Violence, as a concept, has shaped most of human history and discourse. Over the centuries, the concept has gone through dynamic evolutions and should be understood in relation to diverse agents such as nation, nostalgia, and culture. Modern society’s tendency to impede and constrain overt forms of violence has paved the way for covert forms to exist in socio-cultural spheres. Cultural violence is one such realization where aggression gets exercised covertly through heterogenous mediums such as language, regulations, mass media, and (...) most importantly cultural practices. Its topological structures can be traced in national imagination and a sense of cultural nostalgia originating out of it, that ultimately formulates cultural “otherness.” In Gandhian philosophy, the absence of physical aggression is insignificant, if not complemented with the eradication of violence from the cultural and intellectual strata. Gandhi’s critique of exclusive nationalism and narrowness is reflective of a distinct kind of cultural topology that generates structural violence and with the due course of history it gets legitimacy to exert power over the cultural binary it constructed. The fundamental questions of the paper are associated with assessing the role of national imagination and cultural imperatives in germinating the structures of violence in culture, exclusive nationalism, and Gandhian reconsideration of peace in the context of covert violence in the material and intellectual realms. (shrink)

Teachings of the various leaders of the Radhasoami Satsang.

Contributed articles presented at the National Seminar "Vaisnavism as a Religio-Philosophical Movement" held on April 1999 at Institute of Orissan Culture, Bhubaneswar, India.

This book is a critical exposition of multiple facets of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts on ethics and religion. The book first brings out foundations of Wittgenstein's views. Then, it deals with various issues of current debates in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, such as: the notion of transcendental ethics. the dichotomy between fact and value. the distinction between religious and superstitious beliefs. the notion of happiness and human being. discussions on Fideism. whether Wittgenstein's methodology was Christian or Jewish. Wittgenstein's religious thoughts in (...) the context of logical positivism and Habermas. The book is useful not only for students of philosophy and theology but also for a lay reader who is interested in an in-depth analysis of the realm of meta-ethics and religious philosophy of language. (shrink)

The book is full of insights for undergraduate, post-graduate and research students of Philosophy and all those who are interested in the Philosophy of religion and ethics of Wittgenstein.

Rasa, Dhvani and Rasa-Dhvani are the major critical terms in Sanskrit poetics that developed during the post-Vedic classical period. Rasa is used by a sage named Bharata to denote the aesthetic experience of a theatrical audience. But Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta intermedialize this experience by extending it to a reader of poetry. They argue that rasa is also generated by a linguistic potency called dhvani. Some critics like Bhoja also proposed generation of rasa by pictorial art, and further, some modern critics (...) propose to trace dhvani property in non-verbal arts such as dance and music pleading thereby that these non-verbal arts also generate rasa. The present essay examines these arguments and concludes that generation of rasa is confined to only the audio-visual and verbal arts such as the theatre and poetry, and, dhvani as a specific linguistic potency, is strictly confined to the verbal arts. Its intermedialization is a contradiction in terms. (shrink)

Commentary on Avayava, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi dealing with syllogism (avayava) work of the Navya-nyaya school in Indic philosophy by Gaṅgeśa, 13th cent.

Research papers outcome of a seminar organised by the Asiatic Society, Kolkata on 18-19 February 2008.

This article is an obituary on the life and works of Professor G. C. Nayak who was a renowned philosopher of India in the contemporary times. He has contributed immensely to philosophy and has many books and scholarly papers to his credit. The philosophy community mourns his death.

No one in twentieth-century analytic philosophy was more preoccupied with the issues of ethics and religion than Ludwig Wittgenstein. In an age when religion has remained a prominent force, contrary to what some would have thought a hundred years ago, it is not surprising to see a book on Wittgenstein's concern with ethics and religion by a group of Indian philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ethics and Religion, edited by Kali Charan Pandey—a collection of fifteen essays, some of which were presented (...) at a conference—is divided into three sections; the first provides a broad outline while the other two deal with the issues of ethics and religion, respectively. The editor has written a detailed introduction to the .. (shrink)