In Paradigms and Perspectives on Value and Reality, one encounters a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of timeless questions relating to the human condition. In the book, the reader will encounter the fundamental questions of what the nature of reality is, how one can come to know this, and what our moral obligations are as human beings. The reader will learn from the collected insights of philosophy, religion, science, and psychology, and from diverse cultural perspectives both eastern and western in considering these universal human questions.In living ethical lives, one would like to know both how to act in order to act morally, and also how it is that one could have insight into the foundations of morality. The first question concerns the content of humans' moral duties, the second concerns the underlying basis for those duties. In this text, one encounters a pluralistic approach to examining both questions and learns much from the interaction between western and eastern methods of ethical inquiry.Another vital aspect of human life that spans across time, culture, and tradition is curiosity about the world around us, humans' place in it, and how it is that one might form a coherent picture of both. Paradigms and Perspectives on Value and Reality explores this topic in depth and from a variety of cross cultural perspectives.The volume concludes with a final section containing two essays devoted to the discussion of how religion and culture inform current theories of value and reality.
About the Author: Chandana Chakrabarti is a former Professor of Philosophy and Dean of International Program of Davis and Elkins College, WV. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed her postdoctoral work in philosophical psychology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her other postdoctoral work was conducted at the University of Notre Dame and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is a specialist in South Asian philosophy, comparative religion and comparative philosophy. She is Vice-President of the Society for Indian Philosophy and Religion and associate editor of the Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion. Her books include Some Central Topics in Indian Philosophy; Religion and Politics of War (edited with Joel Wilcox); Rethinking Mysticism (edited with Gordon Haist); Politics, Pluralism and Religion; and Morality and Spirituality in the Contemporary World, with Sandra Fairbanks.Dr. Richard D. Vulich received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. He now serves several communities in Southern California as an Adjunct Professor at California State University Fullerton, Chapman University, Orange Coast College and Long Beach City College. Dr Vulich's research interests consist primarily of contemporary metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Richard is the author of Frege's Sharpness Requirement and Natural Language published in the Florida Philosophical Review in 2009, and Peer-Hood published in Logos and Episteme 2011.