Background: Risks to healthcare workers have escalated during the pandemic and they are likely to experience a greater level of stress. This cross-sectional study investigated mental distress among healthcare workers during the early phase of Coronavirus disease-2019 outbreak in India.Method: 140 healthcare workers of a tertiary care hospital in India were assessed for perceived stress and insomnia. A factor analysis with principal component method reduced these questions to four components which were categorized as insomnia, stress-related anxiety, stress-related irritability, and stress-related (...) hopelessness. Further statistical analyses were done on these factor scores to identify the predictors and investigate the differences between the different categories of healthcare workers.Result: Doctors had the highest level of anxiety among the healthcare workers. Both doctors and nurses perceived a greater level of irritability than the other HCWs. Compared to doctors and nurses, other HCWs were more likely to experience insomnia. Lower age, higher education, female gender, and urban habitat were associated with greater perception of anxiety. Older age, being quarantined, and single marital status were the significant predictors of irritability. Female gender, single marital-status, and higher number of medical ailments contributed to perceived hopelessness. Quarantine significantly predicted insomnia.Conclusion: Different categories of healthcare workers are experiencing varied mental health problems owing to their heterogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds. Tailored and personalized care, as well as policies, might help in alleviating their problems. Further research is warranted to explore the psychological distress and remedies among these frontline workers during and after the ongoing pandemic crisis. (shrink)

Leading figures in comparative philosophy and cultural studies demonstrate what the future of comparative philosophy might look like in practice.

This Book Presents A Lucid English Translation Of The Vaisesika-Sutra Of Kanada, Termed The Earliest Exposition On Physics In Indian Philosophy And The Textual Basis For The Nyaya-Vaisesika And Navya-Nyaya Systems Of Thought. The Translation Retains The Feel Of The Original Sutras Even While Conveying The Intended Meaning Accurately And With Clarity.

The introduction of the long-term history of the Earth into the preoccupations of historians has triggered a crisis because it has become impossible to keep the “planet” as one single entity outside of history properly understood. As soon as the planetary intruded into history, it became impossible to keep it as one naturalized background. By problematizing the planetary, Dipesh Chakrabarty has forced philosophers, historians and anthropologists to extend pluralism to the very ground on which history was supposed to unfold. (...) Hence Bruno Latour’s attempt at counting the number of “planets” whose attractions are simultaneously being felt today on any political question. Each of his eight planets are defined by the disconnect between where they are situated and where they are imagined to be moving, which means that each planet is led by a different and incommensurable philosophy of history. Such a “fictional planetology” is then discussed by Chakrabarty, who reviews the difficulties historians have had in taking the nonhuman as a historical agent and then adds to Latour’s count a new planetary body which further complicates the geopolitical situation. The result of their joint effort is to shift questions of philosophy of history to philosophy of geography. (shrink)

The twelve essays in this collection promote scholarship on the rich and diverse subject of mysticism by examining the nature of its thought both from Eastern and Western and from philosophical and religious perspectives. These include studies of specific mystics, including Teresa de Avila, Lady Nijo, Hiroshi Motoyama, and Mirabai, and thinkers about mysticism, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. The book opens with two descriptive studies of similarities in the life of Teresa de Avila and mystics of very different times (...) and cultures. The issue of mysticism and ethics is addressed in three essays, and central concepts involving pure conscious events and primordial oneness in Nietzsche are addressed in two separate essays. Wittgenstein's comments on mysticism are examined in two essays, one that places them in the perspective of his overall development and the other that studies them in comparison with recent continental thought. The book concludes with two essays that look broadly at the supersensible, one from an examination of Kantian aesthetics and the other from quantum mechanical interpretations of reality. Taken together, these essays attest to the power of mysticism to provoke reasoned thought about ultimate matters. (shrink)

It has been just over 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing and more than 65 years since he published in Mind his seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In the Mind paper, Turing asked a number of questions, including whether computers could ever be said to have the power of “thinking”. Turing also set up a number of criteria—including his imitation game—under which a human could judge whether a computer could be said to be “intelligent”. Turing’s paper, as (...) well as his important mathematical and computational insights of the 1930s and 1940s led to his popular acclaim as the “Father of Artificial Intelligence”. In the years since his paper was published, however, no computational system has fully satisfied Turing’s challenge. In this paper we focus on a different question, ignored in, but inspired by Turing’s work: How might the Artificial Intelligence practitioner implement “intelligence” on a computational device? Over the past 60 years, although the AI community has not produced a general-purpose computational intelligence, it has constructed a large number of important artifacts, as well as taken several philosophical stances able to shed light on the nature and implementation of intelligence. This paper contends that the construction of any human artifact includes an implicit epistemic stance. In AI this stance is found in commitments to particular knowledge representations and search strategies that lead to a product’s successes as well as its limitations. Finally, we suggest that computational and human intelligence are two different natural kinds, in the philosophical sense, and elaborate on this point in the conclusion. (shrink)

Writing from the vantage points of history, philosophy, and cognitive science, the contributors to this volume clarify the nominalist apoha theory and explore the relationship between apoha and the scientific study of human cognition.

Although ancient Greek and Indian philosophers held remarkably similar philosophical positions, the possibility of these two traditions having developed independently cannot be discounted. However, in the fifth century BCE substantial parts of Greece and India were under the Persian rule and belonged to the same political entity. It is very likely that Greeks and Indians sat together in the Persian court where translation services were provided to mitigate the language barrier. In the fourth century BCE there were Greek kingdoms for (...) more than a century in and around northwest frontiers of India paving the way for substantial political and commercial contact. Greeks like Megasthenes, Diogenes Laertius, Suidas, Porphyry, etc. testify that eminent Greek thinkers like Democritus, Pyrrho, etc. visited India and/or that Plato, Plotinus, etc. knew about or admired Indian wisdom. Some of this evidence is relatively late but cannot be dismissed in the absence of specific rebuttal; thus, Indo-Greek scholarly exchange is likely. (shrink)

This study examines whether microfinance institutions (MFIs) that serve women borrowers at the base of the economic pyramid are likely to adopt a written code of positive organizational ethics (POE). Using econometric analysis of operational and economic data of a sample of MFIs from across the world, we find that two contextual factors—poverty level and lack of women’s empowerment—moderate the influence of an MFI’s percentage of women borrowers on the probability of the MFI having a POE code. MFIs that serve (...) more women borrowers are more likely to adopt a POE code, especially in negative contexts (where women borrowers face poverty and disempowerment and are therefore susceptible to abuse). This study provides evidence that MFIs can build positive ethical strength in negative contexts. (shrink)

Games and Decision Making, Second Edition, is a unique blend of decision theory and game theory. From classical optimization to modern game theory, authors Charalambos D. Aliprantis and Subir K. Chakrabarti show the importance of mathematical knowledge in understanding and analyzing issues in decision making. Through an imaginative selection of topics, Aliprantis and Chakrabarti treat decision and game theory as part of one body of knowledge. They move from problems involving the individual decision-maker to progressively more complex problems such as (...) sequential rationality, auctions, and bargaining. By building each chapter on material presented earlier, the authors offer a self-contained and comprehensive treatment of these topics. Successfully class-tested in an advanced undergraduate course at the Krannert School of Management and in a graduate course in economics at Indiana University, Games and Decision Making, Second Edition, is an essential text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of decision theory and game theory. The book is accessible to students who have a good basic understanding of elementary calculus and probability theory. (shrink)

It is not a semantic accident that four key notions of social ethics are also key concepts of theater. These are the concepts of character, playing a part/role, performance, and acting. Of course, one could object that there is a touch of pun in this claim: A character in a drama is not quite the same as good or bad character in a virtue ethics; acting in theater is mere play-acting, whereas acting in social and personal life is serious business. (...) But the distinction between play and serious business does not mean that the former is any less important than the latter. In Homo Ludens, his magisterial study of the play-element in culture, Johan Huizinga remarks: “Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Stephen PhillipsArindam ChakrabartiMuch as I am honored by Stephen Phillips' detailed defense, in the face of my methodological "refutation," of the Nyāya thesis that a raw perception of the qualifier is a necessary causal factor for some (not all) determinate perception of an entity as qualified, I am not fully convinced that my deeper qualms about the very idea of immaculate perception unimpregnated by predicative structure have (...) all been adequately addressed. Instead of a detailed response, which I intend to undertake elsewhere, I wish to underscore the central worry behind my fifth (which Phillips calls "good") and seventh (which Phillips calls "weak") objections.When I claimed that perception is introduced, taxonomically, as a variety of veridical awareness, I had in mind the opening line of Gaṅgeśa's section on the definition of perception:sā ca pramā caturvidhā, pratyakṣānumityupamitiśābdā-bhedātAnd such veridical awareness is of four kinds: perception, inferential knowledge, knowledge from similarity, and knowledge from words.1This seems to be flatly incompatible with the admission of a subclass of perceptions that are not veridical awarenesses!Why does Phillips say that I am simply mistaken? True, taxonomic difficulties cannot overturn empirical evidence. But recall that there is no direct apperceptive evidence for "raw perception." The sole evidence is a generalization from a whole series of mediate (parokṣa) awarenesses that can happily afford to be instrumentally and crucially caused by other awarenesses. On the other hand, immediacy, which is the hallmark of a perception, consists of not having another awareness in its causal nexus. My seeing of a wall as white is direct, rather than inferential, analogical, or testimonial, to the extent that I did not have to go through any other awareness first in order to arrive at this visual perception. An inductive generalization from other mediate (cognition-generated) cognitions should not have such inexorable probative power over our account of immediate sensory cognition as to force us into admitting a neither-true-nor-false third kind of raw awareness!Phillips seems to have overlooked the metaphor of "spelling" that I used in this context while giving my second objection. If the step-by-step picture of building up the content of perception that Gaṅgeśa assumes is correct, then each element of the perceptual content of the predicative perception that this is a flower—the universal flowerhood, the actual physical object identified as "this," and qualification as a cementing relation, in this case inherence—would first have to be cognized in the unconnected "raw" manner! Now, even if we somehow swallow the idea of seeing a universal barely and not in relation to any one of its instances, it simply makes no [End Page 114] sense to talk about a bare, raw, unstructured perceptual acquaintance with qualification or inherence! Logically and structurally one could argue that unless you have "got" a, b, and R first, you cannot have the complex aRb. But this is admittedly a process of logical postmortem dissection of a whole piece of direct qualificative perception. And the point of my metaphorical warning—"You need to have 'L' and 'O' and 'D' and 'N' to spell 'London,' but you do not need to spell 'L' or 'O' or 'D' or 'N' first. Single letters simply cannot be spelled!"—was this: there are all sorts of different ways of "getting." You need to "get" the qualifying feature somehow in order to see or hear or taste something as qualified by that feature, but you do not therefore need to see or hear or taste that feature alone first in a bare, raw, unqualified manner! I do believe, like a good Naiyāyika, that high-pitchedness (or fifthness, in the octave) can be heard although it is a sound-universal. But I refuse to admit that before I can hear a sung note as high-pitched or (the fifth) I must somehow hear that universal directly without hearing it in any note!The central point, once again, is this: all awareness is intentional, according to Nyāya. There are only three kinds of intentional roles that our awarenesses assign to their objects: the role of... (shrink)

You cannot say “thank you” in Sanskrit. It would be ridiculous to deduce from this (as William Ward, a British Orientalist) that gratefulness as a sentiment was unknown to the ancient Indian people. It is no less ridiculous to argue that rationality as a concept is absent from or marginal to the entire panoply of classical Indian philosophical traditions on the basis of the fact that there is no exact Sanskrit equivalent of that word.

Due to the nature of lending practices and support services offered to the poor in developing countries, portfolio risk is a growing concern for the microfinance industry. Though previous research highlights the importance of risk for microfinance organizations, not much is known about how microfinance organizations can mitigate risks incurred from providing loans to the poor in developing countries. Further, though many microfinance organizations practice corporate social responsibility to help create economic and social wealth in developing countries, the impact of (...) such CSR practices remains an underdeveloped area of inquiry. We use a normative ethics lens to develop an ethics-based CSR theory that differentiates between three forms of ethics-based CSR—virtue, consequentialist, and deontological. We argue that while all three forms can help mitigate risk, virtue ethics-based CSR is potentially the most useful form of CSR toward mitigating microfinance portfolio risk. We test our hypotheses using a sample of microfinance organizations from across the world. Our findings suggest that virtue ethics-based CSR is not just an important philosophical paradigm; it can actually help mitigate microfinance portfolio risk when implemented in practice. (shrink)

Never before, in any anthology, have contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of language come together to address the single most neglected important issue at the confluence of these two branches of philosophy, namely: Can we know facts from reliable reports? Besides Hume's subversive discussion of miracles and the literature thereon, testimony has been bypassed by most Western philosophers; whereas in classical Indian theories of evidence and knowledge philosophical debates have raged for centuries about the status of word-generated knowledge. `Is the response (...) "I was told by an expert on the subject" as respectable as "I saw" or "I inferred" in answer to "How do you know?"' is a question answered in diverse and subtle ways by Buddhists, Vaisesikas and Naiyayikas. For the first time this book makes available the riches of those debates, translating from Sanskrit some contemporary Indian Pandits' reactions to Western analytic accounts of meaning and knowledge. For advanced undergraduates in philosophy, for researchers - in Australia, Asia, Europe or America - on epistemology, theory of meaning, Indian or comparative philosophy, as well as for specialists interested in this relatively fresh topic of knowledge transmission and epistemic dependence this book will be a feast. After its publication analytic philosophy and Indian philosophy will have no excuse for shunning each other. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical policy research conducted (...) or authorized by government. We argue that investigators need not secure participants' informed consent when conducting government policy experiments if: the government institution conducting or authorizing the experiment possesses a right to rule over the spheres of policy targeted by the research; and data collection does not involve the violation of participants' autonomy rights. (shrink)

Discussion of global climate change is shaped by the intellectual categories developed to address capitalism and globalization. Yet climate change is only one manifestation of humanity’s varied and accelerating impact on the Earth System. The common predicament that may be anticipated in the Anthropocene raises difficult questions of distributive justice – between rich and poor, developed and developing countries, the living and the yet unborn, and even the human and the non-human – and may pose a challenge to the categories (...) on which our traditions of political thought are based. Awareness of the Anthropocene encourages us to think of humans on different scales and in different contexts – as parts of a global capitalist system and as members of a now-dominant species – although the debate is, for now, still structured by the experiences and concepts of the developed world. (shrink)

The domain of early hominin stone tool making and tool using abilities has received little scholarly attention in mainstream philosophy of technology. This is despite the fact that archeological evidence of stone tools is widely seen today as a crucial source of information about the evolution of human cognition. There is a considerable archeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific hominin technical activities. However, within archeology and the study of human evolution the standard perception is stone tools are mere (...) products of the human mind. A number of recent approaches to cognition challenges this simplistic one-way-causal-arrow view and emphasizes instead the functional efficiency of tools or artifacts in transforming and augmenting human cognitive capacities. As a result, the very idea that tools or artifacts are intimately tied to human cognitive processes is fast becoming an alternative within the cognitive sciences and a few allied disciplines. The present study intends to explore its implications for philosophy of technology. The central objective of this paper is to examine the dynamic and intricate tool-mediated activities of the early hominins through the lens of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological theory of human-technology relations and Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory. Highlighting the key points where these two research approaches, despite their subtle nuances, converge and look capable of mutually catalyzing each other, the paper attempts to show why it is important to bring these approaches together for a more refined understanding of the controversial role these stone tools played in human evolution. (shrink)

Daya Krishna(Photo courtesy of Jay Garfield)Govind Chandra Pande(Photo courtesy of his daughter amita sharma)Daya Krishna was the public face of Indian philosophy in the first half-century after Indian independence. Nobody on the Indian scene in that period came close to him in influence or in contribution to the profession. Nobody else in the world thought as hard or as fruitfully about the relation of Indian philosophy to that of the rest of the world, and nobody else dared to think as (...) creatively and even as heretically about the history of Indian philosophy itself. To be sure, the Indian philosophical scene during this period was always a vibrant and creative matrix of thought, and many contributed to that .. (shrink)

This book brings together over 25 years of Arindam Chakrabarti's original research in East-West 'fusion' philosophy on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Organized under the three basic concepts of a thing out there in the world, the self who perceives it, and other subjects or selves, his work revolves around a set of realism links. Examining connections between metaphysical stances toward the world, selves, and universals, Chakrabarti engages with classical Indian and modern Western philosophical approaches to a (...) number of live topics including the refutation of idealism; the question of the definability of truth, and the possibility of truths existing unknown to anyone; the existence of non-conceptual perception; and our knowledge of other minds. He additionally makes forays into fundamental questions regarding death, darkness, absence, and nothingness. Together with conceptual clarification and progress towards alternative solutions to these substantial philosophical problems, Chakrabarti demonstrates the advantage of doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan fashion. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of a thing, and ending with an analysis of the concept of nothing, Realisms Interlinked offers a preview of a future metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind without borders. (shrink)

This study suggests that unrelated diversification has a positive influence on the probability of fraudulent reporting whereas related diversification has a negative influence on the probability of fraudulent reporting. The strength of the influence of these corporate level strategies is contingent on the moral character of the firm. Unrelated diversification provides opportunity for financial innovation within the firm’s internal capital market, which can result in fraudulent reporting. This is more likely when the moral character of the firm is driven by (...) a conscienceless financial self-interest motive, as implied by the firm’s contempt toward the larger community (in terms of damage inflicted on the interests of people outside the firm). In contrast, related diversification, where product divisions focus on mutual sharing and monitoring of operational activities, can reduce the probability of fraudulent reporting. This is more likely when constituents within the firm view themselves as moral citizens, as implied by the firm’s benevolence toward the larger community. Hence, while unrelated diversification focuses the energies of managers within the firm on financial manipulation, related diversification focuses these energies on productive purposes. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

A wide-ranging interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and Provincializing Europe. Dipesh Chakrabarty is one of the leading thinkers on climate change in the humanities. He is responsible for introducing concepts like the "Anthropocene," "geological force," and "species history" into history, philosophy, and literary theory.

An explicit assessment of the extent of René Descartes's influence on John Locke's theory of knowledge as presented in his work An Essay Concerning Human understanding calls for a study of their respective philosophical works in some detail. An examination of their individual philosophical standpoints and the objectives behind their projects suggest a striking difference between the spirit and intent of their projects. However, the marked similarities in the contents of Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Locke's (...) An Essay Concerning Human understanding and several factors like Locke's own assertion in his first letter to Stillingfleet and Lady Masham's own account of her conversation with Locke indicate that the French philosopher did exert a certain degree of influence on Locke's theory of knowledge as presented in his Essay. An attempt is made in the present work primarily to understand how Descartes's thoughts have influenced the various aspects of Locke's theory of knowledge in his Essay. It appears from this that Locke did not borrow blindly from Descartes and had in fact tried to build a bridge between empiricism and rationalism. (shrink)

Although memory is pivotal to consciousness and without it no perceptual judgment or thinking is possible, Nyāya epistemology does not accept memory as a knowledge source. Prof Matilal elucidates and defends Udayana’s justification for calling into question the knowledgehood or even truth of any recollection. Deepening Matilal’s argument, this paper first shows why, if a remembering reproduces exactly the original experience from which it borrows its truth-claim, then there is a mismatch between the time of experience and the time of (...) recall and the remembering ends up being false. To correct that error, if we change the tense in the content of recollection, the added past-ness goes beyond the original experience and violates the purely reproductive nature of memory. The paper ends by responding to this Nyāya position using arguments from Dvaita Vedānta and Jaina epistemology where remembering can be veridical and memory is accepted as an important knowledge source. The additional element of past-ness cannot be derived from sense perception. It has to be a spontaneous contribution of the inner sense. (shrink)

As the first comprehensive collection of essays in English on the perennial problem of free will and agency in Indian philosophies, Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy, edited by Matthew R. Dasti and Edwin F. Bryant, richly deserves to be read widely and critically by philosophers, Asianists, and global historians of ideas. It is an excellent endeavor in comparative philosophy. So, like every exercise in comparative philosophy, it must face a frustrating double bind. Let me start this review (...) essay by illustrating this double bind with an anecdote. Many years back, in a large freshmen's Introduction to Logic class at Montana State University, as a zealous young visiting professor from India, I was... (shrink)

Crop cultivation is one of the oldest activities of civilization. For a long time, crop production was carried out based on knowledge passed from generation to generation. However, due to the rapid growth in the human population of the world, human knowledge-based cultivation is not enough to meet the demanding need. To address this issue, the usage of machine learning-based tools has been studied in this paper. An experiment has been carried out over 0.3 million data. This dataset identifies 46 (...) prominent parameters for cultivation, which is collected from the Department of Agriculture Extension, Bangladesh. Comparison between neural networks and numbers of machine learning algorithms has been carried out in this research. It is observed that the neural network outperforms the other methods by maintaining an average prediction accuracy of 96.06% for six different crops. Other contemporary machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machine, random forest, and logistic regression, have average prediction accuracy of around 68.9%, 91.2%, and 62.39%, respectively. (shrink)