Does language dominance modulate knowledge of case marking in Hindi-speaking bilinguals? Hindi is a split ergative language with a rich morphological case system. Subjects of transitive perfective predicates are marked with ergative case (-ne). Human specific direct objects, indirect objects, and dative subjects are marked with the particle -ko. We compared knowledge of case marking in Hindi-English bilinguals with different dominance patterns: 23 balanced bilinguals and two groups of bilinguals with Hindi as their weaker language: 24 L2 learners of Hindi (...) with age of acquisition (AoA) of Hindi in adulthood and 26 Hindi heritage speakers with AoA of Hindi since birth) in oral production and acceptability judgments. The balanced bilinguals outperformed the English-dominant bilinguals; the L2 learners and the heritage speakers, who showed similar lower command of the Hindi case marking system, with the exception of –ko marking as a function of specificity with direct objects. We consider how dominant language transfer, age of acquisition of Hindi, and input factors may explain the acquisition and knowledge of morphology in Hindi as the weaker language. (shrink)

Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then (...) report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges. (shrink)

From seed to table, the food chain is gendered. When seeds and food are in women’s hands, seeds reproduce and multiply freely, food is shared freely and respected. However, women’s seed and food economy has been discounted as “productive work.” Women’s seed and food knowledge has been discounted as knowledge. Globalization has led to the transfer of seed and food from women’s hands to corporate hands. Seed is now patented and genetically engineered. It is treated as the creation and “property” (...) of corporations like Monsanto. Renewable seed becomes nonrenewable. Sharing and saving seed becomes a crime. Diversity, nourished by centuries of women’s breeding, disappears, and with it the culture and natural evolution that is embodied in the diversity is lost forever. Food, too, is transformed in corporate hands. It is no longer our nourishment; it becomes a commodity. And as a commodity it can be manipulated and monopolized. If food grain makes more money as cattle feed than it does as food for human consumption, it becomes cattle feed. If food grain converted to biofuel to run automobiles is more profitable, it becomes ethanol and biodiesel. (shrink)

Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo interviews one of the most well-known environment activists of our time, Vandana Shiva, and in the process, addresses issues ranging from nature and spiritualism, the Chipko Movement and the birth of Navdanya, 'earth democracy', and 'seed globalization' to the functioning of neoliberal paradigm in India, swadeshi and village governance, corruption in India, the future of Indian farmers, and the relevance of Gandhi in the twenty-first century.

Para ampliar la mirada sobre los ejes articuladores entre el feminismo y las propuestas de sustentabilidad planetaria, se presentan tres textos de Vandana Shiva, una de las figuras centrales en el mundo, en el ámbito del ecofeminismo. La autora expone nuevas formas de mirar y comprender conceptos como pobreza y democracia; denuncia el desarrollo como proyecto culturalmente tendencioso que destruye los estilos de vida sanos y sostenibles y crea pobreza material; y denuncia la violencia de la globalización corporativa.

ABSTRACTDecisions that influence health and access to health care are necessarily a matter of ethics. This paper attempts to examine current budgetary allocations and policy shifts in India from the perspective of global ethical values. It also describes how global economic processes may increase health inequity nationally and argues that they should, therefore, be subject to global health ethics. Public health in India is in a state of crisis from a disinvestment in public health care services and persistent neglect, simultaneous (...) to the global push to enhance privatization. National health policies have remained oblivious to the unacceptably high inequity in access to health care on the one hand, and the cautionary analysis of the experience with currently chosen solutions through public-private- partnership and insurance models, which further marginalize the poorest. Global institutions such as the World Trade Organisation also influence national policies to benefit global business interests but often with detrimental effect upon equitable access to health and health care. The paper argues that the application of ethics must become more visible in the determination of national policies that are led by the dominant global paradigms of economic development to ensure that equitable access to health is prioritized. (shrink)

This paper is in conversation with Richard Sorabji’s reading of the Gandhi Tagore debate. On Sorabji’s account freedom was an important issue in that debate as Gandhi was unable to appreciate Tagore’s emphasis on individual freedom as creativity. While I agree that freedom was an important issue, I argue that Gandhi understood and employed the resources made available by individual creativity. The differences arose because Gandhi thought of freedom as creativity primarily in moral rather than aesthetic terms.

Year after year, our exposure to the Gita remains limited to these fleeting visual engagements as they become part of our muscle memory as we go about our chores.

Study of Vedanta philosophy before and after Śaṅkarācārya.

Tagore and Gandhi shared a relationship across 26 years. They argued about many things including the means for the attainment of swaraj/freedom. In terms of this central concern with the nature of freedom they came fairly close to an issue that has perhaps dominated the (European) Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment has sought to clarify what is meant by individual freedom and attempted to secure such freedom to the individual. This article argues that the Tagore-Gandhi debate can perhaps be reconstructed around (...) the issue of freedom and the collective. Gandhi was able to employ the idea of collective action with conceptual and practical ease. He seemed to have felt no tension between individual freedom and the notion of the collective of which an individual becomes a part in his/her attempt to deal with the contending ‘other’ and secure his /her freedom/swaraj. To understand Tagore’s opposition to the Gandhian idea of swaraj this article draws a philosophical parallel between Tagore and Kant on individual freedom as primarily the freedom to reason. Tagore’s argument seemed to have centered on the insight that the location of the individual in a collective hypostatized self in order to protect his or her freedom from ‘others’ reaffirms the self other divide. The insider-outsider exclusionary dynamics that are generated not only consolidate such distinctions as external to (and outside of) the collective self, but they also initiate internal dynamics that create the ‘silenced insider.’. (shrink)

This review discussion examines two recent works on Gandhi, Richard Sorabji’s Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values, and Ram Guha’s Gandhi Before India. The review makes the point that we can see Gandhi’s unusual philosophical method at work if the two books are read together. Sorabji has argued that it is essential to understand Gandhi’s philosophy before we can assess the consistency between what he thought, believed and did. Guha has recorded events in Gandhi’s early years that (...) can provide readers with details of Gandhi’s practise and experiments. (shrink)

_Gale_ Academic OneFile includes Reversing globalization: what Gandhi can teach us by Vandana Shiva. Click to explore.

This essay discusses Rawls distinction between the reasonable and the rational in the context of the liberal effort to establish the priority of the right over the good. It argues that inarticulacy about the good makes it difficult for Rawls to find arguments in support of a minimal conception of the reasonable overlapping consensus. The essay examines Rawls’ arguments in support of the distinction between the rational and the reasonable. The paper suggests that in terms of these arguments, the term (...) reasonable seems to be a derivative of the rational. However, this does not stop Rawls from employing that term as if the distinction has been satisfactorily made. Therefore, the philosophical work expected from the term reasonable in Rawls is more than that term is legitimately able to do. Rawls’ arguments explaining reasonable and his arguments employing the term reasonable as a virtue of citizens begin to turn on an equivocation on the use of that term. The conclusion suggests that it is possible to reconstruct Rawls so that the term reasonable can be used in a substantive normative sense without endangering the stability of the overlapping consensus. This is possible if Rawls’ conception of the moral powers of citizens can be philosophically reconstructed as forming part of the basic moral potential of citizens as persons. Such moral potential can be conceived, as prior to and independent of, a complete/partial conception of the good in terms of which that potential might find a complete or partial articulation. (shrink)

Includes text of Patañjali's Yogasūtra in Sanskrit (Thai script).

This essay will examine Gandhian ahimsa in its inseparability from truth. In this context, it will take issue with those who have argued that Gandhian ahimsa was either (entirely or in part) drawn from Tolstoy or (entirely or in part) from the anekantavada of the Jains; arguing that while Gandhi was influenced by both these sources, his ahimsa was drawn (in his own admission) from an altogether different source, i.e. from the metaphysics and ethics of the Bhagavad Gita. Even if (...) one were to disregard for the moment the differences between Gandhi and the other interpreters of the Gita (specially from those who were his contemporaries), Gandhi’s drawing of ahimsa as non-violence and a non-passionate universal love from the context of the war between cousins in the Gita might seem surprising. Gandhi’s contemporaries like Tilak and Sri Aurobindo (among others) had argued that the Gita had justified the exception to the law of harmlessness for the sake of duty and suggested that the aim of the Gita was to undertake a critique of the ethical and confirm it’s subordination to the political. Gandhi however had argued (to the contrary) that the metaphysics of oneness in the Gita brought out in the vision of Sri Krishna’s divine form recommended both desireless action and absolute ahimsa; given that to harm anyone or anything in the universe was, quite literally, to harm oneself. (shrink)

There is robust evidence that women with eating disorders (EDs) display an attention bias (AB) for disorder-salient stimuli. Emerging data suggest that the presence of these biases may be due, in part, to neurological deficits, such as poor set shifting and weak central coherence. While some have argued that these biases function to predispose and/or act to maintain disordered eating behaviours, evidence supporting this view has rarely been examined. This report summarises and integrates the existing literature on AB in EDs (...) and other related psychiatric disorders to better understand its potential role in the development and maintenance of an ED. The domains reviewed include experimental data using the dot-probe and modified Stroop task and neurobiological findings on AB in women with EDs as well as the role of AB in current theoretical models. We conclude by proposing an integrated model on the role of AB in EDs and discuss treatment approaches aimed at modifying these biases. (shrink)

Robert Kraut has proposed an analogy between valuing a loved one as irreplaceable and the sort of “rigid” attachment that (according to Saul Kripke’s account) occurs with the reference of proper names. We wanted to see if individuals with Kripkean intuitions were indeed more likely to value loved ones (and other persons and things) as irreplaceable. In this empirical study, 162 participants completed an online questionnaire asking them to consider how appropriate it would be to feel the same way about (...) a perfect replica of a loved one, as well as other questions about replaceability. Participants who previously had endorsed Kripkean reference (n = 96) rated loved ones as less replaceable on two different measures than participants who had previously endorsed Descriptivist reference (n = 66, t(160)> 2.27, p <.02, eta2> .03). Additional results suggest that this difference extends to other targets as well and is at least partially dependent on sentimental attachment. (shrink)

In matters of discontinuation of life-sustaining treatment, traditional role of the family to speak on behalf of the incompetent patient is questionable. We explore the reasons why physicians perceive patient autonomy to be transferrable to family members. Principle of patient autonomy may not suffice when futile treatment is demanded and may serve to erode the ethical integrity of medical profession. An enhanced role for bioethics committees is proposed when physicians propose to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient (...) or their families. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses moral philosophy, philosophical psychology, religion, and aesthetics.

The study objective is to understand the perception of truthfulness among business managers as practiced in organizations, the critical situations that test their truthfulness, and their responses to such situations. A qualitative approach involving conventional content analysis was adopted to address the research objectives. The results indicate that managers carry a conventional and altered view of truthfulness. While the conventional view encourages them to expect perfection and righteousness in the workplace, the altered view convinces them that small compromises resulting in (...) a gain, lies to avoid interference, and dishonesty in response to non-transparency in management, are acceptable and judicious. Target pressure, coercion to conceal the fact, taking leave, or working from home tested the truthfulness of managers apart from incentives and promotion aspirations. To respond, business managers choose to fight, succumb, or cope by being diplomatic. The study provides meaningful implications for new employee orientation and management education. (shrink)

As is fairly well-known several issues raised by Tagore became a subject of some debate between Gandhi and him during the years between 1915 and 1941 (Puri, 2015). These issues could be broadly categorized into two, those concerning an uncritical adoption of the western modular nation as the end/goal by those engaged in the movement for India’s freedom and those concerning satyagraha (in the form of non-cooperation, boycott, fasting, etc.) as the unquestioned “moral” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 49) means to that (...) end. This essay will examine the first set of issues and argue that though Tagore had difficulties with what he described as “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996: 425) these difficulties did not amount to a rejection of the “case for self-determination-the forging of the national links” (Berlin, 1999: 264) or of an independent politically reorganized Indian nation but were targeted at the uncritical acceptance of “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996. 425)/“cruel epidemic of evil” (ibid., 424) which was “sweeping over the human world” (ibid.); as the goal of India’s struggle for freedom/swaraj. This essay will take issue with scholars who argue that Tagore’s arguments against the western nation did not distance him from Gandhi because both shared insights into the illegitimacy of the nation-state. It will suggest, to the contrary, that what these thinkers had rejected was the modular western nation-state which they saw as a product of enlightenment modernity, and that this was not a rejection of the nation per se. Gandhi and Tagore came together in their “love of country” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 70), expressed in/by a resolve of building a praja or great eastern nesan in continuity with the premodern communities of India’s past. One which was modelled closely along the lines of harmony in diversity and in the spirit of Tagore’s swadeshi samaj/indigenous Indian society. (shrink)

This book examines the centrality of ideas such as satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), humility, and respect for understanding moral life in the complex milieu of human existence. It provides a comprehensive view of how Gandhian ideas have both a temporal and spatial universality significantly different from Western modern philosophy's universality claims. The chapters represent different styles of philosophy but with a common purpose, offering insights into how the global debates on religion, morality, and politics are assessed from Gandhi's point of (...) view. Written in language accessible to general readers with an interest in Gandhian thinking, the book will appeal to academics and philosophers. (shrink)