Daya Krishna and Twentieth-Century Indian Philosophy introduces contemporary Indian philosophy as a unique philosophical genre through the writings of one its most significant exponents, Daya Krishna (1924-2007). It surveys Daya Krishna's main intellectual projects: rereading classical Indian sources anew, his famous Samvad Project, and his ardent attempt to formulate a social and political theory that can better fit India's needs and challenges. Conceived as a dialogue with Daya Krishna and contemporaries, including his interlocutors, Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, Badrinath Shukla, Ramchandra (...) Gandhi and Mukund Lath, this book is an engaging introduction to anyone interested in contemporary Indian philosophy and in the thought-provoking writings of Daya Krishna. (shrink)

Daniel Raveh's book consists of four chapters, each dedicated to a certain narrative, retold and analyzed vis-à-vis Pātañjala-Yoga, and through the writings of contemporary philosophers such as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, Pandit Badrinath Shukla, Daya Krishna and Mukund Lath. The narratives discussed are from the Upaniṣadic lore, the Mahābhārata, the pre-modern Śaṅkara-digvijaya, and finally the script of a recent Bollywood movie, Ghajini.There are several layers to the book, all interesting in and of themselves, but their interconnection is the heart of (...) this unusual work. The thread that binds these layers and connects a myriad of themes and texts--classical and... (shrink)

In 1995, Chaturvedi Badrinath contributed essays to The Times of India on Indian philosophy and thought. In simple and accessible language, these essays range over perceptions of the self and the other; different ways of ordering society in Jainism, Islam, and Christianity; the paradox of sex; the roots of violence; and the quest for truth and peace.

Essays, previously published in the Times of India.

This book is a scholarly treatise on the subject of Indian philosophy and is also written by one of its foremost and most well-known proponents. Chaturvedi Badrinath shows that the Mahabharata is the most systematic inquiry into the human condition. Badrinath shows that the concerns of the Mahabharata are the concerns of everyday life––of dharma, artha, kama and moksha. This book dispels several false claims about what is today known as ‘Hinduism’ to show us how individual liberty and (...) knowledge, freedom, equality, and the celebration of love, friendship and relationships are integral to the philosophy of the Mahabharata, because they are integral to human life. What sets this book apart from others is that Badrinath has used more than 500 Sanskrit shlokas, which he has translated himself to illustrate his arguments. Secondly, his approach to Hindu philosophy is one based in humanism, rather than in divisive politics. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. Dharma -- 2. Jainism -- 3. Buddhism -- 4. The question of dialogue -- 5. Towards the Hinduism-Islam dialogue -- 6. Towards the Hinduism-Christianity dialogue -- 7. Secular and religious fundamentalism -- Acknowledgements -- Endnotes -- List of words with diacritical marks -- Index.

Care Ethics needs to make clear and defensible normative claims. Michael Slote’s work shows how accounts taking care as a sentimental motive can do the needful. Such motive accounts of care can also provide a way to capture the important distinction between care and justice approaches to morality. However, it is important for Care Ethics to establish harmony between caring motives and acting rightly. Slote’s account does so at the cost of an unintuitive account of obligation. We propose another way (...) to capture this harmony. (shrink)

A reductionist view of mental health tends to give limited results. While some important benefits are still achieved, other key elements are left unaddressed. These gaps tend to wipe out the gains which were made by focusing on the dominant aspects of mental health that are promoted by a reductionist view. This paper explores such gaps by looking at those healing traditions which view health and wellness from a broader perspective. Through the live experience of such traditions the paper tries (...) to illustrate how the deeper aspects of mental health are also relevant. The paper attempts to argue that diverse cultures have inbuilt repositories of existential wisdom which can help in promoting and maintaining positive mental health through a conceptual exploratory analysis. (shrink)

The relationship between ethical ideology and job stress appears to be complex. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39:175, 1980), showing two dimensions (idealism and relativism) that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Based on a survey of 561 employees of hotel industry in India, ethical ideologies were found to be negatively associated with job stress. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and multiple regressions. The result (...) showed that relativism is negatively correlated with job stress. Further, it has been established that idealism and relativism interacted in such a way that there is a negative relationship between idealism and job stress when relativism is low and positive relationship when relativism is high. The findings imply that ethical ideology adversely influences the job stress in the organization. (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)

On the philosophy of Ghāsīdāsa, b. 1756, Hindu religious leader and social worker.