Sustainable behaviour promotes pro-ecological behaviour and is a practice of consuming and utilizing resources responsibly. The ongoing COVID-19-induced pandemic has already put economic, social and psychological distress across the globe. Meanwhile, it has become vital to think of issues related to the sustainable management of resources. Behavioural norms play a prominent role while promoting sustainable living. This research examines how the sustainable dimension in one’s behaviour influences the decision-making in their daily life. Previous studies have shown the importance of sub-factors (...) like happiness, diversity constraint and frugal actions as factors affecting sustainable behaviour. These indicators mainly define the action one will choose to react to while buying and consuming different resources. The study identifies happiness as the mediating variable which influences the relationship between the predictor variables—mindfulness and diversity acceptance and the criterion variable—frugality-linked sustainable behaviour. With a sample of 324 participants, Baron and Kenny’s mediation model was outlined to test the mediation. Results showed a positive relationship between frugality, diversity, mindfulness and happiness. Happiness was found to be mediating between mindfulness, diversity acceptance and frugality-linked sustainable behaviour indicating that mindfulness and diversity acceptance alone have limited potential to impact the frugality-linked sustainable approach that individuals take. Happiness, as explained through a positive frame of mind, plays a very important role in enhancing sustainability behaviour. (shrink)

The Green Revolution in India which was heralded in the 1960‘s was a mixed blessing. Ambitious use of agro-chemicals boosted food production but also destroyed the agricultural ecosystem. Of late Indian farmers and agricultural scientists have realized this and are anxious to find alternatives – perhaps a non-chemical agriculture – and have even revived their age-old traditional techniques of natural farming. Scientists are working to find economically cheaper and ecologically safer alternatives to agro-chemicals. Blue-Green Algae Biofertilizers, Earthworm Vermicomposts, biological control (...) of pests and herbal biopesticides are showing promise. Saline agriculture and sewage farming are also being promoted in India to augment food production in the face of water scarcity. There is a move to search for alternative foods, which are more nutritious, cheaper and have shorter harvest cycles. Farm and food policy in India has to change its outlook before there can be a second green revolution. (shrink)

Since 2014, two legislative actions, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights)Act 2019, and the Draft Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill 2021, have been pivotal in re-inscribing the Indian state’s colonial policing of queer kinship networks. By criminalising relationalities outside the heteropatriarchal conjugal home, the sexual subaltern is exposed to the state’s mechanisms of rescue and rehabilitation. These developments have occurred alongside the constitutional recognition of privacy in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 and (...) the decriminalisation of the anti-sodomy law in Navtej Johar v. Union of India 2018 (10) SCALE 386 which have been celebrated as victories of self-determination and dignity for queer kinship. These judicial pronouncements, although symbolically pertinent, fail to materially protect queer kinship, and with the contemporary advocacy around queer marriage, the need for legal and cultural recognition has obfuscated the substantive needs of pre-existing queer alliances. Queer communities continue to organise for their own emancipation and despite their vulnerability, queer visibility offers a public counter-narrative of resistance and survival against the brutalities of society and the state. (shrink)

Stone, J. Thoughts on supposed "Death of law".--Krishna Iyer, V. R. Jurisprudence and jurisconscience.--Sharma, G. S. Law and social change in India.--Sharma, S. D. The concept of justice in Manu.--Chand, H. Legal values for a developing country.--Ramarao, T. S. The new international law relating to the rights and duties of States.--Sinha, B. S. Custom and customary law in Indian jurisprudence.--Mazumdar, D. L. Techno-economic structure of our industrial society.--Subrahamanian, N. Law and social change.

Hegel's treatment of the Sublime is both self-consistent and distinctive. He not only defines sublimity, but discovers and ranks its types or stages from one select point of view—the viewpoint of God-world relation; and the way he does this, on the one hand, distinguishes him from many others who have contributed to an understanding of the concept, and, on the other hand, enables him to suggest, if but implicitly, a criterion for distinguishing the sublime from allied concepts. Besides, he discusses (...) the matter in the wide context of diverse cultures, making quite a few insightful references to Eastern literature; and, consistently with his own conception of philosophy, also from the viewpoint of historical necessity, so that the sublime appears, in his Aesthetik, as a specific stage which the evolving story of art must in fact traverse. (shrink)

This essay seeks to clarify Gandhi's logic of self-suffering. Its inner accents have not received the attention they deserve. So I propose to emphasize them, though the context of such suffering and its impact on men too must be given due regard.

Advances in life-saving technologies in the past few decades have challenged our traditional understandings of death. Traditionally, death was understood to occur when a person stops breathing, their heart stops beating and they are cold to the touch. Today, physicians determine death by relying on a diagnosis of ‘total brain failure’ or by waiting a short while after circulation stops. Evidence has emerged, however, that the conceptual bases for these approaches to determining death are fundamentally flawed and depart substantially from (...) the established biological conception of death. We argue that the current approach to determining death consists of two different types of unacknowledged legal fictions. These legal fictions were developed for practices that are largely ethically legitimate but need to be reconciled with the law. The considerable debate over the determination of death in the medical and scientific literature has not informed the public that vital organs are being procured from still-living donors and it seems unlikely that this information can remain hidden for long. Given the instability of the status quo and the difficulty of making the substantial legal changes required by complete transparency, we argue for a second-best policy solution: acknowledging the legal fictions involved in determining death to move in the direction of greater transparency. This may someday result in more substantial legal change to directly confront the challenges raised by life-sustaining and life-preserving technologies without the need for fictions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2, November 1994, pp. 261-287 Collingwood's Understanding of Hume S. K. WERTZ What was David Hume's reception in the British idealistic tradition? In this paper, I shall contribute a short chapter on this question by examining Hume's place in R. G. Collingwood's thought.1 Such an examination has been lacking in the literature, so what follows is a comprehensive study of Collingwood's use of Hume (...) throughout all of R.G.'s writings. I shall mainly focus on two main, unrelated discussions of Hume: first is the theory of the imagination which primarily occurs in The Principles of Art, and second is the set of relations between human nature and human history which is principally found in The Idea of History. These sections will be followed by a section on minor discussions and omissions and a conclusion. It is a common misconception that Collingwood (1889-1943) has little to offer Hume scholarship, and I wish to amend that here. Actually, Collingwood has good insights into the nature of the imagination and its role in human understanding, besides instructive thoughts on Hume on human nature and history, even though his discussion of the latter is flawed. This essay serves both historical and philosophical purposes. It is to sample Hume's place in early twentieth century British idealism at a time when he began to emerge as an important philosophical figure worthy of careful study. (By "idealism," I mean the philosophical movement which takes ideas to be an irreducible part of the world and whose program is opposed to both materialism and realism.) So Collingwood's portrait is historically interesting. But over and above this, it carries significant philosophical amendments, S. K. Wertz is at the Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University, Box 30781, Fort Worth, TX 76129 USA. e-mail: [email protected] 262 S. K. Wertz criticisms, and suggestions about Hume's thought and the eighteenth century intellectual climate. Collingwood has mostly been studied as a philosopher of history or as an aesthetician, but not in toto from the perspective of one of the historical figures to whom he is deeply indebted. Such a view affords a portrait of Hume that is instructive and rewarding. The comparison of Hume and Collingwood lead us to finer appreciation of both philosophers. Let us first look at Collingwood's positive contribution. Imagination Collingwood begins his analysis by declaring his intentions: I shall...try to show that there are such things, to be with what Hume (whose account of them I shall take as my starting-point) called 'ideas' as distinct from 'impressions'. I shall try to show that there is a special activity of mind correlative to them, and that this is what we generally call imagination, as distinct from sensation on the one hand and intellect on the other. (PA 170-71, emphasis added) Why would Collingwood start with Hume's distinction between impressions and ideas? Undoubtedly, this means that Collingwood is willing to accept the validity of the distinction and to build on it. Isn't this a strange place for an idealist to begin? Not really. When we look at British philosophy at the turn of this century, we find idealists preoccupied with the distinction,2 so it is not extraordinary to find Collingwood utilizing it to some extent. Like most Oxford students of the time, Collingwood read Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in his undergraduate program. Consequently we find them in the problems he addresses. "It was Hume who first perceived the [Lockean] problem [of confusing sensation with imagination]," Collingwood attributes, "and tried to solve it by distinguishing ideas from impressions" (PA 200). In detail: He [Hume] was right when he laid it down that the immediate concern of thought is not with impressions but with ideas; that it is ideas, not impressions, that are associated with one another and thus built up into the fabric of knowledge; and that ideas, though 'derived' from impressions, are not mere relics of them like an after-taste of onions or an after-image of the sun (as Lockeans like Condillac supposed), but something different in kind: different, if not in what he... (shrink)

Focusing on what makes psychology in Asia distinct from that in the West, the contributors to Asian Perspectives on Psychology present perspectives and approaches to psychological knowledge as practiced in Asian countries. The original essays cover socialization and development, cognition and emotion, social behavior and personality, and indigenous approaches to health by experts from different countries. The contributors make the case that Asian psychologists, as distinct from their Western colleagues, take into account the spiritual and transcendental, are more practically oriented, (...) and show a greater concern for larger societal and personal issues. This volume demonstrates how Asian psychological traditions can provide fresh perspectives to enrich the field and argues for a greater complementarity between Western and Eastern approaches. For those schooled in Western psychological approaches, Asian Perspectives on Psychology offers a new take on the field of psychology that will stimulate discussion. Students as well as academics and researchers in cross-cultural psychology, multicultural counseling and psychology, cultural anthropology, and research methods will want to consider the information offered in this volume. (shrink)

Despite global and local attempts to end genital mutilation, in their various forms, whether of males or females, the practice has persisted throughout human history in most parts of the world. Various medical, scientific, hygienic, aesthetic, religious, and cultural reasons have been used to justify it. In this symposium on circumcision, against the background of the other articles by Hutson, Short, and Viens, the practice is set by the author within a wider, global context by discussing a range of rationalisations (...) used to support different types of genital mutilation throughout time and across the globe. It is argued that in most cases the rationalisations invented to provide support for continuing the practice of genital mutilation—whether male or female—within various cultural and religious settings have very little to do with finding a critical and reflective moral justification for these practices. In order to question the ethical acceptability of the practice in its non-therapeutic forms, we need to focus on child rights protection. (shrink)

I examine Nagarjuna’s averting an opponent’s argument, Paul Sagal’s general interpretation of Nagarjuna and especially Sagal’s conception of "averting" an argument. Following Matilal, a distinction is drawn between locutionary negation and illocationary negation in order to avoid errant interpretations of verse 29 The argument is treated as representing an ampliative or inductive inference rather than a deductive one. As Nagarjuna says in verse 30: "That [denial] of mine [in verse 29] is a non-apprehension of non-things" and non-apprehension is the averting (...) of arguments or "the relinquishing of all views." "Not making a proposition P" would be not speaking P or silence with regard to P and, as Sagal argues, not meaning a global linguistic silence. Such an interpretation would lead to attributing wholesale irrationalism to Nagarjuna-something I wish to avoid. (shrink)

Is the existence of God a question of fact? To the majority of theists, both now and in the past, I think it has seemed clear that, if the phrase ‘God exists’ is to be meaningful, then it is a fact, either that God exists or that he does not. This assertion may even seem trivially true; and yet it has evidently been denied, in recent years, by many theologians. The reasons for such a denial are, in part, to be (...) found in the general reaction against metaphysical philosophy, which was characteristic of the early years of this century, and which is, in Britain, epitomised by A. J. Ayer's stipulation that no proposition can be factually significant unless it is verifiable; unless, in principle at least, some series of observations could conceivably show it to be true. By restricting ‘observation’ to the senses of the physical body, and by emphasising the fact that God, as transcendent by definition, was not a possible object of the senses, some philosophically sensitive theologians were startled into denying that ‘God’ was, even in principle, verifiable; and consequently into denying that propositions purporting to assert his existence were factual. (shrink)

This article investigates whether acts of plagiarism are predictable. Through a deductive, quantitative method, this study examines 517 students and their motivation and intention to plagiarize. More specifically, this study uses an ethical theoretical framework called the Theory of Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior to proffer five hypotheses about cognitive, relational, and social processing relevant to ethical decision making. Data results indicate that although most respondents reported that plagiarism was wrong, students with strong intentions to plagiarize had a more positive (...) attitude toward plagiarizing, believed that it was important that family and friends think plagiarizing is acceptable, and perceived that plagiarizing would be an easy task. However, participants in the current study with less intention to plagiarize hold negative views about plagiarism, do not believe that plagiarism is acceptable to family, friends or peers, and perceive that the act of plagiarizing would prove difficult. Based on these findings, this study considers implications important for faculty, librarians, and student support staff in preventing plagiarism through collaborations and outreach programming. (shrink)

Although we believe the results reported below to have direct philosophical import, we shall for the most part confine our remarks to the realm of mathematics. The reader is referred to [4] for a philosophically oriented discussion, comprehensible to mathematicians, of tense logic.The “minimal” tense logicT0is the system having connectives ∼, →,F(“at some future time”), andP(“at some past time”); the following axioms:(whereGandHabbreviate ∼F∼ and ∼P∼ respectively); and the following rules:(8) fromαandα → β, inferβ,(9) fromα, infer any substitution instance ofα,(10) fromα, (...) inferGα,(11) fromα, inferHα.A tense logic is a systemTwhose language is that ofT0and whose axioms and rules include (1)–(11). The axioms and rules ofTother than (1)–(11) are calledproperaxioms and rules.We shall investigate three systems of semantics for tense logics, i.e. three notions ofstructureand three relations ⊧ which stand between structures and formulas. One reads⊧αas “αis valid in.” A structureis amodelof a tense logicTif every formula provable inTis valid in. A semantics isadequateforTif the set of models ofTin the semantics is characteristic forT, i.e. if wheneverT ∀ αthen there is a modelofTin the semantics such that∀ α. Two structuresand, possibly from different semantics, are calledequivalent(∼) if exactly the same formulas are valid inas in. (shrink)

The novel Doctor Zhivago has not received the attention it has deserved lately—even much less for its philosophical ideas—so in this essay I want to bring attention to Boris Pasternak's notion of the nature of consciousness, which I find quite interesting. Yurii Zhivago, one of the principal characters in Doctor Zhivago, says the following about the experience of death: Will you [Anna Ivanovona] feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But (...) what is consciousness? Let's see. A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to... (shrink)

What are the historical origins of aesthetic education? One of these comes from the eighteenth century. This became an important theme in a novel of the time. Published in 1761, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps1 was an instant success in eighteenth-century Europe. Widely read, the novel made European culture self-conscious and forced it to pay attention to aspects of living that had gone (...) unnoticed or underappreciated, including taste and food.2 These aspects—taste and food—become concrete manifestations of aesthetic education. Through the voices of Julie and her tutor-turned-lover Saint Preux, they provide a lively critique of.. (shrink)