"Liberal Perspectives for South Asia" discusses the essentials of the liberal philosophy, while also indicating how appropriate it is in the South Asian context. In the past, the subcontinent was renowned for the skill with which it took up the dominant ideologies of the west and articulated them for the Asian context. In the post-colonial period, the only dominant ideology that was sidetracked by all political parties was liberalism, the ideology that promoted freedom of the individual. The idea of a (...) book about the need for liberalism in the subcontinent was the brainchild of Chanaka Amaratunga, who set up the first avowedly Liberal Party in Sri Lanka. Many political parties have implemented liberal policies on an ad hoc basis and without a proper framework to guide them. Not all parties would accept all aspects of a liberal programme, however, in a context in which many parties are seeking an ideology that accords both with the present times and trends, and also with some of the goals they accepted in the past. It is hoped that this volume will provide food for thought and ideas for adoption and incorporation within the party programme. Ranging from erudite expositions of classic liberal thinkers to lively discussions of liberal economic principles put into practice by imaginative entrepreneurs, this volume is essential reading for a region making a swift transition into the contemporary, globalized world. (shrink)

In the discipline of software development, effort estimation renders a pivotal role. For the successful development of the project, an unambiguous estimation is necessitated. But there is the inadequacy of standard methods for estimating an effort which is applicable to all projects. Hence, to procure the best way of estimating the effort becomes an indispensable need of the project manager. Mathematical models are only mediocre in performing accurate estimation. On that account, we opt for analogy-based effort estimation by means of (...) some soft computing techniques which rely on historical effort estimation data of the successfully completed projects to estimate the effort. So in a thorough study to improve the accuracy, models are generated for the clusters of the datasets with the confidence that data within the cluster have similar properties. This paper aims mainly on the analysis of some of the techniques to improve the effort prediction accuracy. Here the research starts with analyzing the correlation coefficient of the selected datasets. Then the process moves through the analysis of classification accuracy, clustering accuracy, mean magnitude of relative error and prediction accuracy based on some machine learning methods. Finally, a bio-inspired firefly algorithm with fuzzy analogy is applied on the datasets to produce good estimation accuracy. (shrink)

Study of Tēvāram and Nālāyirat tivviyap pirapantam, anthology of Śaivite and Vaishnavite hymns by Tamil Hindu saints.

In this essay I discuss the issue of Kantian hospitality and how Katrin Flikschuh’s arguments in “Kant’s Nomads: Encountering Strangers” offer us a framework for dealing with certain problems that seem to arise out of the Kantian account, namely, problems of dealing with cultures unlike modern liberal states, such as nomadic and indigenous communities. I look at some criticisms of Kant’s position on hospitality and cosmopolitan right and on how Flikschuh’s discussion helps to resolve these criticisms. I focus especially on (...) her discussion of respectful interaction and openness in the course of encountering cultural others, encounters that inherently and positively contain a large element of unexpectedness. (shrink)

Introduction Kant develops a positive though regulative role for reason toward the end of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the Appendix to the Dialectic. In the opening section, “The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason”, he provides us with an account of how these ideas can unify the understanding in its employment, although only regulatively. Part of this account includes a discussion of the hypothetical use of reason, in which one inspects a group (...) of particulars to see whether they fit a given universal and then generalizes over other future particulars that the universal will apply to them as well. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 135-148, December 2013.

Recently Samuel Fleischacker has developed Kant’s model of enlightenment as a “minimalist enlightenment” in the tradition of a relatively thin proceduralism focused on the form of public debate and interaction. I want to discuss the possibility that such a minimalism, endorsed by Fleischacker, Habermas, Rawls, and others, benefits from a metaphysics of critical individual subjectivity as a prerequisite for the social proceduralism of the minimalist enlightenment. I argue that Kant’s enlightenment, metaphysically thicker than much contemporary proceduralism, constitutes a recovery and (...) transformation of a subjective interiority deeply Cartesian in spirit and central to the reciprocity of the community of subjects in What is Enlightenment. This opens a space for a site of resistance to the social. Descartes’ solus secedo describes the analogical space of such a resistance for Kant’s sapere aude. The Meditations thus point forward implicitly to how a rational subject might achieve critical distance from tradition in its various forms, epistemic, ethical, moral, and political. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. (...) Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective. (shrink)