Prashant Bagad

In this paper I attempt to uncover the concept of alienation in M. K. Gandhi’s seminal work, the Hind Swaraj. It is my contention that there is an implicit notion of alienation that informs the whole of Hind Swaraj, which is, to some extent, similar to the concept of alienation found in Karl Marx’s thought. The Gandhian and Marxian concepts seem to have affinity and seem to share the same critical, diagnostic spirit, since they are employed for the same purpose, namely as keys to understanding the ills of modern civilization. However, as far as I know, although Gandhi and Marx have been compared in numerous books and papers, there have been no at­tempts to read the Hind Swaraj as presenting a Marxian-looking concept of alienation. So I propose to do that here. I would first delineate the Marxian concept of alienation. I would then try to make explicit the implicit Gandhian notion of alienation. I would then turn to comparing the two concepts. This comparative study would show that a Gandhian way to a non-alienated state is to make constant use of one’s “hands and feet”, whereas a Marxian way seems to regard the non-alienated state as something to be achieved once and for all.

In this paper I interpret the intriguing but underexplored concept of divine success in the Nāṭyaśāstra. The Nāṭyaśāstra discusses two main types of success that a dramatic performance may achieve. Chapter 27 of the Nāṭyaśāstra is principally devoted to explicating these two types of success: mānuṣī siddhi and daivikī siddhi. Prima facie, one type of success is deemed "human" because its achievement seems to depend on human efforts: the better the effort the greater the chances of attaining human success. The other type is called "divine" because its achievement does not seem to be fully in human control; it seems to emanate from some nonhuman sources or factors....

Like many other Platonic dialogues, the Ion is richly ambiguous. It may be read simultaneously as praise for poetry and as a scathing critique of it. However, I contend in this paper that it is neither entirely favourable nor entirely unfavourable to poetry. Rather, the Ion seems to propose, albeit obliquely and with a generous amount of Socratic irony, a new, un-rhapsodic, philosophical model for the interpretation and evaluation of poetry. This model of poetic interpretation is presented as an alternative to the model immanent in the well-established practice of rhapsody as presented or painted in the dialogue.

I propose in this paper an interpretation of Kant’s fascinating notion of “aesthetic ideas”. I contend that aesthetic ideas, in spite of Kant’s way of explicating them in those terms, are not mirror images, sensible counterparts or translations of intellectual or rational ideas. Rather, they have independent life. They present what cannot be available by any other means and thereby make a poem a unique, singular, insubstitutable individual. This reading of the notion can shed a different light on Kant’s view that a poem should look like nature. If we focus on Kant’s description of “genius” as a source of aesthetic ideas, this seemingly mysterious concept begins to make a nuanced sense: concepts of genius and aesthetic ideas are what I call “medium-centric” notions. To write a poem is to play upon the medium and discover aesthetic ideas; a poet who can achieve this is or has genius.