Sadhan Chakraborty and Gangadhar Kar
LANGUAGE as such and linguistic practices interest philosophers. Philosophers have been interested in language for very many reasons. Language, being a human phenomenon, interests the philosopher as the purpose of philosophy is to make sense of the world and our lives in it. Language occupied the centre stage of philosophy during the first-half of the last century. It is still a very important area for the philosophers. How is it that we manage to talk about things in the world? How is it that sounds become meaningful words and they concatenate to form sentences that convey our thoughts? How is it that our thoughts and our talks are related? How is it that our words manage to mean what they mean? Why at all do we need to mean what we mean through the use of languistic meaning? How do silences speak? How do words like "I" and "mine" illuminate us about who we are and how we see ourselves? How is it that language can capture images, and how does language in its turn become an image? How do we enjoy the aesthetic savour through language? How is it that complex aesthetic metaphors express our deepest aesthetic experiences? These are a few of the questions that intrigue philosophers. This anthology is an attempt at understanding language and its relation to the world and the mind. Philosophers around the world have thought over the nature of the relation between the word and the world.
Silence and language though seem to be at par with each other, in "Silence" by Sandhya Basu, they are shown as contemporaries of each other. The author does not aim at teaching people how to remain silent, rather, attempts to teach people how to speak out. Dealing with silence in art, religious practice and socio-political context, the author has shown how silence may signal assent or agreement, sometimes disagreement, and also either unite or dissociate people.
"The Concept of Samhita: A Formal Approach" by Piyali Palit exposes the nature of Samhita following the fundamental theory of Vaisesika formal ontology as established by Professor Navjyoti Singh. Inquiring about the nature of Samhita, the author upholds that Samhita reveals the nature of the Vedas and other Šästras in Indian tradition. It also states that the logical form of "point" or "punctuator", which is a non-entity, acts as the glue or stitch required to bind and relate the entities or padarthas in their fixed order. Samhita is identified as the condition for such stitching.
In our daily linguistic behaviour, we are familiar with the word sva in such usages as caitrah svaputram pasyati. But what actually is the meaning of sva - this has been examined by Madhu Kapoor in "The Meaning of Sva in Its Own Trajectory", by taking into account the narration of Gadādhara's Śaktivāda. The semantic explanation by the author is preceded by a brief exposition of the meaning of sva as used in our language in different ways, followed by its transcending reference to the word atman as found in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad.
In "Rasasvadanam: A Perspective on Aesthetic Enjoyment" Madhu Kapoor discusses the meaning of rasa as defined in Bharata's Natyasastra and further proceeds to show how the meaning of rasa took a different turn in the hands of later interpreters and rhetoricians. By way of introducing the rasa theory, the meaning of a word is also taken into consideration. Alongside, it has also been elucidated whether rasa resides in the actor or in the spectator.
Hindu (1774)
Philosophers (2333)
Aesthetics (319)
Comparative (70)
Dictionary (12)
Ethics (49)
Language (350)
Logic (81)
Mimamsa (58)
Nyaya (136)
Psychology (513)
Samkhya (61)
Shaivism (66)
Shankaracharya (232)
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