Remnants of Words in Indian Grammar

This paper in an elementary level expresses the inevitable relation between the word and meaning from the prominent Indian philosophical trends by giving stress on Vyakti-śakti-vāda and Jāti-śakti-vāda, the two contender doctrines. The first one puts emphasis on the semantic value of a predicate whereas the latter draws attention to the generic uses of nouns. The second part of the writing underpins Navya Nyāya and Kumārila’s positions on the word-meaning reliance and the debate initiate when we look back to the question whether the word-meaning relation sounds conventional or eternal. I propose a position (śabda-vivarta-vāda) on these issues derived from the works of Patan᷈jali and Bhartṛharị, two grammarians of classical Indian tradition. They defend eternal verbum as the material cause of the word and objects. This doctrine advocates uniforism by giving up bifurcation between the word and the world

The concept of self (atman) in Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophy

Nyaya, one of Hinduism's six orthodox schools of philosophy has been of interest to western philosophers largely because of its sophisticated analysis of logical and linguistic problems. In India, the purpose of the orthodox school (or dar'ana - "view") has been to lead the student toward liberation (moka). Hence Nyaya's preoccupation with logic should not in itself preclude a real concern with moka. The broad aim of my thesis therefore, is to determine how Nyya functions as a complete darana, to see if indeed the various aspects of the system stand together as a coherent mokamãrga (way to release). Because Hindus conceive of salvation as the realization of a transcendental Self (tman), and because the nature of such a Self has been a prime focus for Indian philosophical debate, this thesis will concentrate on the Nyãya understanding of ãtman, and the logical arguments for its existence. Nyãya philosophers played a leading role in arguing against their Buddhist opponents in India who denied the existence of any such transcendental Self. The debate, which endured for many hundreds of years, culminated in the eleventh century A.D. with the works of Udayana, a leading Nyãya philosopher, and his Buddhist opponents, JnaIrimitra and Ratnakirti, after which time the Buddhist challenge waned in India, and the Nyãya school, known in its later phase as Navya-Nyãya, became more concerned with the method rather than the substance of the arguments. In this thesis I concentrate on one particular text of Udayana, the Atmatattvaviveka (The Discrimination of the Reality of the Self), for in this text Udayana arranged most of the major disputes that had engaged Nyãya and Buddhist philosophers in the preceding centuries in such a way as to clearly display their relevance for the debate about ãtman. The main body of my thesis consists of translations from this hitherto largely untranslated work, and discussions of some of the important arguments found therein. The concluding part of my thesis uses my findings for the broader discussion of the importance of ãtman in Nyãya, and the place of Nyãya within the wider spectrum of Indian soteriological thought

Studies in Jaina History and Culture

The last ten years have seen interest in Jainism increasing, with this previously little-known Indian religion assuming a significant place in religious studies. Studies in Jaina History and Culture breaks new ground by investigating the doctrinal differences and debates amongst the Jains rather than presenting Jainism as a seamless whole whose doctrinal core has remained virtually unchanged throughout its long history. The focus of the book is the discourse concerning orthodoxy and heresy in the Jaina tradition, the question of omniscience and Jaina logic, role models for women and female identity, Jaina schools and sects, religious property, law and ethics. The internal diversity of the Jaina tradition and Jain techniques of living with diversity are explored from an interdisciplinary point of view by fifteen leading scholars in Jaina studies. The contributors focus on the principal social units of the tradition: the schools, movements, sects and orders, rather than Jain religious culture in abstract. Peter Flügel provides a representative snapshot of the current state of Jaina studies that will interest students and academics involved in the study of religion or South Asian cultures

Praxi-centric phenomenology: From Nagarjuna through Dogen to Martin Heidegger

Buddhist practitioners in the Zen tradition have repeatedly located the tension between theory (theoria) and practice (praxis) when describing profound reality or the way things are/are becoming (yath abutam). The subjective stance is constantly challenged as not just a limiting but entirely mistaken perspective with which to approach reality/meaning. Although the Buddhist practitioners and teachers considered here propose teachings distinctive to each other, there is consistency in emphasising the necessity of practical experience expressed via sunyata and the ultimate realisation of egolessnessness or no-self (anatman/nairatmya). Nagarjuna's logical critique works to free the mind from conceptual foundationalism so that practice is effective and unfettered by delusion. Practitioners within the Yogacara school such as Asanga recognise the powerful effectiveness of meditation that highlights the tension between no-self and a perfected self necessary to the Bodhisattva-marga. Dogen explores the relationship between the cosmic reality of Buddha-nature and personal participation in seated meditation such that letting go of ego-self is the very manifestation of the Buddha-self I consider these Buddhist approaches to reality/meaning in relation to Western phenomenology, as especially borne out in Martin Heidegger's work to allow for an authentic attitude in and toward truth event (Ereignis). Ultimately, I argue that the Buddhist approach to reality embodies what I term a "praxi-centric phenomenology" that encourages Western phenomenological reflection to remain practical but egoless

Электронное учебное пособие по учебной дисциплине "Философия" обязательного модуля "Философия" для студентов 1 ступени высшего образования всех специальностей очной и заочной форм получения образования

The textbook includes materials of a lecture course, guidelines for independent study of the discipline "Philosophy" a list of additional literature for independent, scientific and research work of students

The Mitaksara Birthright: A Comparative Study in the Light of Anticipated Legislation in India.

This thesis is primarily about the relevancy of the Mitaksara birthright, the pivot of the juridical Hindu joint family, in the context of codification of a uniform Civil Code or Code of Family Law in India. It also represents an enquiry into the origination of the concept and a study of it in its historical and comparative perspective. The comparative framework of the thesis shows that a Hindu legal institution, which governs about one-sixth of the human race, may stand comparison with the institutions of any system with which it is likely to be compared. In compliance with the progress of social science, the study of law is heading towards an Interdisciplinary approach, and in the present study attention is also focussed on the operation and veritable social role of the juridical concept of joint family. Contemporary attempts at creating a uniform world law have come into the foreground, prompted basically by socio-economic changes throughout the world. In the context of this global unification movement, the present study indicates that any viable attempt to reform, modernise and unify the personal laws (e.g. Hindu law) In India deserves a comparative awareness of other legal systems of the world, past and present. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

On the Mutability of Protocols

Centre for Intelligent Systems and their ApplicationsThe task of developing a framework for which agents can communicate reliably and flexibly in open systems is not trivial. This thesis addresses the dichotomy between reliable communication and facilitation of the autonomy of agents to create more flexible and emergent interactions. By the introduction of adaptations to a distributed protocol language, agents benefit from the ability to communicate interaction protocols to elucidate the social norms (thus creating more reliable communication). Yet, this approach also provides the functionality for the agent to unilaterally introduce new paths for the conversation to explore unforeseen opportunities and options (thus restoring more autonomy than possible with static protocols). The foundation of this work is Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC). LCC is a distributed protocol language and framework in which agents coordinate their own interactions by their message passing activities. In order to ensure that adaptations to the protocols are done in a reasonable way, we examine the use of two models of communication to guide any transformations to the protocols. We describe the use of FIPA's ACL and ultimately its unsuitability for this approach as well as the more fecund task of implementing dialogue games, an model of argumentation, as dynamic protocols. The existing attempts to develop a model that can encompass the gulf between reliability and autonomy in communication have had varying degrees of success. It is the purpose and the result of the research described in this thesis to develop an alloy of the various models, by the introduction of dynamic and distributed protocols, to develop a framework stronger than its constituents. Though this is successful, the derivations of the protocols can be dificult to reconstruct. To this end, this thesis also describes a method of protocol synthesis inspired by models of human communication that can express the dialogues created by the previous approaches but also have a fully accountable path of construction. Not only does this thesis explore a unique and novel approach to agent communication, it is tested through a practical implementation

Intertextual Readings of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa on Buddhist Anti-Realism

This two-part dissertation has two goals: 1) a close philological reading of a 50-page section of a 10th-century Sanskrit philosophical work (Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyabhūṣaṇa), and 2) the creation and assessment of a novel intertextuality research system (Vātāyana) centered on the same work. The first half of the dissertation encompasses the philology project in four chapters: 1) background on the author, work, and key philosophical ideas in the passage; 2) descriptions of all known manuscript witnesses of this work and a new critical edition that substantially improves upon the editio princeps; 3) a word-for-word English translation richly annotated with both traditional explanatory material and novel digital links to not one but two interactive online research systems; and 4) a discussion of the Sanskrit author's dialectical strategy in the studied passage. The second half of the dissertation details the intertextuality research system in a further four chapters: 5) why it is needed and what can be learned from existing projects; 6) the creation of the system consisting of curated textual corpus, composite algorithm in natural language processing and information retrieval, and live web-app interface; 7) an evaluation of system performance measured against a small gold-standard dataset derived from traditional philological research; and 8) a discussion of the impact such new technology could have on humanistic research more broadly. System performance was assessed to be quite good, with a 'recall@5' of 80%, meaning that most previously known cases of mid-length quotation and even paraphrase could be automatically found and returned within the system's top five hits. Moreover, the system was also found to return a 34% surplus of additional significant parallels not found in the small benchmark. This assessment confirms that Vātāyana can be useful to researchers by aiding them in their collection and organization of intertextual observations, leaving them more time to focus on interpretation. Seventeen appendices illustrate both these efforts and a number of side projects, the latter of which span translation alignment, network visualization of an important database of South Asian prosopography (PANDiT), and a multi-functional Sanskrit text-processing web application (Skrutable).:Preface (i) Table of Contents (ii) Abbreviations (v) Terms and Symbols (v) Nyāyabhūṣaṇa Witnesses (v) Main Sanskrit Editions (vi) Introduction (vii) A Multi-Disciplinary Project in Intertextual Reading (vii) Main Object of Study: Nyāyabhūṣaṇa 104–154 (vii) Project Outline (ix) Part I: Close Reading (1) 1 Background (1) 1.1 Bhāsarvajña (1) 1.2 The Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (6) 1.2.1 Ts One of Several Commentaries on Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyasāra (6) 1.2.2 In Modern Scholarship, with Focus on NBhū 104–154 (8) 1.3 Philosophical Context (11) 1.3.1 Key Philosophical Concepts (12) 1.3.2 Intra-Textual Context within the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (34) 1.3.3 Inter-Textual Context (36) 2 Edition of NBhū 104–154 (39) 2.1 Source Materials (39) 2.1.1 Edition of Yogīndrānanda 1968 (E) (40) 2.1.2 Manuscripts (P1, P2, V) (43) 2.1.3 Diplomatic Transcripts (59) 2.2 Notes on Using the Edition (60) 2.3 Critical Edition of NBhū 104–154 with Apparatuses (62) 3 Translation of NBhū 104–154 (108) 3.1 Notes on Translation Method (108) 3.2 Notes on Outline Headings (112) 3.3 Annotated Translation of NBhū 104–154 (114) 4 Discussion (216) 4.1 Internal Structure of NBhū 104–154 (216) 4.2 Critical Assessment of Bhāsarvajña's Argumentation (218)   Part II: Distant Reading with Digital Humanities (224) 5 Background in Intertextuality Detection (224) 5.1 Sanskrit Projects (225) 5.2 Non-Sanskrit Projects (228) 5.3 Operationalizing Intertextuality (233) 6 Building an Intertextuality Machine (239) 6.1 Corpus (Pramāṇa NLP) (239) 6.2 Algorithm (Vātāyana) (242) 6.3 User Interface (Vātāyana) (246) 7 Evaluating System Performance (255) 7.1 Previous Scholarship on NBhū 104–154 as Philological Benchmark (255) 7.2 System Performance Relative to Benchmark (257) 8 Discussion (262) Conclusion (266) Works Cited (269) Main Sanskrit Editions (269) Works Cited in Part I (271) Works Cited in Part II (281) Appendices (285) Appendix 1: Correspondence of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (286) Appendix 1D: Full-Text Alignment of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (287) Appendix 2: Prosopographical Relations Important for NBhū 104–154 (288) Appendix 2D: Command-Line Tool “Pandit Grapher” (290) Appendix 3: Previous Suggestions to Improve Text of NBhū 104–154 (291) Appendix 4D: Transcript and Collation Data for NBhū 104–154 (304) Appendix 5D: Command-Line Tool “cte2cex” for Transcript Data Conversion (305) Appendix 6D: Deployment of Brucheion for Interactive Transcript Data (306) Appendix 7: Highlighted Improvements to Text of NBhū 104–154 (307) Appendix 7D: Alternate Version of Edition With Highlighted Improvements (316) Appendix 8D: Digital Forms of Translation of NBhū 104–154 (317) Appendix 9: Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 by Shodo Yamakami (318) Appendix 10.1: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Overall) (324) Appendix 10.2: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Detailed) (325) Appendix 11D: Skrutable Text Processing Library and Web Application (328) Appendix 12D: Pramāṇa NLP Corpus, Metadata, and LDA Modeling Info (329) Appendix 13D: Vātāyana Intertextuality Research Web Application (330) Appendix 14: Sample of Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (331) Appendix 14D: Full Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (333) Appendix 15: Vātāyana Recall@5 Scores for NBhū 104–154 (334) Appendix 16: PVA, PVin, and PVSV Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (338) Appendix 17: Sample Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (349) Appendix 17D: Full Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (355) Overview of Digital Appendices (356) Zusammenfassung (Thesen Zur Dissertation) (357) Summary of Results (361

Ethical Interface : Literature, Economics, Politics, and Religions

My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it

Mysticism in eighteenth-century English literature

In the heart of the 'age of reason' there is a hunger for transcendence, for the experience of unity of the mind and spirit of man with the Divine, both within nature and beyond. The sublime was the socially acceptable mode in which the man of reason abandoned the rules and anxiously sought to experience the transcendental. The sublime was not an aberration of the age but an inevitable outcome of the new awareness of the infinite resulting from various causes including the seventeenth-century scientific advances, the work of Newton and of Locke. The desire of the age for integration and wholeness is elucidated through examination of the work of sixteen writers. Beginning with the third Earl of Shaftesbury and ending with William Law, this thesis intends to show, first, that there was a significant amount of mystical literature written in eighteenth-century England and, secondly, that there was a vital mystical dimension in the spirit of the age. The writers examined are not part of one or two large groups atypical against the background of their century. They come from different traditions and are diffused throughout the period. The writers studied are as well-known as Christopher Smart and George Berkeley and as little known as James Usher and Alexander Dow. The oneness of mystical experience, which, to various degrees, all of the writers demonstrate in their mystical insights, impelled them to write of the oneness of internal and external reality, and of the human and Divine. They all testify, in different ways and with various emphases, that there is a divine, creative force in man which unifies all the disparate elements of self, and unites the self with God, but only when one gives all to this divine fire in the soul