Ramesh Pradhan

Daya Krishna defines philosophy as a conceptual inquiry into the most fundamental problems facing the humankind. The spirit of philosophy is to seek clarifications about the problems and their solutions. It is in this sense that Daya Krishna makes a passionate effort to come to grips with the problems ranging from the metaphysical to the moral, and from the logical to the social and cultural problems in the spirit of a free inquiry. He, therefore, takes the philosophical inquiry as an open-ended inquiry with the sole aim of making concepts clear and precise.

Daya Krishna explores the different realms of knowledgeKnowledge and truthTruth in his inquiry into the nature of sciencesSciences and humanities. He is a defender of the idea of the multiple domains of truth and knowledgeKnowledge and rejects the idea that there is only one truth and that scienceSciences alone has the absolute monopoly of truthTruth and knowledgeKnowledge. He discusses the autonomous realms of arts and literatureLiterature as he finds that these two realms provide vital clue to the understanding of the human mind and its creativity.

Daya Krishna is concerned with the nature of religionReligion, ethicsEthics, and societySociety in his various writings (Daya Krishna, The art of the conceptual: explorations in conceptual Maze over three decades. Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1989), while exploring the many dimensions of the human beings’ civilizationCivilizations building activities. What interests him most is the human consciousnessConsciousness in developing his religious, ethical, and social valuesSocial values, and idealsIdeals. The roots of the many-sided human civilizationCivilizations lie in the human beings’ value seeking awareness. The religious consciousnessConsciousness is firmly rooted in the human selfSelf awareness; so are the human beings’ ethical intuitions and social behaviour. Thus, in studying the nature of the human beings, we must study their religionsReligion, ethical systems, and the social formations across the many centuries of human existenceExistence on earth.

Daya Krishna’s philosophy of the human existenceExistence encompasses his theory of cultureCultures and value, because of the fact that the concept of a human being is integrally involved with the concept of cultureCultures and value. The existenceExistence of the human beings is not only biological, but also social and cultural. That is to say, in the human being, both the social and cultural efflorescence take place such that the biological man transcends into the social and cultural human being.

Daya Krishna’s philosophyHistoriographyofHistoryhistoryCultures, culture, and civilizationCivilizations is one of the most profound aspects of his many-sided philosophy. His Prolegomena to Any FutureHistoriographyHistoriographyofCulturesCulturesandCivilizationsCivilizations (Daya Krishna, 1997) is a monumental expression of his insightful reflection on the nature of historyHistory, cultureCultures, and civilization. The depth of his vision of the historyHistory of mankind and of its cultural and civilizational creations is worth understanding in order to have a full grasp of what he has to say on many aspects of the human beings’ creative existenceExistence as a civilizationCivilizations building creature.

This chapter extends the transcendental or non-naturalist argument further to show that consciousness itself, which is central to the structure of the mind, is the transcendental source of meaning. Meanings are placed in the realm of consciousness because the latter constitute the meanings as has been pointed out by the transcendental phenomenologist like Husserl.Recently Owen Flanagan has shown that meanings themselves constitute multiple spaces within the space of meanings. From science to spirituality, there is a whole range of meanings which are constituted within consciousness. He argues that there is a really hard problem about how there can be meaning in a material world.If we take the standpoint of the radical naturalist, Flanagan argues, we can never explain meaning in a material world because it is already disenchanted by the scientific laws. Meanings are myths for a radical naturalist because everything is causally explainable. Flanagan therefore takes the standpoint of the soft naturalist to make room for meanings in the natural world.However, it can be shown that meanings demand a transcendentally autonomous space for themselves because in the absence of such a space they are constantly under threat from naturalism.

This chapter takes into consideration the nature of meaning keeping in view that both language and mind embody meaning. The concept b of meaning is central to philosophy of language and mind because meaning is the way language and mind function. The problem arises when we try to decipher the way meaning arises. The holists and atomists differ as to how meaning arises in language and mind.Quine and Davidson have been the champions of meaning holism because both hold that meaning cannot be atomic because language functions as a system. With reference to language, Quine is of the view that language as a theory is not verifiable in experience piecemeal because sentences do not get verified in isolation. Therefore language as a whole has to get its meaning by an encounter with the world.Davidson explains the language-world encounter through the concept of interpretation of our utterances regarding the world. For him, interpretation is a basic mechanism by which we understand language as such. Therefore we have to keep in mind the truth conditions of the sentences we make regarding the world. Meaning accrues to language holistically within a broad truth schema that can ensure meaning for the entire language by appealing to the truth conditions.Meaning holism is defended in this chapter because of its efficacy in explaining meaning without going back to the atomistic verificationism and reductionism of the logical positivists. However, it is further argued the naturalist semantics is not enough to explain meaning and normativity of language.

This chapter continues the theme developed in the previous chapter to show that mind and world are metaphysically related in the way laid down by Kant and Hegel. It was Kant who first had shown that the world is structured by the categories of the mind. Hegel gave it a metaphysical grounding by showing that the world itself is an expression of the mind or the spirit.John McDowell recently has taken up the Kantian and the Hegelian argument further by showing that the world is placed in the space of reasons and that there is no way we can place it beyond the realm of the conceptual because the latter is unbounded in nature. The world is independent of our empirical thought and experience, but it is within the space of reasons. Therefore, the world is empirically independent of the mind but is transcendentally dependent on mind.McDowell develops a transcendental argument to show that the world and mind cannot be understood within a naturalist framework because naturalism, especially the reductive or bald naturalism, disenchants the mind and the world. The world gets its meaning from its place in the space of reasons; so also the mind being rational in nature is the source of the meanings and reasons.

In this chapter I will discuss Wittgenstein’s views on self, meaning and world in an attempt to bring out the connections between self, language and the world within a transcendental framework. Wittgenstein has opted for a transcendental way of bringing out the connections between language and logic on the one hand and the world on the other. From his early philosophy in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1961a) and to his later philosophy in the Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953, 2009), he has pursued a method of understanding language and the world which can be called transcendental (Shwayder 1969: 66–70; Stenius 1960; Pradhan 2008). Though he calls his early philosophy transcendental, he calls his later philosophy grammatical (Wittgenstein 1953, 2009) in nature. However, we can consider Wittgenstein as a transcendental philosopher in general as he has given up the empiricist and the naturalist way of interpreting language and the world.

This chapter examines two naturalist theories of mind, namely, those of Jerry Fodor and John Searle. Both Fodor and Searle are naturalists and consider mind and meaning from a naturalist point of view, though they differ considerably about the nature of the mind itself. While Fodor advocates the computational representational theory of mind, Searle accepts a biological view of mind. For Fodor, mind functions like a computer in its activities, while Searle holds that mind is a biological system with consciousness as its central feature.Fodor’s theory is a functionalist theory which holds that mental states are computational in nature and have intentionality as a necessary feature. The mental states are cognitive states which are representational in character. Meaning is a mental content which has both narrow and broad dimensions. As narrow contents, the meanings are internal to the mind, while the broad contents refer to the world.Searle rejects the mechanical view of the mind and holds that the mind can never be a cognitive machine; it is a natural system of mental states which are caused by the brain. The brain causes the mind, but the mind cannot be reduced to the brain because the mental states are conscious and subjective in character. Meaning and intentionality are intrinsic to the mind.This chapter exposes the inadequacies of both these theories and holds that we must go beyond both the mechanical and the biological theories of mind and consciousness and offer a transcendental explanation of the latter.

This chapter explores the transcendental nature of the self, will and agency because it is the self in its form of will and agency which explains human actions and experience. The notion of self has been analysed from both the empirical and the transcendental standpoint.The concept of self has been at the centre of controversy since Hume who denied the possibility of the Cartesian substance-self. From then on, there have been many attempts to bring back the self. Both Kant and Wittgenstein have brought back the self as the transcendental self that is the centre of all our knowledge, language and action.In this chapter it has been argued that it is the transcendental or the metaphysical self which is the centre of our language and knowledge. Therefore in order to situate meaning, consciousness and the world in the proper perspective, we need the transcendental self which is not part of the world but is the presupposition of the world.

This chapter examines the subjectivity of consciousness. Many philosophers like Chalmers and Searle hold that consciousness is necessarily subjective or first person in character. Subjectivity is an ontological feature of consciousness. They hold that consciousness is always given to a subject or self because there is no consciousness without the conscious self or subject.The subject of consciousness is the metaphysical locus of consciousness and its contents. That is why the self has been so central to the understanding of mind and consciousness. Those who deny the centrality of the self go to the other extreme of denying any subjective centre of consciousness. For them, consciousness needs no subjective locus because consciousness is not very different from the brain states.The objective or third-person approach to consciousness fails to understand consciousness because it cannot explain meaning and intentionality arise at all. Therefore there is a need to accept a transcendental self to give a proper understanding of consciousness, meaning and intentionality.In this chapter it has been shown that consciousness has a transcendental dimensional which needs to be probed in order to explain how consciousness can transcend itself and can go beyond its embodied situation.

This chapter attempts to argue for a transcendental theory of consciousness keeping in mind the fact that consciousness has many levels of reality other than the brain-related consciousness. At the primary level, consciousness is bodily in nature, but it rises to higher levels in a process of evolution. From the body consciousness to the spirit consciousness or self-consciousness, there is an evolutionary progress.Consciousness itself is a phenomenon of a very different kind from the body itself, though unsurprisingly it is embodied in its primary level. But as consciousness goes to higher stages, its body relation is loosened. Pure consciousness is such a state of consciousness where the body is not an essential factor.The theory of consciousness in Vedanta and Buddhism points to the higher level of consciousness where the body becomes conceptually detached for the reason that the ability of consciousness to generate new meanings is constrained by the body. The highest consciousness for them is a body-detached consciousness that rises to the higher realms of values and meanings.The metaphysics of consciousness demands a transcendental theory of consciousness that overcomes the pitfalls of naturalism, empiricism and reductionism.

Description: The book presents a systematic view of the landmark developments in analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. It highlights the development of the concepts such as language, meaning, truth, reference, necessity, analyticity, etc. which have been central to analytic philosophy. The book consists of four parts, namely: Part I The Linguistic Revolution; Part II The Logic of Language; Part III The Primacy of the Semantical and Part IV Language, Mind and Metaphysics. Part I discusses the nature of the linguistic revolution and the analytic method. Part II presents a panoramic view of the fall of formal language philosophy and the rise of the ordinary language philosophy in the west. Part III brings out the semantic issues like the problems of truth, meaning, reference, etc. Part IV attempts to discuss the nature of language-reality relationship, the nature of mental representations and the concept of mind and also the metaphysical issues of realism and anti-realism. Finally, it brings out the metaphysics of freedom, value and reason. The author has attempted to bring out the issues of analytic philosophy in a systematic and coherent fashion. Analytic philosophy, in spite of the appearances to the contrary, is a systematic philosophy with a built-in metaphysics of man and the universe. The book will be of interest to the general students of philosophy as well as the specialists in philosophy working in the areas of philosophy of language and meaning.

The present book intends to approach the problem of mind, meaning and consciousness from a non-naturalist or transcendental point of view. The naturalization of consciousness has reached a dead-end. There can be no proper solution to the problem of mind within the naturalist framework. This work intends to reverse this trend and bring back the long neglected transcendental theory laid down by Kant and Husserl in the West and Vedanta and Buddhism in India. The novelty of this approach lies in how we can make an autonomous space for mind and meaning without denying its connection with the world. The transcendental theory does not disown the embodied nature of consciousness, but goes beyond the body in search of higher meanings and values. The scope of this work extends from mind and consciousness to the world and brings the world into the space of mind and meaning with a hope to enchant the world. The world needs to be retrieved from the stranglehold of scientism and naturalism. This book will dispel the illusion about naturalism which has gripped the minds of our generation. The researchers interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness can benefit from this work.

This paper seeks to move from soft naturalism to anti-naturalism with regard to the understanding of mind and the world. John McDowell has already laid down the groundwork of soft naturalism or limited naturalism in his framework of understanding of the relation between mind and the world. McDowell’s argument is based on his commitment to some form of naturalism as against what he calls “bald naturalism.” His form of naturalism is derived from his idea of “second nature,” which places the space of reasons within the realm of second nature as distinguished from the realm of first nature. The latter is the realm of law, while the former is the realm of reasons. Thus, McDowell reconciles rationalism or Platonism with naturalism by showing that reason must be placed within the realm of human nature, if not in the realm of the natural world. My argument is that even soft naturalism cannot be reconciled with rationalism because we have far more responsibility to place normativity and reasons away from nature, even if the latter is the human nature. Human nature is an extension of the natural world, and there must be a decisive break between the realm of reasons and the so-called second nature.

This paper is about making the ethical discourse relevant to the students of technology in the present age of information. Information ethics is already a part of the present day engagement with information technology at all levels. This encourages us to carry forward the ethical discourse further by bringing in the moral thoughts of Wiener and Gandhi. Both Wiener and Gandhi lived in the age of technology, but both rebelled against it for basically moral reasons. Wiener is the founder of cybernetics and communication science, while Gandhi is a humanist and moralist and a crusader for freedom of humanity. Both agreed, however, that human freedom needs check on the inhuman use of technology. That is, both shared the philosophy of human dignity and value which demand a "human use" of technology. In this paper we explore the possibility of a humanistic ethics for information technology on the basis of moral thoughts of Wiener and Gandhi and wish to present the vision of the human civilization which underlies their thoughts.