The concept of “X cannot be created or destroyed” is part of the ontology of many orthodox traditions of ancient philosophy in the Indian subcontinent. But it also appears in the ontology of ancient Greek philosophy and in the ontology of modern science. Heraclitus, like Buddha, emphasised impermanence (change), saying “one cannot step into the same river twice.” In contrast, Plato, like the Vedantins , emphasised changelessness. The former called it Brahman, manifested as in

In some of the previous Saturday Conversations, we discussed the role of assessment in shaping what students learn in an educational program. The conversation in this video examines is on the CBSE science examination 2026 as a case study. While various policy documents in India talk about the need for higher order cognitive abilities in school education and higher education, all that CBSE examinations continue to be largely limited to testing (a) the memorization and reproduc

This conversation was triggered by the Aeon article, “How to be a Genius,” by Craig Wright ( https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-secret-habits-of-genius ). The discussion evolved into: “Helping the young develop valuable mental capacities.” The terms genius, prodigy, gifted person, and talented person denote individuals that society recognises as highly capable along some dimension of life — music, painting, dance, mathematics, physics, technological inventions,

Though the topic for discussion was the purpose of education as discussed in the YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qT6kluPH1s the conversation evolved into a discussion around ways of incorporating inquiry in the current education system and the challenges involved. The link for the youtube video of the discussion can be found here https://youtu.be/GIB_7BjvUPY The summary of the conversation can be found here

The conversation on 14 March explores the origin and history of written examinations in systems of education, as a way of understanding the implicit purpose and function of education, by examining the broad outline of the evolution of the system of institutionalised education from the ancient times to the modern times. Within that broad outline, the origin and evolution of the system of written examinations is only one of the strands of the curricula of institutionalised educ

The conversation on 7 March explored the concept denoted by the English word freedom , and the cluster of concepts associated with it. Conceptual inquiry — the investigation of concepts — is one of the corner stones of philosophical inquiry. Here is the announcement of the topic of the conversation: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau “A human is never born free; first, it is in the parental chain, then the family chain, and then the so

The Youtube video of the Week 2 conversation can be found at the following link: https://youtu.be/y7UywqnPhec The topics discussed in this video include             counterfactuals as counter-to-fact;  counterfactual conditional,                                                     counterfactual questions; and             reasoning, causal reasoning, quantum logic, and AI.  These threads are woven together to form a single thread, namely, counterfactuals and reasoning,  Giv

The series of Saturday Conversations with Tara and Mo is meant for those who enjoy discussing ideas and learn from one another. It is meant to facilitate intellectual well-being for all those engaged in it by learning from one another through spoken interaction. The Youtube video of the Week 1 conversation can be found at the following link: https://youtu.be/IJRtaC-lTyA The transcript and timestamps of the conversation can be found below:

Tara Mohanan This is a handout prepared for a talk titled, "Conflict Resolution in Hindi Agreement" that I presented in a conference in 1993. It ought to have been developed as an article, but for some reason, I have not done that yet. I still hope to do so some time.  The central claim of the talk was that the facts of Subject-Verb Agreement in Hindi require non-monotonic logic (also called defeasible logic) to resolve the conflict between constraints that result in logical

Many research questions and knowledge claims in academia crucially involve the concept of causality: causal relations, causal...

The NAAC White Paper, ‘Re-imagining Assessment and Accreditation in Higher Education in India", published by NAAC in 2022, is a game...