjects to engage in practices of “doing good” and I explore alternative possibilities that are more explicitly “political.” Along the way, I examine certain blind spots in Western political theory that appear connected to the picture of Western subjects as obligated to “do good” in distant places. My analysis engages substantially with Alison Jaggar’s essay, “Saving Amina,” drawing attention to matters of agreement and possible disagreement. (shrink)

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which (...) the flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

YO GA-DARSHAN A Sfitras of Patafijali with Bhaisya ofVy:1sa BY Ganganatha Jha he Yoga-darshana includes the Yoga-sfitras ofPataf1jali, and the ancient commentary thereon by Vyasa. The Yoga-sfitras of Patafijali are the classic?...

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which (...) the flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

Study of Tattvacintāmaṇididhiti of Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, commentary on Pakṣatā, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gaṅgeśa, dealing with the essential nature of proposition (pakṣatā), of Navya Nyāya school in Hindu philosophy.

On verbal epistemology of the neo-Nyaya school in Indic philosophy; includes Sanskrit text, Apūrvavāda from Nyāyasiddhāntadīpa of Śaśadhara.

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

I point to a colonial care discourse that enabled colonizers to define themselves in relationship to "inferior" colonized subjects. The colonized, however, had very different accounts of this relationship. While contemporary care discourse correctly insists on acknowledging human needs and relationships, it needs to worry about who defines these often contested terms. I conclude that improvements along dimensions of care and of justice often provide "enabling conditions" for each other.

On the tenets of Sankhya philosophy in the light of Vijnanabhiksu's bhāṣya and Yoga varttika.

Huey P. Newton remains one the left’s intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton’s thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton’s critique of what he called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This (...) comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton’s ideas about the need for a war of position based on ‘survival pending revolution’ presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors. (shrink)

Group Violence Interventions combine a focused deterrence law enforcement approach with community mobilization and social services. The current study qualitatively examines Project Longevity, Connecticut's largest GVI initiative, to contribute to the limited literature on implementation of gun violence reduction strategies. Relying on interviews with 24 of Project Longevity law enforcement and non-law enforcement partners, we explore the establishment of interagency collaboration, which was viewed by study participants as the most pressing implementation challenge of Project Longevity. Our case study results offer (...) important lessons to practitioners responsible for implementing GVI strategies. (shrink)

Abstract:In contemporary debates, the materialist ethics of Cārvāka has primarily been discussed in relation to and on the backdrop of ethical schema suited for systems whose metaphysics permits the notions of God and soul. This essay elaborates on this insight and draws attention to the significance of the metaphysical backdrop of ethical theories. We also briefl y discuss two aspects of Cārvāka materialistic ethics, which attends to the metaphysics of Cārvāka justly, namely the crucial role of pain in their ethical (...) theory and the lack of inherent moral value to actions. (shrink)