Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion

This book examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna and brings him into dialogue with Western philosophers of religion, primarily in the recent analytic tradition. Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, opens up an entirely new paradigm for addressing central topics in the philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious diversity, the nature and epistemology of mystical experience, and the problem of evil

"God Is Infinite, and the Paths to God Are Infinite": A Reconstruction and Defense of Sri Ramakrishna's Vijñana-Based Model of Religious Pluralism

This article argues that contemporary philosophers have unduly ignored Sri Ramakrishna’s pioneering views on religious pluralism. The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) taught the harmony of all religions on the basis of his own spiritual experiences and his diverse religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. Part I reconstructs the main tenets of Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism. Part II explores how Sri Ramakrishna addresses the problem of conflicting religious truth-claims. Part III addresses some of the major criticisms leveled against Sri Ramakrishna’s views on religious pluralism

The challenge of the oceanic feeling: Romain Rolland’s mystical critique of psychoanalysis and his call for a ‘new science of the mind’

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the “oceanic feeling,” a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud—intentions less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda—were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical “science of the mind” that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science

In seinem Anderen bei sich selbst zu sein: Toward a Recuperation of Hegel’s Metaphysics of Agency

This essay argues for a distinctly post-Kantian understanding of Hegel’s definition of freedom as “being at home with oneself in one’s other.” I first briefly isolate the inadequacies of some dominant interpretations of Hegelian freedom and proceed to develop a more adequate theoretical frame by turning to Theodor Adorno. Then I interpret Hegel’s notion of the freedom of the will in the Philosophy of Right in terms of his speculative metaphysics. Finally, I briefly examine Hegel’s treatment of agency in the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to establish important continuities between the early and late Hegel

A Lepton-specific Universal Seesaw Model with Left-Right Symmetry

We propose a left-right symmetric framework with universal seesaw mechanism for the generation of masses of the Standard Model quarks and leptons. Heavy vector-like singlet quarks and leptons are required for generation of Standard Model-like quark and lepton masses through seesaw mechanism. A softly broken $Z_2$ symmetry distinguishes the lepton sector and the quark sector of the model. This leads to the presence of some lepton-specific interactions that can produce unique collider signatures which can be explored at the current Large Hadron Collider run and also future colliders.Comment: 15 Pages, 3 figure

Neutrino and Collider Implications of a Left-Right Extended Zee Model

We study a simple left-right symmetric (LRS) extension of the Zee model for neutrino mass generation. An extra $SU(2)_{L/R}$ singlet charged scalar helps in generating a loop-induced Majorana mass for neutrinos in this model. The right-handed neutrinos in this case are very light of the order of a few eV to a few MeV which makes this scenario quite different from other LRS models. We have analyzed the scalar potential and Higgs spectrum in detail, which also play an important role for the neutrino phenomenology. We identified the parameter regions in the model which satisfy the experimentally observed neutrino masses and mixings along with other experimental constraints. We have then studied the collider signatures of the charged scalar at $e^+e^-$ colliders with different benchmark points. It is possible to get a huge enhancement in the production cross-section of the charged scalar at lepton collider compared to the hadron colliders, resulting in a much stronger signal which can be easily observed at the upcoming ILC or CLIC experiments.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 5 table