The six major orthodox schools of philosophical thought in Hinduism, known as the orthodox darsanas, are concerned with the nature of reality and it is this theme which unites them. The text begins by analyzing the concept of knowledge, and what constitutes real knowledge. Four topics - the self, causality, the concept of God, and liberation - are then examined.

New Perspectives on Virtual and Augmented Reality discusses the possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality in the role of innovative pedagogy, where there is an urgent need to find ways to teach and support learning in a transformed learning environment. Technology creates opportunities to learn differently and presents challenges for education. Virtual reality solutions can be exciting, create interest in learning, make learning more accessible and make learning faster. This book analyses the capabilities of virtual, augmented and mixed reality by providing ideas on how to make learning more effective, how existing VR/AR solutions can be used as learning tools and how a learning process can be structured. The virtual reality (VR) solutions can be used successfully for educational purposes as their use can contribute to the construction of knowledge and the development of metacognitive processes. They also contribute to inclusive education by providing access to knowledge that would not otherwise be available. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the field of educational technology.

Are Western epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of science grounded only in men's distinctive understandings of themselves, others, and nature? Does this less than human understanding distort our models of reason and of scientific inquiry? In different ways, the papers in this collection explore the evidence for these increasingly reasonable and intriguing questions. They identify how it is distinctively masculine perspectives on masculine experience which have shaped the most fundamental and formal aspects of systematic thought in philosophy and the natural and social sciences - precisely the aspects of thought believed most gender-neutral. They show how these understandings ground Aristotle's biology and metaphysics; the very definition of the problems of philosophy in Plato, Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau; the `adversary method' which is the paradigm of philosophic and scientific reasoning; principles of individuation in philosophical ontology and the philosophy of language; individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; Marxist political economy; and conceptions of `objective inquiry' in the social and natural sciences. These essays also begin to identify for us the distictive aspects of women's experience which can provide the resources needed for the creation of a truly human understanding. Audience: The book will be of interest to those involved in epistemology, and philosophy of the natural and social sciences, as well as feminist scholars in philosophy. The work will also be of value for theorists, methodologists, and feminist scholars in the natural and social sciences.

The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions who consider the specific ways media migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including: the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto "ordinary" people the transformation of self under the public eye the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Media and Television Studies courses, particularly those on the globalisation of television and media, and reality television.

Hunger is an issue which has been subject to much rigorous intellectual examination by economists, philosophers, sociologists, NGOs and governments. This volume provides a critical overview of current academic and political perspectives and then compares these views from thenon-hungry people with those of thehungry particularly from a broad range of poor communities in India. Their views are gathered using participatory rural appraisal techniques and the scale of the material presented is unprecedented. Not surprisingly, the comparisons show that the perceptions of the hungry are fundamentally different from those of the non-hungry. It makes compelling suggestions about how best policy makers can attempt to eliminate hunger based on what the hungry themselves suggest. The book also draws attention to the critical role of Common Property Resources and women in the fight against under-nutrition, which have so far been largely ignored.

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.

An Introduction to Indian Philosophy offers a profound yet accessible survey of the development of India’s philosophical tradition. Beginning with the formation of Brahmanical, Jaina, Materialist, and Buddhist traditions, Bina Gupta guides the reader through the classical schools of Indian thought, culminating in a look at how these traditions inform Indian philosophy and society in modern times. Offering translations from source texts and clear explanations of philosophical terms, this text provides a rigorous overview of Indian philosophical contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics. This is a must-read for anyone seeking a reliable and illuminating introduction to Indian philosophy.

This book explores various explanatory frameworks for paranormal encounters. It opens with the story of an inexplicable human figure seen crossing a secluded hotel corridor, interpreted as a ghost by the sole witness. The subsequent chapters explore the three most important historical perspectives accounting for this and other types of paranormal experience. Each perspective is examined from first principles, with specific reference to what happened in the corridor, how it happened, why it happened, and who might be responsible. The first perspective considers the experience to be legitimate – to be something real – and various possibilities are presented that are grounded in the paranormal and parapsychological literature, among which a “ghost” is one putative explanation. In turn, the second perspective treats the experience as being wholly illegitimate. With reference to psychological theory, the ghost sighting is a product of erroneous consciousness. The third perspective is different yet again, and considers the sighting to be authentic, but argues that explaining the ghost requires a radical departure from conventional models of reality and consciousness. By contrasting these three paths, the book provides a valuable resource for readers interested in the philosophical and psychological origins of explanations for paranormal experiences, from the 19th century to the present. It will appeal to general readers in addition to students and scholars of parapsychology, anomalistic psychology, and consciousness studies.

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Feelings of Being is the first ever account of the nature, role and variety of 'existential feelings' in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, surreality, unfamiliarity, estrangement, heightened existence, isolation, emptiness, belonging, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Ratcliffe refers to such feelings as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world In this book, Ratcliffe argues that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. He explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. He then explores the role of altered feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.