We hypothesize that recent uses of the Internet as a public-participation mechanism in the United States fail to overcome the adversarial culture that characterizes the American regulatory process. Although the Internet has the potential to facilitate deliberative processes that could result in more widespread public involvement, greater transparency in government processes, and a more satisfied citizenry, we argue that efforts to implement Internet-based public participation have overlaid existing problematic government processes without fully harnessing the transformative power of information technologies. Public (...) comments submitted in two United States Department of Agriculture rulemaking processes—the National Organic Program’s organic standard and the Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule—compose our data. We conclude that the Internet provides an arena for playing out three types of conflicts that have long plagued environmental decision-making processes: conflicts over trust of federal agencies, the use of science, and the role of public values. (shrink)

In order to make Mukund Lath’s thoughts on music and identity accessible to a broader audience, and to call attention to links between Hindustānī musical theory and classical Indian philosophical notions, Lath’s paper “Identity Through Necessary Change: Thinking About ‘Rāga-Bhāva,’ Concepts and Characters” is being republished here with an introduction by David Shulman and explanatory notes. Mukund Lath argues that identity is usually understood as something that remains the same despite change. His endeavor is to explore an alternative (...) to this convention. The case study for Lath’s philosophical exploration is rāga music, i.e. Hindustānī classical music. He argues that the identity of the rāga is maintained not despite change, but owing to the necessary change in every execution of “the same” rāga. But how are we to even start thinking about a notion of identity that embraces rather than rejects change, a notion of identity that is based on and is rooted in change, not in stability or perpetuity? Lath explores this alternative and its consequences for the notion of identity at large. (shrink)

Private detectives and deception as official work -- Building believable lies -- Justifying work-related deceptions -- The shadow world of unofficial deception -- Subterranean education and training -- Deception as social currency -- Goofing off and getting along -- The everyday ethics of workplace lies -- Appreciating deception in thinking about organizations.

A non-ad hoc, general theory of anthropic reasoning can be constructed based on Bostrom's Strong Self-Sampling Assumption that we should reason as if the current moment of our life were a randomly selected member of some appropriate reference class of observer-moments. We do not need to use anything other than standard conditionalization of a hypothetical prior based upon the SSSA in order to estimate probabilities. But we need to make the SSSA precise. We specify exactly what is and what is (...) not an observer, how to choose a reference class and how to select a prior probability distribution that can be used when selecting randomly from the reference class. There are both collective Dutch Book and relative frequency arguments in favor of our rules for choosing priors and reference classes. In order to handle examples like Bostrom's Lazy Adam scenario, a causal anthropic decision theory is developed. (shrink)

When reasoning about self-locating belief, one should reason as if one were a randomly selected bit of information. This principle can be considered to be an application of Bostrom's Strong Self-Sampling Assumption\cite{Bostrom} according to which one should reason as if one were a randomly selected element of some suitable reference class of observer-moments. The reference class is the class of all observer-moments. In order to randomly select an observer-moment from the reference class, one first randomly chooses a possible world $w$ (...) and then selects an observer-moment $z$ from world $w$. The probability that one selects $z$ given that one has chosen $w$ should be proportional to the amount of information that $z$ is capable of representing. There are both wagering arguments and relative frequency arguments that support our theory of anthropic reasoning. Our theory works best when the amount of information represented is finite. The infinite case is represented as a limit of a finite cases. We can learn from experience how best to represent the infinite case as a limit of finite cases and also learn from experience whether our theory or some other theory is the superior theory of anthropic reasoning. In order to test which theory is best, we use standard Bayesian methodology: We just need prior probabilities for the theories that are being tested and then we only have to use Bayes' rule. (shrink)

Sanskrit poeticians make the visionary faculty of pratibhā a necessary part of the professional poet’s make-up. The term has a pre-history in Bhartṛhari’s linguistic metaphysics, where it is used to explain the unitary perception of meaning. This essay examines the relation between pratibhā and possible theories of the imagination, with a focus on three unusual theoreticians—Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha Paṇḍita. Rājaśekhara offers an analysis of pratibhā that is heavily interactive, requiring the discerning presence of the bhāvaka listener or critic; he (...) also positions pratibhā in relation to Bildung (vyutpatti) and practice. For Kuntaka, pratibhā, never an ex nihilo creation by a poet, serves as the basis for the peculiar forms of intensified insight and experience that constitute poetry; these may also involve the creative scrambling and re-articulation of the object in terms of its systemic composition. At times, Kuntaka’s pratibhā comes close to a strong notion of imaginative process. But the full-fledged thematization of the imagination, and of pratibhā as its support and mechanism, is best seen in the seventeenth-century debates preserved for us by Jagannātha. A link is suggested between the discourse of poetic imagination in Jagannātha and similar themes that turn up in Indo-Persian poets such as Bedil. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall provide a simple argument for the thirder analysis of the usual version of Sleeping Beauty\c and the hslfer analysis of a bare-bones version of the scenario. This argument depends upon a calculation of relative frequencies when the Sleeping Beauty experiment is repeated, but it is crucial that we be dealing with independent repetitions of the same experiment. The versions of repeated Sleeping Beauty discussed in the literature violate the independence requirement.

In sixteenth-century South India, the notion of the imagination was strongly thematized as perhaps the defining aspect of the human mind. We examine one striking example, an allegorical play called the Bhāvanā-puruṣottama by Ratnakheta Srinivasa Dīkṣita. Here we see a king searching frantically for his own imagination, the young woman Bhāvanā with whom he is in love, while she, for her part, is absorbed in the uneven and rather frustrating processes of imagining him. The two lovers could be said mutually (...) to determine one another’s existence. On the other hand, imagination, for this poet, is not a matter of discovering something new but of perceiving something that is already there and, by perceiving it, enhancing or intensifying its presence and its activity. At the same time, the imagination focuses on singularities, however elusive: in this period, the general faculty of imagination has become a highly personal matter. (shrink)

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003 , Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as (...) well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003, Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as well (...) as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

Eviatar Shulman’s Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception offers an important reminder to take early Buddhist texts seriously as meaning what they say, with regard to the four noble truths, dependent origination, and selflessness. Shulman’s book ably makes this interpretive point, but is frustratingly unclear in its more general discussion of the relationship between philosophy and meditation. Shulman’s main thesis is that the four noble truths, as they are customarily taught today, are a...

The set-theoretic axiom WISC states that for every set there is a set of surjections to it cofinal in all such surjections. By constructing an unbounded topos over the category of sets and using an extension of the internal logic of a topos due to Shulman, we show that WISC is independent of the rest of the axioms of the set theory given by a well-pointed topos. This also gives an example of a topos that is not a predicative (...) topos as defined by van den Berg. (shrink)

Tamil: A Biography. By David Shulman. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 402.

Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature. Edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gray Tubb. South Asia Research. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 805. Rs. 1295, $39.95.

When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women's consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women's civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This (...) was the women's liberation movement, and writing--powerful, personal, and prophetic--was its beating heart. Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works--many long out-of-print and hard to find--that catalyzed and propelled the women's liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan's Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi's Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life--changes too often taken for granted today--but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved"--Back cover. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.