Papers by Arindam Chakrabarti
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jul 1, 2022
hemeroteca/chakrabarti.pdf Este ensayo cuestiona una imagen popular del yoga como algo amoral, an... more hemeroteca/chakrabarti.pdf Este ensayo cuestiona una imagen popular del yoga como algo amoral, anti-analítico, o a-racional e indaga sobre la relación exacta entre meditación yóguica, pensamiento o razonamiento lógico-analítico y las virtudes prácticas morales y sociales.
Routledge eBooks, Jan 6, 2023
Summerhill, Oct 22, 2020
My impression is that what has been charged thus Jar is abuse, which I believe technically is dif... more My impression is that what has been charged thus Jar is abuse, which I believe technically is different jro111 torture. And tlterefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.. ... .... Secretary of Defense Donald Ru111sjeld Lo?king at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can so111eone grin at the suffe rings and l111111iliation of another hu nwn bemg? Set guard dogs at the genitals ami legs of cowering .naked prisoners? Force slwckled, hooded pnsoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one anot/ 1 er? A nd you fee/naive for asking, since the answer is, se~f-evidently, people do these things to other people. Rape and pain infl icted on tl1e genitals nre amoilg tl1e III OS I con11110n fo mts of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps ami in Abu Ghraib when if was run by Sadrlam Hussein. A111ericans, too, have rlone anrl do I he111 when they are told, or 111nde to f eel, tfwt tlwse over who111 they lwve nbsolu te power desl!rve to be hu111 ilia ted, tor111en tt!d. They rio them when they are led to !Je/ievl! that the people they are torturing bt!long to an infe rior race or religion. For f lit! 111eauillg of these pictures is not just tlwt these acts were pe1jormed, but tlwt their perpetrators apparently lind no sen sf! that there was nnythinf? wrong i11 what the pictures show.
Springer eBooks, 2012
When it comes to evaluating the primordial human emotion of vengeance, moral philosophers, ancien... more When it comes to evaluating the primordial human emotion of vengeance, moral philosophers, ancient and modern, Indian and Western, are divided into two groups: revenge-approvers and revenge-denouncers. Socrates, for example, decries revenge but Aristotle extols it as a virtue. Using the works of Nietzsche and Nozick, insights from the Mahābhārata, and Euripedes’ Orestes, this paper distinguishes between revenge and retribution, and goes on to expose the misleading metaphors behind revenge-abetting phrases such as “teaching a lesson” or “getting even”. An elementary mistake of confusing the dictum “Do to others what you want to be done to yourself” with the totally different dictum: “Do to others what they do to you” seems to lie behind the vague concept of “reciprocity” which is invoked by contemporary pro-revenge moral philosophers. Robert Solomon’s subtle defense of revengefulness as an ineliminably human emotional motivation for justly angry actions is critiqued as slipping into a logical mistake. Finally, the paper proposes a moral psychological explanation of why revenge-spirals unstoppably escalate by the in-built discontent and self-contradiction in the motivational structure of the avenger’s principle: “He should never have done that to me, therefore I shall now do exactly the same thing to him!” Any act of revenge is doomed to self-frustration, because it mimics and repeats a wrongdoing in the name of resisting and deterring it, it does the same in the name of doing the opposite, expecting emotional closure and non-closure at the same time.
BRILL eBooks, Jul 9, 2020
Springer eBooks, 1997
Those who had expected an unravelling of the Enigma of Existence from this book must be thoroughl... more Those who had expected an unravelling of the Enigma of Existence from this book must be thoroughly disappointed. My basic insight has been simply this: Existence which belongs to all that there is can still be meaningfully denied of some specific targets of linguistic reference. This is possible because on special occasions we — the speaker—hearers of language — can together switch our pragmatic (or, if you like, illocutionary) gears in between pinning down the topic of conversation and issuing a comment on it. Noticing this feature of our linguistic behaviour does not solve or dissolve the mystery of existence even for me. I am not one of those who write off all philosophical puzzlement on the nature of reality as merely a matter of being caught up in lexical or grammatical muddles. Even after the “is” of identity, the “is” of predication, the “is” of existence, the “is” of constitution and all other uses of the verb to be have been carefully distinguished and make-believe reference has been set apart from absolute spatio-temporal identification, I am sure a deeper metaphysical question about what it is really to exist remains. Forgetting about all my other language-games, even the informationally trite statements in game (1) like “I exist” or “You exist” or “Material bodies exist” or “The Universe exists” give rise to genuine philosophical problems. It is obvious that I did not even dream of raising those metaphysical issues in this work. Not that I have tried to shun onto-logical involvement altogether. Claiming such avoidance would be foolish for any serious exercise in the philosophy of language. My distinction between game (1) and game (4) is openly based on the ontological demarcation between concrete spatio-temporal particulars and abstract entities. To try to reduce game (4) to an indirect or compendious way of conducting game (1) could be Nominalistic.
Springer eBooks, 1989
Whether God exists, clearly, is not a controversy concerning God. It is an issue about the world.... more Whether God exists, clearly, is not a controversy concerning God. It is an issue about the world. This can be said without having to pronounce that existence is not a genuine property of individuals.1 In the classical Indian inference-schema:
Philosophy East and West, Apr 1, 1983
... manifests itself (in the individual soul) at liberation) ("Anandam Brahmaho Page 6. 172 ... more ... manifests itself (in the individual soul) at liberation) ("Anandam Brahmaho Page 6. 172 Chakrabarti rupam tac ca mokse 'bhivyajyate"). Spinoza's Ethics (Prop. 33 to Prop. 42) describes the state of freedom (through the intellectual ...
Routledge eBooks, Nov 15, 2021
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Jul 1, 2000
Introduction: The Puzzle of Singular Existence-Denials. 1. The Scaffolding for a Solution. 2. The... more Introduction: The Puzzle of Singular Existence-Denials. 1. The Scaffolding for a Solution. 2. The Logical Form of Existence-Assertions. 3. Singular Death-Sentences. 4. An Enquiry into the Meaning and Truth of Fictional Discourse. 5. Deeper Troubles with Fiction: Reference, Emotion and Indeterminacy. 6. Appearing Unreals. 7. The Marvel of the Master Game. 8. Concluding Unsemantic Postscript. Appendix: The Problem of the Nonexistent in Indian Philosophy of Logic and Language.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Mar 1, 1992
Realisms about the self and about the external world entail each other. And both realisms derive ... more Realisms about the self and about the external world entail each other. And both realisms derive support from the plain fact of perceptual reidentification of objects across times and senses. That is going to be the major contention of this paper. The Berkeleyan view that there is an abiding ego undergoing subjective states but no material objects for these states to focus on will be shown to be inconsistent. Equally incoherent, I shall argue, is the Parfitian view that there are more or less persistent material objects, e.g., buildings in Venice and hemispheres of brains, and also experiences and thoughts about them but no stable owners of those states of consciousness. A reductive anti-realism about selves will logically commit us to a similar diffusion of material bodies into their secondary qualities, and of those, in turn, to subjective
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 9, 2015
Springer eBooks, 1997
Unicorns do not exist. Dinosaurs do not exist either. The sentence-frame “... does not exist” is ... more Unicorns do not exist. Dinosaurs do not exist either. The sentence-frame “... does not exist” is used in ordinary language not only to reveal the unreality of certain items which are talked or written about, believed in, dreamt of or depicted, but also to report demise or extinction. That the existence-predicate serves to express two quite easily distinguishable concepts in these two kinds of use can be made clear by two simple idiomatic expansion tests. When we report the current nonexistence of prehistoric mammoths or of the Euston Arch we can smoothly add “now”, “any longer” or “these days” to the assertion. But it would be odd and misleading to say that Centaurs do not exist now or that El Dorado does not exist any longer (unless the appropriate mythology specifies that they would be extinct by the end of the twentieth century and we are asserting a fictional truth). Conversely, when we assert the absolute nonexistence of a particular hallucinated elf or of a very life-like fictional detective, we can idiomatically insert “really” between “does not” and “exist”. It would be quite awkward and misleading to do the same with our reports of present nonexistence. We might expand “Miss Marple does not exist” to “Miss Marple does not really exist” but would not expand “Agatha Christie does not exist” in the same way. Of course, we could exploit this ambiguity of “exists” and make statements like “Atlantis does not exist”, meaning, non-committally as it were, that either it was always imaginary or even if it once existed it no longer does, because according to the legend itself it went under the ocean in the year 950 B.C.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Oct 20, 2017
Introductory Remarks You cannot say "thank you" in Sanskrit. It would be ridiculous to deduce fro... more Introductory Remarks You cannot say "thank you" in Sanskrit. It would be ridiculous to deduce from this (as William Ward, a British Orientalist, did in 1822) that gratefulness as a sentiment was unknown to the ancient Indian people. It is no less ridiculous to argue that rationality as a concept is absent from or marginal to the entire panoply of classical Indian philosophical traditions on the basis of the fact that there is no exact Sanskrit equivalent of that word. For one thing, there are several words for the science or art of reasoning: for example, "anviksiki *," "tarkasastra*," "nyaya*." (And one of these namely, "anviksiki," and its role in the Indian metatheory of branches of learning or knowledge will occupy us in a separate section of this article). There are also very ancient words for the institutions of rational debate and public problem-solving contests (for example, a "brahmodya''), like the famous one reported in the Brhadaranyaka* Upanisad* (third book) in which Yajñavalkya* steals the show in the court of the philosopher-king Janaka. There are also words for the special form of reflecting by means of anticipated "pro" and "contra" arguments ("uhapoha*," "manana," "yukti-vicara*"), which one is urged to cultivate as part of a contemplative culture. Second, even if there were no such closely cognate words, that would hardly license the conjecture that the concept is foreign to the Vedic people. Of course, identity-criteria for concepts are hard to formulate. But, as the following discussion would demonstrate, articulated concepts of what makes a belief, an action, an interpretation, a preference, a choice of means or an end reasonable could be detected everywhere in classical Indian thought. Those concepts may not be easily recognizable as concepts of rationality, since unlike the standard Western concepts of rationality, the typically Indian notions of rationality are, on an average, non-hedonistic, nonindividualistic, non-positivistic, and aim at surrendering the personal ego to an impersonal tradition or to some universal consciousness. In this article, I shall first try to diagnose four major worries that can make even unprejudiced surveyors of Indian thought wonder whether the concept of rationality, with its positive valueovertone, is at all compatible with the general tenor of classical Indian philosophies. Although it is advisable to be suspicious of any talk of the "general tenor" of all Indian philosophies (except Buddhism, because I have avoided discussing it here), these deep worries are well grounded. By trying to face them, I think, we can get a better grip on the special contribution that Indian ways of thinking in their inexhaustible variety of in-house disagreements and their passion for intratraditional polemics made to the multivalent concept of rationality. After responding to these four major worries, I take up specific aspects of the Indian theoretical engagement with logical, epistemic, hermeneutic, ethical, aesthetic, and soteriological
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Papers by Arindam Chakrabarti