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Indian Institute Of Advanced Study, Shimla was perhaps the first research organization in India to have staged some years ago a seminar on MAN. The seminar was a many-pronged intellectual exercise directed toward the understanding of human reality. Although the participants were mainly philosophers, drawn from Indian universities, the papers and discussions at the seminar covered diverse aspects of human life-anthropological, psychological, ethical, ontological, religious, etc. The aim of the sessions was to delineate various dimensions of the human phenomenon, to uncover the meaning of human existence, to arrive at the foundation of man-and-the-world and man-to-man encounters. Speakers put across Indian and Western, scientific and metaphysical, analystic and holistic, inward-directed and outward-directed points of view.

The present volume contains most of the constibutions read and discussed at the seminar. They are by D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Ramchandra Gandhi, Ramakant Sinari, N.S.S. Raman, Suresh Chandra, R.K. Gupta, Y.N. Chopra, S.S. Barlingay, A.K. Sinha, S.N. Mahajan, Sujata Miri, Sisir Kumar Ghose, Amar Kumar Singh, Pratap Chandra, L.P. Singh and V.N. Tiwari.

Each article in this volume reflects an unduplicable paradigm, a unique way of looking at MAN. The reading of all the articles would leave one with an inevitable impression that the meaning of being human can be understood from a number of vantage points, that there are seemingly diverse though fundamentally complementary perceptions concerning humanness, that what a particular writer sees as the dominant feature of human life arises probably from his/her own experience of being in the world.