In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bucky Flies, Almost!Govinda SrinivasanOne day Bucky the monkey saw birds high up in the sky. He was looking at the Harpy Eagle soaring beautifully in the sky. He wished he too could fly like that. He knew how to get to the top of the canopy, but then how to fly free in the sky? That was the great problem. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page (...) 109]Now he looked at himself and said, “I don’t have any wings. But I do have a tail for balance.” He wagged his tail with joy. “Now how do I get wings?” He looked at the whole upper canopy. He saw some huge leaves of the teak tree. He took eight leaves, two for each limb. He tied the leaves to his arms and legs. Crossy-Cross. He felt panic and excitement. Bucky flapped his arms and leapt into the sky. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 110]The birds looked at him from the sky. Bucky flew for a quarter of a minute and then... “Aaaaaaaaeeeh! Click for larger view View full resolutionEeeeeeeeeh! Oooooooh!” cried Bucky as he desperately caught hold of a branch and hung on to it. The branch creaked and broke. Bucky was much too heavy.[End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolutionLucky Bucky. He fell through the canopy into the swamp. “SPLASH!” A Manatee took him back to the bank. Bucky said, “Thank you!” in a dizzy tone. He did not give up though. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 112]Next time he tried something different. He made friends with the Harpy Eagles. He asked four of them to carry him up in the sky and leave him high in the sky.Bucky then started flapping his leafy wings. The leaves tore away. “Aaaaah! Eeeeeh! Oooooh!” again. One of the Harpy Eagles was swift and it swooped down and held Bucky by his tail just as he was about to crash into the canopy. “Thank God!” said Bucky. “No, No, Thank you, Harpy,” Bucky corrected himself. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 113]Professor Beaver was watching, and so were all the students in his class. All the animals in the Amazon Rainforest saw Bucky. Then two Weaver birds came and told Bucky, “We can help you stitch big wings.” Then the beavers came and said, “We will help you build a big yet light frame for the wings.” They began working as a team. All kinds of spiders came and shared their super-strong silk threads. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]Soon the forest was humming with activity. Bucky got a pair of wings. Then he asked for advice from the birds. The Tawny Owl said, “You know, Bucky, why don’t you try to glide first. You can learn it from the Flying Squirrels.” Bucky said, “What a great idea! I can learn to fly from a fellow mammal.” Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 115]Bucky went in search of the squirrels dragging his wings along. He searched all day, but the Flying Squirrels were not to be found. “Well, Bucky, Flying Squirrels are nocturnal. You will have to wait until dark,” said the Tawny Owl. “OK! I shall wait then,” said Bucky. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 116]At night, the Flying Squirrels came out and started flying from tree to tree. Bucky begged them to teach him how to fly. They said, “We don’t fly. We glide. We are called Flying Squirrels, but we don’t fly.” “Oh! Dear! Let me learn to glide then. Gliding is surely better than falling like a rock,” said Bucky. He climbed to the top of trees with the squirrels and jumped across just like them. They glided to the tree trunks far far away.But Bucky fell yet again with a big thud, and a bigger scream. “Aaaah! Eeeeeh!! Ooooooh!!!” He woke up the whole forest in the middle of the night. The animals were... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely ChildEllen Handler SpitzThere was the child, listening to everything...—Yasunari Kawabata1IntroductionPicture-book characters spring to life in both verbal and visual registers. Moving about the page before our eyes as well as speaking and acting in their respective stories, they often make a long-lasting impact on children. Pictures and words, moreover, may overlap but are never commensurate; like the (...) words and notes of a song, they mean and evoke differently even while being experienced together. This brief essay considers a small selection of works by two distinguished twentieth-century American authors-artists: William Steig (1907–2003) and Maurice Sendak (b. 1928). It argues that, with their artful words and pictures, Steig and Sendak construct very different—even contrasting—visions of childhood. By “ethos” in this context I mean to suggest a vision of what a child is, a sense of what it means both to be a child and to address one. Such visions differ not only through the ages and from one culture and locale to another but also from one author-artist of the same period and locale to another. Invited to speak on Sendak’s and Steig’s respective works at meetings scheduled just a week apart in New York City during the winter of 2007, I found in these paired invitations a fortuitous opportunity to juxtapose several of their works and thereby discover some arresting contrasts and formulate the following readings.2First, a word on the topic of methodology. Nearly one hundred years have elapsed since Freud published his celebrated-cum-notorious foray into psychobiography with Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,3 wherein shards of circumstantial biographical evidence were laid out in seductive mosaic patterns secured with a grout of ingenious speculation. Despite subsequent decades of critical reflection, Freud’s method soldiers on nonetheless as a modus operandi in the psychological interpretation of art and literature.4 By bracketing a small selection of Steig’s and Sendak’s works here and limiting myself to extracting a tentative underlying ethos from them, I am [End Page 64] taking the position that to write psychologically one need not mention or exploit a creator’s personal life. This essay points gently toward psychological approaches that ask what we can see when we look carefully at the pages of works. What can we find when we share children’s books with children? Why, for example, has Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are sold over seventeen million copies (and its Amazon rank last time I checked was around 145, which means that only 144 other books in the United States were selling more copies at that particular moment), whereas his later work Outside Over There—a book that apparently figures prominently in his personal life—comes nowhere close?5 While market figures do not correlate flawlessly with children’s actual preferences (adults, not children, are the buyers), I would aver that, in this case, they do reflect the success and beloved status of Where the Wild Things Are, since the figures tally with additional facts: the book continues to appeal in its fifth decade post publication; it is known and has been translated worldwide, dramatized, and set to music6; and its characters have been fashioned into ubiquitous stuffed toys. On the other hand, in my (limited) experience, young children seem to find Outside Over There unsettling, unintelligible, even “creepy” and often have trouble sitting still through a full rendition. Some adults, on the other hand, praise that book as poetic and admire its more complex art. Such discrepancies in reception deserve our attention; they hint at fallow fertile fields lying over the rainbow, far beyond the much-plowed tracts of authorial psychobiography. This essay gestures casually toward those fields.The Connected Child“My dear Deborah,” said Doctor De Soto, “you must have been reading my mind.7Let’s begin with William Steig, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons. His work for children extends back to 1968,8 however, when he was already a man in his sixties. Setting aside the... (shrink)

Many traditions in the East have proposed that consciousness without content is possible and could be achieved with mental training. However, it is not clear whether such a state is possible given that intentionality is a critical property of mentality and consciousness in many theories of consciousness. A prominent recent attempt to account for such states of “minimal phenomenal experience” is the ascending reticular arousal system (ARAS) model, which proposes a specific type of non-conceptual representational content to address such a (...) state. Consciousness without content can also be understood by studying related or similar states of minimal phenomenal experience and this paper discusses such findings from such states including dreamless sleep experience and their implications. One way to argue for the need for proposing consciousness without content is to locate a property of consciousness that would necessitate postulating it. A continuous state of consciousness without content may be needed to understand continuity of conscious experience. Finally, I discuss the implications of consciousness without content for current theories of consciousness. (shrink)

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter (...) begins with a personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

What is it for an analytic philosopher to do ideology critique? Just how useful are the proprietary tools of analytic philosophy when it comes to thinking about ideology, and in what sense ‘useful’, and to whom? And to what end might analytic philosophers pursue ideology critique? Here I attempt to say something about these questions by commenting on a recent contribution to analytic ideology critique, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works.¿Qué significa para un filósofo analítico hacer crítica de la ideología? ¿En (...) qué medida son útiles las herramientas propias de la filosofía analítica cuando se trata de pensar sobre la ideología, y en qué sentido de ‘útiles’, y para quién? Y ¿con qué fin podrían emprender los filósofos analíticos la crítica de la ideología? Aquí pretendo decir algo acerca de estas cuestiones comentando una reciente contribución a la crítica analítica de la idelogía, la obra de Jason Stanley How Propaganda Works. (shrink)

Research on attention has been closely linked with possible advances in the study of consciousness. Various theories and models have been proposed for attention in the past 50 years. Behavioural, computational, and neuroscientfic approaches have been successful in improving our understanding of attentional processes. Given the current status of attention research, what can we say about the relationship between attention and consciousness? This paper discusses the possible relationships between attention and consciousness. Findings from cognitive science and neuroscience relevant to the (...) elucidation of this relationship are discussed. Recent findings from phenomena that have a bearing on this relationship such as inattentional amnesia, change blindness, attentional blink, perceptual stabilization, and afterimages are described. The implications of the results of these phenomena for attention and awareness are also discussed. It is proposed that top-down attention is not a unitary phenomena and such a characterization may provide a way to interpret some of the results from these findings. (shrink)

Donald Michie was many things; a computing pioneer in machine intelligence, a cryptographer who made key breakthroughs at Bletchley Park, and a geneticist. Tragically, two years ago he died in a car crash. Here, Ashwin Srinivasan presents an engaging collection of lively essays from Michie's writings, on thinking computers, mice, and much more.

In the early 1980s, U.S. universities began regulating sexual relationships between professors and students. Such regulations are routinely justified by a rationale drawn from sexual-harassment law in the employment context: the power differential between professor and student precludes the possibility of genuine consent on the student’s part. This rationale is problematic, as feminists in the 1980s first observed, for its protectionist and infantilizing attitude toward (generally) women students. But it is also problematic in that it fails to register what is (...) truly ethically troubling about consensual professor-student sex. A professor’s having sex with his student constitutes a pedagogical failure: that is, a failure to satisfy the duties that arise from the practice of teaching. What is more, much consensual professor-student sex constitutes a patriarchal failure: such relationships often feed on, and reinforce, women’s second-class standing in higher education. As such, these relationships can thwart the legal right of women students, under Title IX, to exist in the university on equal terms with their male counterparts. Whether or not we should ultimately favor such an interpretation of Title IX—whether or not, that is, it would render campuses ultimately more equal for women and other marginalized people—it is clear that university professors need to attend more carefully to the sexual ethics of their own practice. (shrink)

Phenomenology, as I understand it, by G. C. Deb.--Phenomenology: education and evaluation, by Kazi A. Kadir.--Phenomenology, by B. H. Siddiqi.--Phenomenology in perspective, by James L. Kinder.

Selected works of Gorakhanātha, exponent of the Natha sect in Hinduism and Hindi poet; includes study of his life and works.

Life and works of Ācārya Madhva, chief proponent of the Dvaita school of Vedanta.

Spirituality is now a much talked about subject. All over the world, after a long reign of heavy and soul- stifling materialism, people are seeking for a higher meaning in work and life, beyond the mundane and material aims. So religion and spirituality are coming back with the message of hope and peace. Business, which is a leading institution of our age and employs a large chunk of humanity, cannot escape from this new worldwide trend. Thus, the meeting of business (...) and spirituality is already happening. This article examines the evolutionary significance of this meeting in the light of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision. (shrink)

On comparative philosophy; articles previously published in journals.