Are human rights negotiable? Jacques Derrida argued that it is necessary to negotiate the nonnegotiable to save the nonnegotiable. This paper defends this claim while arguing for what Calvin Schrag called an ethics of the fitting response and finding such a response in Amartya Sen’s realization-focused comparative approach to justice. For Derrida, the aporetic character of urgency produces decisions which must be made outside the institutional limits of decision theory. That calls for a deconstruction of the axiomatics of rights in institutional settings. It also makes urgent the need for a deinstitutionalized ethics undeceived by the challenge of making judgments in aporias. Using Ted Honderich’s humanism as counterfoil, the argument moves through Derrida’s concept of "contradictory coherence" to Schrag’s transverse rationality, which thinks with deconstruction in order to think against its negative outcomes. The paper ends by suggesting that Schrag's communicative praxeology forges an ethics compatible with Sen’s threshold conditions to determine rights through freedoms.

In this article, I reconsider Gandhi's relationship to liberal democracy. I argue that a properly Gandhian approach to this relationship should emphasize the role of the satyagrahi facilitating conflict resolutions and progress in truth. Above all, this approach calls upon courageous, exemplary individuals to pass over and join the viewpoints of 'unreasonables' marginalized by the liberal state. However, I also argue that contemporary Gandhians should explore cultural adaptations of the satyagrahi-role appropriate to highly materialistic, multicultural liberal-democracies. In these societies, the traditional figure of the ascetic or saint may lack popular cultural resonance. Moreover, moral learning and spiritual insight often derives from popular culture and entertainment as much as religious traditions, or devotional practices. Contemporary Gandhi’s scholars should thus consider the prospects for 'alternative satyagrahis' embracing some materialist values and cultural motifs, as appropriate sources spiritual growth and soul-force.

Religion (dharma) plays a vital role in the Hindu (Sanatana) quest for understanding and practicing harmony between nature and humanity that result into the formation of a cosmological awakening, i.e. 'transcending the universe.' The importance and applicability of such new consciousness is a sign in promoting global humanism in the 21st century, where environmental ethics and sustainability are the wheels of making the future more humane and peaceful. Arne Naess, who coined the term 'deep ecology' conceiving humankind as an integral part of its environment, gives credit to Gandhi. Gandhi’s contributions help to re-awaken the human spirit to self-realisation, finally leading to revelation promoting human coexistence with nature sustainably, mostly through re-interpretation of Vedantic thought. Under the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) the ideas of Gandhi are recognised as a path that makes human coexistence stronger, feasible and co-sharedness, sustainable in peace and harmony with nature. This essay presents ecospiritual contextuality and its vitality concerning a sustainable perspective in line with Gandhi's vision and way of life.

The global reach of Tagore’s achievement can be freshly understood through a theory of purposive behavior by the American philosopher, Stephen C. Pepper. Pepper proposed dividing human purposes in three categories: conative achievement, and affective. Tagore’s prose fiction can fill out the theory with more complex and problematic examples towards a cross cultural ethics. His novels about the emerging professional class in India reveal the tensions between traditional values of the family and religious observance against individual efforts to fulfil desire, find pleasure, and be productive outside or in home life. The last completed prose fiction of the Bengali master presents a distinct challenge for critics and filmmakers as his longstanding sympathy for the plight of women may cause us to misread the rollickingly satirical "Laboratory" in which a scientist's legacy is fought over by a thoroughly corrupt mother and daughter.

This paper explores the philosophy of emotion in classical India. Although some scholars have endeavored to develop a systematic philosophy of emotion based on rasa theory, no serious effort has been made to read the relationship between emotion and the self in light of rasa theory. This exclusion, I argue, is an outcome of a broader presupposition that the 'self' in classical Indian philosophies is outside the scope of emotion. A fresh reading of classical Sanskrit texts finds this premise baseless. With an underlying assumption that emotion and self are inherently linked, this paper explores similarities between the Indian and Chinese approaches.

While yoga has come to be seen as more of an exercise than anything else in the West, the roots of yoga are similar to those of philosophy and religion. There is a philosophically rich view on the nature of the world, being, the nature of humanity, how we ought to live, and our place in the world. The theoretical part of yoga has been called a religion as well as a philosophy and this paper argues that it should be treated as a philosophy. Yoga gives reasons for the theoretical views, reasons for the practice, and encourages practitioners to continuously study, reflect, and search for knowledge of "eternal truths". This paper focuses on the ethical restraints of yoga – the yamas – in order to show the connections to the Dualistic metaphysical view of the universe and the epistemological goals expressed in The Yoga Sutras.

One approaching a thing from a distance may perceive it as existent, then as a substance, then as a tree and, finally, as a fig tree. Thus, the same fig tree can be the object of all these different perceptions. This shows, Udayana argues, that difference in cognitive states does not necessarily prove that their objects are different. This argument is in response to the Buddhist claim that since perceptual cognitive states and non-perceptual cognitive states are different, their respective objects are also different; unique particulars (svalakSaNa) that alone are real, are grasped in perception; general features (saamaanyalakSaNa) that are not real are grasped in non-perceptual cognitive states. The Buddhist objects: when the same thing appears to be the object of different cognitive states, only that cognitive state which leads to useful result is reliable. Udayana replies: More than one cognitive state in the above situation may lead to useful result; it is not justified to accept only one of them as reliable and reject the others. The Buddhist objects again: perceptual awareness is direct but non-perceptual awareness is indirect: hence their objects are different. Udayana replies: The same thing may be perceived when there is sensory connection with it and then inferred from an invariably connected sign when there is no sensory connection. Thus, the same thing may be the object of both direct and indirect cognitive states depending on different causal conditions.