"This book is a Festschrift volume in honour of Prof. Trichur S. Rukmani that reflects the plethora of issues which she studied in her scholastic life. It includes twenty-four essays by distinguished scholars on various classical and contemporary issues pertaining to Indian studies. While the volume discusses current research in the field of Yoga -- Prof. Rukmani's primary research field -- it also invites further reflection on other areas of Indian thought which have attracted her attention in the (...) course of her long and fruitful academic career. The volume is divided thematically into six sections. The first two sections deal with the interpretation of the Yoga, Vedanta and Gaudiya-Vaishnava traditions, exploring issues of hermeneutics, methodology and philosophical analysis. The third section addresses issues of continuity within the Indian tradition and includes essays on tantric Shaivism, Mimamsa and the Bhagavad-Gita. The next two sections feature essays on the Sanskrit philosophical discourse, grammar, epic literature and renunciation in the Indian tradition. The last section of the volume takes up issues of contemporary relevance such as the insights from the Hindu tradition towards environmental ethics, the Svadhyaya movement and its dharmic ecology, non-violence, gender, cultural identity as well as syncretism."--Publisher description. (shrink)

On the life of Śaṅkaracārya, a Hindu philosopher.

Exegesis of Vyāsa's Yogabhāṣya, commentary of Patañjali's Yogasūtra, basic tenets of the Yoga school in Indic philosophy.

The concept of dharmamegha-samādhi that occurs in Patañjali's Yogasutras, in the path to kaivalya, has not been easy to comprehend. Scholars working in the field of Yoga have explained the concept in many different ways. This essay tries to reach an understanding of dharmamegha-samādhi based on a careful reading of the Yogastitras along with Vyāsa's commentary on it and the later well-known commentaries on Vyāsa's own commentary such as the Tattvavaisāradī, the Yogavārttika, and so on. Whether dharmamegha-samādhi is in any (...) way connected with the concept of jīvanmukti or liberation while embodied, and whether jīvanmukti can be reasonably understood as being part of Yoga philosophy also comes in for discussion toward the end of this essay. (shrink)

Classical commentary on Yogasūtra of Patañjali.

This article examines the question of the freedom that a commentator has while commenting on a philosophical sūtra text. The texts covered are Gautama's Nyāyasūtras, Is'varakṛṣṣa's Sāṁkhyakārikā, and Patañjali's Yogasūtras.It is well known that every commentator believes that s/he is the one who has understood the true intention of the original author and therefore employs some interpretative tools to bring out the meaning of the text s/he is commenting on. Generally there are three devices that are commonly employed. One is (...) to supply some additional points that the commentator believes are missing in the sūtra text so as logically to connect the main ideas contained in the original text for clarity of the concept... (shrink)

Contributed papers presented at a seminar organized by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, in May 1987.

The Siddhāntaleśasaṅgraha written by Appayyadīkshitar in the seventeenth century is one of the rare texts where the author brings together the different views of Advaita present at his time. The book itself starts with the controversy surrounding whether the sentence “śrotavyaḥ…” is a vidhi-vākya or not. This paper attempts to summarize the various approaches to this question in the SLS and gives us a glimpse as to how the debate was conducted. Even though the SLS was translated by Suryanarayana Sastri (...) in 1933 the vocabulary and the style is so out-dated that it was not of much use. I then decided to do a fresh translation of the SLS and have succeeded only in translating the first uddeśa. I have condensed the arguments presented in the SLS under some broad headings and thus tried to recreate the arguments presented in the text. (shrink)

In this note, we reconstruct some results of the DRT analysis of presupposition projection within the theory of local contexts of Schlenker (2009). The latter offered a way to annotate every sentence with variables that denote the various local context sets that play a crucial role in Heim’s satisfaction theory (Heim 1983). In standard satisfaction theories, a presupposition must be entailed by its local context. Here we allow a presupposition to be indexed with other local contexts, and we propose, following (...) van der Sandt (1992) and Zeevat (1992), that presuppositions are preferably anaphoric to the highest possible context. The resulting analysis emulates some desirable results of DRT—notably its solution to the ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1999). But it arguably improves on DRT in some respects: it can generate genuine conditional presuppositions; and it yields more adequate results for some quantified examples. Several limitations of the theory—some of them quite severe—are also discussed. (shrink)

The information conveyed by any utterance is a motley ensemble. Utterances carry content about the world as it is according to the speaker, but also about speakers’ attitudes, the way they speak, what has been said before, and so on. There are many kinds of information that are conveyed by way of language, and differences in kind correlate with differences in status. Presupposed information exhibits a distinctive projection behaviour; conversational implicatures are cancellable in a way that asserted information is not; (...) a pronoun’s gender may help to determine a referent, but is otherwise truth-conditionally inert; and so on. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed comparison between discourse representation theory and dependent type semantics, two frameworks for discourse semantics. Although it is often stated that DRT and those frameworks based on dependent types are mutually exchangeable, we argue that they differ with respect to variable handling, more specifically, how substitution and other operations on variables are defined. This manifests itself in two recalcitrant problems posed for DRT; namely, the overwrite problem and the duplication problem. We will see that these problems (...) still pose a challenge for various extended compositional systems based on DRT, while they do not arise in a framework of DTS where substitution and other operations are defined in the standard type-theoretic manner without stipulating any additional constraints. We also compare the notions of contexts underlying these two kinds of frameworks, namely, contexts represented as assignment functions and contexts represented as proof terms, and see what different predictions they make for some linguistic examples. (shrink)

This paper proposes a semantics of anaphora in attitude contexts within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). The paper first focuses on intentional identity, a special kind of cross-attitudinal anaphora. Based on the DRT semantics of attitude reports summarized by Kamp et al. (in: D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (Eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, 2011), the author proposes a semantics of intentional identity that implements the following two ideas: (1) indefinites and pronouns appearing in attitude contexts introduce _metadiscourse referents_, (...) which represent one’s mental files and record appearances of discourse referents in attitude contexts; and (2) what underlies the relevant kind of anaphoric links between indefinites and pronouns across attitude contexts is _the coordination relation_ between mental files, which is represented by using metadiscourse referents. Next, the paper expands the semantics to cover _de re_ anaphora, in which an anaphoric pronoun in an attitude context takes as its antecedent an expression appearing outside any attitude context. (shrink)

The central characteristic of denials is that they perform a non-monotonic correction operation on discourse structure. A second characteristic is that they may be used to object to various kinds of information including presuppositions and implicatures. In this paper we first use standard DRT to capture these features, implement an earlier proposal of van der Sandt (1991) in DRT and point out a shortcoming of that approach. We then adopt Layered DRT. LDRT is an extension of standard DRT designed to (...) represent and interpret different types of information conveyed in a conversation by distributing them over separate layers of the same LDRS. We will then show how LDRT allows us to solve the problems of the classic monostratal system. The resulting system makes use of a directed reverse anaphora mechanism to locate, remove and negate the material objected to. (shrink)

This review establishes Rukmani, Indian philosophy and Yoga as cornerstones of Indian Studies.

• names and indexicals are directly referential/rigid designators • wide-scope behavior w.r.t. operators • not synonymous with the description giving their ‘descriptive meaning’, as shown by Kripke-Kaplan examples (1) and (2).

The effects of utterances such as cue phrases, keep-turn markers, and grounding signals cannot be characterized as changes to a shared record of the propositions under discussed: the simplest (and arguably most natural) way of characterizing the meaning of these utterances is in terms of a theory in which the conversational score is seen as a record of the discourse situation, or at least of the speech acts that have been performed. The problem then becomes to explain how discourse entities (...) are accessible. We consider three hypotheses about the dynamics of a speech act-based theory of the conversational score, and argue that they could be implemented with relatively minor modifications to the technical tools already introduced in theories such as Compositional DRT. (shrink)

Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based representation of mental states with a global belief-layer and a (...) variety of labeled attitude compartments embedded within it. Hence, desires and other non-doxastic attitudes are asymmetrically dependent on beliefs. I integrate these mental state representations into a general semantic account of attitude ascriptions which relies on the parasitic nature of non-doxastic attitudes to solve Karttunen’s puzzle. (shrink)

A number of puzzles about propositional attitudes in semantics and philosophy revolve around apparent referential dependencies between different attitudes within a single agent’s mental state. In a series of papers, Hans Kamp offers a general framework for describing such interconnected attitude complexes, building on DRT and dynamic semantics. I demonstrate that Kamp’s proposal cannot deal with referential dependencies between semantically conflicting attitudes, such as those in Ninan’s puzzle about de re imagination. To solve the problem I propose to replace Kamp’s (...) treatment of attitudes as context change potentials with a two-dimensional analysis. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantics of de dicto , de re and de se belief reports. First, I flesh out in some detail the established, classical theories that assume syntactic distinctions between all three types of reports. I then propose a new, unified analysis, based on two ideas discarded by the classical theory. These are: (i) modeling the de re/de dicto distinction as a difference in scope, and (ii) analyzing de se as merely a special case of relational de (...) re attitudes. The resurrection of these ideas takes place in a dynamic setting. My formalization of the first idea involves a modification of the presupposition-as-anaphora resolution algorithm for DRT. The second involves treating acquaintance relations as second-order presuppositions, to be bound in the context by means of higher-order unification, or accommodated if necessary. The resulting framework requires no syntactic distinctions between different modes of attitude, with the exception of a specific subclass of de se reports characterized by special ‘ de se pronouns’ (i.e. PRO and logophors). These special pronouns are handled in syntax; everything alse is passed on to the pragmatic resolution module as it appears on the surface. The more sophisticated contextual resolution process nonetheless ensures adequate output truth conditions for a variety of classical and novel puzzles. In particular, I compare the new pragmasemantic system to the classical, syntactic analysis with respect to iterated and quantified reports, and monstrously shifted indexicals. (shrink)

Shows that both anaphoricity and egocentric em de se binding play a crucial role in the interpretation of tense in discourse. Uses the English backwards shifted reading of the past tense in a mistaken time scenario to bring out the tension between these two features. Provides a suitable representational framework for the observed clash in the form of an extension of DRT in which updates of the common ground are accompanied by updates of each relevant agent's complex attitudinal state.

This paper offers a semantically-based solution to the problem of predicting whether a verb will display the subjective conjugation or the objective conjugation in Hungarian. This alternation correlates with the definiteness of the object, but definiteness is not a completely reliable indicator of the subjective/objective alternation, nor is specificity. A prominent view is that the subjective/objective alternation is conditioned by the syntactic category of the object, but this view has also been shown to be untenable. This paper offers a semantic (...) solution: If the referential argument of a phrase is lexically specified as familiar/new, then the phrase bears the feature [+DEF]/[−DEF], and this feature governs the conjugations. The notions of novelty and familiarity are made precise using a compositional version of DRT in the context of a suitably large fragment of Hungarian, including local and non-local personal pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite articles, quantifiers, wh-words, numerals, and possessives. (shrink)

Several theories of presupposition projection predict that some sentences which intuitively yield unconditional presuppositions should have weaker, conditional ones. For instance, If John is realistic, he knows that he is incompetent is predicted to have the presupposition that if John is realistic, he is incompetent, whereas one certainly infers that John is in fact incompetent. We summarize some difficulties faced by three solutions, DRT, Singh’s ‘Formal Alternatives’, and Singh’s ‘Interacting Alternatives’; we then offer a new analysis which is compatible with (...) several semantic theories of projection, and which does not require the addition of a new representational module. In essence, we obtain unconditional inferences by assuming that speakers may ignore certain parts of a sentence when they accommodate a presupposition—presumably to simplify their computational work. They do so by adding to the context an assumption that would satisfy the presupposition of the sentence no matter which meaning some of its elements have. Depending on which elements are ignored in this way, a variety of strengthened presuppositions are obtained. We speculate on a possible mechanism (which follows some of Singh’s earlier ideas) to determine which of these strengthened inferences are in fact obtained. The analysis correctly predicts some new instances of the Proviso Problem in quantificational examples. (shrink)

I present a concrete DRT-based syntax and semantics for the representation of mental states in the style of Kamp. This system is closely related to Recanati’s Mental Files framework, but adds a crucial distinction between anchors, the analogues of mental files, and attitudes like belief, desire and imagination. Attitudes are represented as separate compartments that can be referentially dependent on anchors. I show how the added distinctions help defend the useful notion of an acquaintance-based mental file against Ninan’s :368–377 2015) (...) recent challenge involving counterfactual de re attitudes. (shrink)