This post is partly a response to Sartaj’s post from a few days ago. He starts his post with a rather remarkable quote: “Colors are an artefact of perception.” This one line captures four hundred years of western investigations of the mind. One line of inquiry summarized in this quote goes as follows: If experiential…
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The idea of a primeval order or design is central to Indo European cultures – it is there in the Rig-Vedic corpus in the notion of Rta, and it is there in Plato when he talks about ideas. Someone like Thomas McEvilley would argue that these notions have circulated within the ancient world for a…
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This piece is part of an ongoing response to Amartya Sen’s book that continues the discussion of reason, emotion and ethics from the seminar I taught last year. Introduction. Amartya Sen’s “The Idea of Justice” (IOJ from now on) is arguably the most awaited and critically acclaimed work of ethics of the twenty first century….
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In ordinary language, we use the word “sense” in three different ways: sense as in sensation; sense as in making sense and finally, sense as in being sensitive. The first use of sense is about perception, the second use of sense is about conceptualization and the third use of sense is related to empathy and…
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