Comparative study of Indic philosophies from pre-Vedic times to the present day.

YO GA-DARSHAN A Sfitras of Patafijali with Bhaisya ofVy:1sa BY Ganganatha Jha he Yoga-darshana includes the Yoga-sfitras ofPataf1jali, and the ancient commentary thereon by Vyasa. The Yoga-sfitras of Patafijali are the classic?...

The book sets an ambitious goal. It devises a new account of scientific methodology that makes it possible to explain how scientists manage, at least occasionally, to find true models of reality. The new methods may be contrasted with all those currently available that employ “coherence theories” of knowledge. Under this designation are grouped positions that can seem very different (such as those of Poincaré, Duhem, Popper, Hempel, Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend) but are united by the idea that the most (...) general statements of science are merely hypotheses. They may be conjectures, opinions, conventions, posits, paradigms, or even myths. The most we can claim to know from such generalities is that they are internally consistent and coherent with empirical data. Consistency is insufficient to establish the truth of a conceptual system because many different systems, perhaps an infinite number, can be logically consistent and cohere with recorded data. Such is the well-known problem of the empirical under-determination of theories. Francis Bacon’s Skeptical Recipes for New Knowledge suggests a new methodology that solves this fundamental problem of knowledge. (shrink)

For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves (...) upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built. (shrink)

Polanyi’s philosophy of “man in thought,” by all appearances, chronologically and structurally, seems to be founded on his epistemology. Polanyi’s epistemology of tacit knowing as integration is teleological. By his “ontological equation,” he patterned comprehensive (and complex) entities as emergence on his epistemology. This forces him to make puzzling formulaic statements which land him in trouble with fellow scientists. The equation also lends itself to unwarranted problematic interpretations. The exploration leads me to suggest that Polanyi may be understood as a (...) “rational realist” who insisted on a tacit knowledge version of interactionist mode of mind-body relation. (shrink)

pt. 1. [without special title] -- pt. 2. The eternal world drama.

This article takes direction from the transnational feminist lesbian encounter that took place between the Dutch collective Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the 1980s to reflect on the role of archives within transnational feminist research. Drawing on archival materials from the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) at Atria (Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, I consider how (...) fragmented archives offer stories on kinship, intimacy and loss. Taking into account the ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ (Lewis, 2017) produced in this archival research project, I propose an archival research methodology that is rooted in a practice of ‘orientation’ (Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003). (shrink)

Critical study, with text and commentary of Vedāntasiddhāntamuktāvalī of Prakāśānanda, 16th cent., of Vendānta philosophy.

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

Philosophers routinely invoke self‐control in their theorizing, but major questions remain about what exactly self‐control is. I propose a componential account in which an exercise of self‐control is built out of something more fundamental: basic intrapsychic actions called cognitive control actions. Cognitive control regulates simple, brief states called response pulses that operate across diverse psychological systems (think of one's attention being grabbed by a salient object or one's mind being pulled to think about a certain topic). Self‐control ostensibly seems quite (...) different because it regulates complex, temporally extended states such as emotions and cravings. But critically, these complex states also exhibit important componential structure: They rely on response pulses as a key means by which they bring about action. The overall picture is that self‐control consists of skilled sequences of cognitive control directed against extended streams of response pulses that arise from states such as emotions and cravings, thus preventing these states from being effective in action. The account clarifies the “atoms” of self‐control—the elemental units that get combined in complex ways to produce different kinds of self‐control actions. Surprisingly, the account, which is derived from research in cognitive science, aligns nicely with the commonsense conception of self‐control. (shrink)

According to Interest-Relative Invariantism, whether an agent knows that p, or possesses other sorts of epistemic properties or relations, is in part determined by the practical costs of being wrong about p. Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI. We discuss our results in light of complementary findings by other theorists, and address the challenge posed by a (...) leading intellectualist alternative to our view.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. EMPIRICAL TESTS OF INTEREST-RELATIVE INVARIANTISMVolume 9, Issue 1Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Jason StanleyDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.2Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much (...) hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will. (shrink)

Development of the Physicist's Conception of Nature P. A. M. Dime When one looks back over the development of physics, one sees that it can be pictured as a ...

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the (...) desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models. (shrink)

Humans are unique in the animal world in the extent to which their day-to-day behavior is governed by a complex set of rules and principles commonly called norms. Norms delimit the bounds of proper behavior in a host of domains, providing an invisible web of normative structure embracing virtually all aspects of social life. People also find many norms to be deeply meaningful. Norms give rise to powerful subjective feelings that, in the view of many, are an important part of (...) what it is to be a human agent. Despite the vital role of norms in human lives and human behavior, and the central role they play in explanations in the social sciences, there has been very little systematic attention devoted to norms in cognitive science. Much existing research is partial and piecemeal, making it difficult to know how individual findings cohere into a comprehensive picture. Our goal in this essay is to offer an account of the psychological mechanisms and processes underlying norms that integrates what is known and can serve as a framework for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a general copula approach to accommodate non-normal continuous mixing distributions in multinomial probit models. In particular, we specify a multivariate mixing distribution that allows different marginal continuous parametric distributions for different coefficients. A new hybrid estimation technique is proposed to estimate the model, which combines the advantageous features of each of the maximum simulated likelihood inference technique and Bhat’s maximum approximate composite marginal likelihood inference approach. The effectiveness of our formulation and inference approach is demonstrated (...) through simulation exercises and an empirical application. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions (...) to the agent. In a second study, we examined people's judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the critical features problem, the problem of figuring out which among the myriad features present in hypothetical cases are the critical ones that our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers. (shrink)

I examine social capital’s impact on financial reports. Based on the social capital literature, I predict that the quality of the financial reports is higher when a firm is headquartered in a region with high social capital. Consistent with this prediction, I find that the firms that are headquartered in this type of region in the USA have a lower probability of committing fraud by misrepresenting financial information. Further, I find that the firms in regions with high social capital have (...) lower levels of discretionary accruals and much more readable annual reports. (shrink)

Recent studies of emotion mindreading reveal that for three emotions, fear, disgust, and anger, deficits in face-based recognition are paired with deficits in the production of the same emotion. What type of mindreading process would explain this pattern of paired deficits? The simulation approach and the theorizing approach are examined to determine their compatibility with the existing evidence. We conclude that the simulation approach offers the best explanation of the data. What computational steps might be used, however, in simulation-style emotion (...) detection? Four alternative models are explored: a generate-and-test model, a reverse simulation model, a variant of the reverse simulation model that employs an “as if” loop, and an unmediated resonance model. (shrink)

An anti-representationalist view of language and a deflationary view of truth, key themes in contemporary pragmatism and especially Richard Rorty, do not undermine the notion, in critical theory, of ideology as 'false consciousness'. Both Foucault and Marx were opposed to what Marxists call historical idealism and so they should be seen as objecting to forms of ideology-critique that do not sufficiently avoid such an 'Hegelian' perspective. Foucault's general views on the relations between truth and power can plausibly be construed in (...) a way that makes them compatible with a Marxian critical theory. (shrink)

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not (...) to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes. (shrink)