With recent advancements in systems engineering and artificial intelligence, autonomous agents are increasingly being called upon to execute tasks that have normative relevance. These are tasks that directly—and potentially adversely—affect human well-being and demand of the agent a degree of normative-sensitivity and -compliance. Such norms and normative principles are typically of a social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural nature. Whereas norms of this type are often framed in the abstract, or as high-level principles, addressing normative concerns in concrete applications of (...) autonomous agents requires the refinement of normative principles into explicitly formulated practical rules. This paper develops a process for deriving specification rules from a set of high-level norms, thereby bridging the gap between normative principles and operational practice. This enables autonomous agents to select and execute the most normatively favourable action in the intended context premised on a range of underlying relevant normative principles. In the translation and reduction of normative principles to SLEEC rules, we present an iterative process that uncovers normative principles, addresses SLEEC concerns, identifies and resolves SLEEC conflicts, and generates both preliminary and complex normatively-relevant rules, thereby guiding the development of autonomous agents and better positioning them as normatively SLEEC-sensitive or SLEEC-compliant. (shrink)

With recent advancements in systems engineering and artificial intelligence, autonomous agents are increasingly being called upon to execute tasks that have normative relevance. These are tasks that directly—and potentially adversely—affect human well-being and demand of the agent a degree of normative-sensitivity and -compliance. Such norms and normative principles are typically of a social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural (‘SLEEC’) nature. Whereas norms of this type are often framed in the abstract, or as high-level principles, addressing normative concerns in concrete applications (...) of autonomous agents requires the refinement of normative principles into explicitly formulated practical rules. This paper develops a process for deriving specification rules from a set of high-level norms, thereby bridging the gap between normative principles and operational practice. This enables autonomous agents to select and execute the most normatively favourable action in the intended context premised on a range of underlying relevant normative principles. In the translation and reduction of normative principles to SLEEC rules, we present an iterative process that uncovers normative principles, addresses SLEEC concerns, identifies and resolves SLEEC conflicts, and generates both preliminary and complex normatively-relevant rules, thereby guiding the development of autonomous agents and better positioning them as normatively SLEEC-sensitive or SLEEC-compliant. (shrink)

In Bancoult, a majority of the House of Lords upheld the British government's use of the royal prerogative to expel the population of the Chagos Islands from their homeland. The majority acknowledged that the government's treatment of the Chagossians was disturbing, but held that the law left them with no choice but to hold the orders valid. In this article, I draw a parallel between this decision and the 18th-century judicial response to the Zong affair—where over a hundred slaves were (...) thrown off a ship to drown in the sea. Both decisions are cloaked in formalist rhetoric but, as I show through an examination of the law as it stood prior to each of the decisions, the actual legal reasoning in both decisions is so without basis as to be unsustainable on any formalist or legalist account. Rather, the decision in Bancoult, like the decision in the Zong, shows all the hallmarks of being a purely pragmatic one, prompted by broader concerns as to the practical impact of a contrary decision and the precedent it would set. The inherent limitations of this mode of judicial reasoning make its deployment in Bancoult troubling. (shrink)

Ramana Maharsi is one of the lesser lights of modern Indian thought but a major figure in the context of modern Advaitic thought in Hinduism. Modern Indian thought in general is distinguished by a robust confidence in the efficacy of effort as an expression of free will, a confidence it shares with the temper of the West in general and which it may have imbibed by coming in contact with it. Modern Advaitic thought, as represented by its popular modern exponents (...) such as S. Radhakrishnan and T. M. P. Mahadevan, shares this confidence. Ramana Maharsi, however, strikes, at least at first glance, a somewhat discordant note. The purpose of this paper is to present his view on the time–honoured debate between predeterminism and free will and to analyze its philosophical implications. (shrink)

Interpretative writings on Brahmasūtraśaṅkarabhāṣyam, Saundaryalaharī and Vakyavrtti, three works of Śaṅkarācārya.

Opaqueness of pp collisions is evaluated at three CERN-ISR energies. Comparisons with predictions of the factorizable eikonal models and the scaling hypothesis are made. It appears that results are in favor of the factorizable models.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikhism between Tradition and "Assemblage":Reflections on Arvind Mandair's Sikh PhilosophyAnanda Abeysekara (bio)Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World. By Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and tradition in Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I begin with a brief discussion of (...) a lecture titled "A Genealogy of Liberty" delivered by Quentin Skinner at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, which he would give again, with minor changes, in 2015 at the University of Chicago and in 2017 at Stanford University. At the outset of the lecture, joining forces with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, he says, "Here I am a Nietzschean, and it is reflected in my title"—contending that "concepts [like liberty] that have histories cannot have definitions." In giving a concise history of the rival "polemical" claims made by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Arendt, Taylor, and others about the concept of liberty, Skinner concludes that, contrary to what Anglo-American philosophy claims, there is not one "coherent way of thinking about liberty" in its contested genealogy. And "while each of these accounts is coherent in its own terms, you cannot combine them. This is genealogy. You can't get this to be the concept of liberty. You are going to have to make some choices, because they don't fit together. So what choice should you make? As to the answer, I leave that up to you" (Skinner 2016).The puzzle of how to think about such a genealogy was palpable in the questions from the audience that followed Skinner's lecture. Noteworthy was one question, about how the thinkers—for example from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill—in the history of the debate about liberty seem to "move around," their views seeming to "bleed into one another" (Skinner 2015). That is, isn't John Stuart Mill's view of liberty—as something that one can voluntarily renounce by internalizing the external views or customs—more or less the same as Hobbes' view of liberty as something free from external interference? And hence don't these competing views after all "fit together" within a single narrative? Ultimately, the concern here boils down to a question about the definition of liberty. [End Page 333]But what the presupposition in the question misses is that each of these positions—as Skinner carefully argues—is "ideological," "polemical," and "contested"; that is, these positions—even though Skinner does not say this explicitly—are marked by distinct forms of historical sensibility. That each of the historical positions, again as Skinner rightly argues, is "coherent" already grants that the sensibilities that define them within their specific conditions cannot be reproduced. That is, to extend Skinner's argument, these sensibilities cannot simply be "combined" within a seamless narrative because they presuppose relationships of power in which they have the force of intelligibility that they do in particular historical contexts. But the presumption about the meaning of a concept—for example the concept of "creativity" or "emptiness"—that can be readily and universally identified in a historical narrative is prevalent in other disciplines like Buddhist studies and South Asian studies, where, despite scholars using the term, genealogy remains poorly thought through (Abeysekara 2023; Walser 2018).1Largely absent in Skinner's genealogy is any discussion of the concept of "tradition" itself even though at times he alludes to "the tradition of liberty." This may not be a simple oversight on Skinner's part, but its very absence raises the question of whether liberalism itself is a discursive, embodied tradition in the ways a religious tradition works, as conceptualized by Talal Asad and others. Asad has described liberalism itself as a certain kind of "tradition" constituted by historical disputes (Asad 2009).2 And the broader implication of that argument is that, because it is a tradition animated by the very debates about what constitutes it, those who make claims about it are already situated within that tradition. And so it is unsound to speak of multiple traditions of liberty and, by extension, "multiple modernities... (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Foreword ix -- Preface xi. -- Introduction xiii -- CHAPTER I -- The Concept of God 1 -- CHAPTER I -- The Case for God 15 -- CHAPER m -- The Case Against God 31 -- CHAPTER IV -- God, Suffering and Human Beings 37 -- CHAPTER V -- Revelation, Faith and Knowledge 47 -- CHAPTER VI -- Epistemology and Ontology 63 -- CHAER VII -- Religious Language 77 -- CHAPTER v -- Religious Language and Truth (...) 89 -- CHAPTER IX -- The Problem of Religious Pluralism 109 -- CHAPTER X -- Human Destiny: Western Perspectives 121 -- CHAPTER XI -- Human Destiny: Indic Perspectives 135 -- Recommended Reading .153. (shrink)

Super commentary on Śaṅkara's commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, work on Vedanta philosophy.

Comments on: JRE Focus on The 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Journal of Religious Ethics 26.2 “Rethinking Human Rights: A Review Essay on Religion, Relativism, and Other Matters” by David Little, Journal of Religious Ethics 27.1.

The purpose of this article is to discuss at greater length two problems raised by Mr. D. J. Mosley towards the end of his discussion of the Athenian Embassy to Sparta in 371 published in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society N.s. viii, 41 ff. The first of these problems concerns the policy pursued by Callistratus at this peace-conference, the second the effect on their audience of the divergent speeches of three of the Athenian ambassadors, Callias, Autocles, and Callistratus, which (...) Xenophon reports. (shrink)

In speaking of Demosthenes' conduct in the period between his return to Athens after the peace agreement with Macedon and Philip's death Aeschines refers to only one specific incident, the attempt by Demosthenes to have himself elected What this position was has never been satisfactorily explained.

Glos, who had been in command of the fleet and was married to the daughter of Tiribazus, fearful that it might be thought that he had cooperated with Tiribazus in his plan and that he would be punished by the King, resolved to safeguard his position by a new project of action. Since he was well supplied with money and soldiers and had furthermore won the commanders of the triremes to himself by acts of kindness, he resolved to revolt from (...) the King. (shrink)

At Book 15, chapter 76, Diodorus Siculus says that during the Attic year 366/5, at the same time as the Thebans won possession of the Attic border district of Oropus, the King of Persia sent ambassadors and persuaded the Greeks to put an end to their wars and to conclude Common Peace )); this peace, he adds, was more than five years after the battle of Leuctra.

Mārgi Saṅgīta in Upaniṣadic times -- Emotion, aesthetics, bioenergy fields : a brief introduction of the archetypal/historical/living singer effect in the Indian psyche -- Indian aesthetics : the personal and impersonal.

The aged in India have conventionally enjoyed privileges within the framework of a social economy where the needs of the old remained a moral responsibility of family, kith and kin. However the present changing times have forced a shift in the approach to old age care. The old person finds him- or herself in a sticky situation, in between an insensitive state and the demands of globalization. The present paper situates this problem within the framework of globalization and systematically measures (...) the strategic response of the state to this daunting challenge, with respect to economic security and health care in particular. In the conclusion, the paper argues for a rejection of the conventional welfare approach and it advocates an integrated approach based on a coherent social development perspective within the valuation framework of social quality. (shrink)

A biologist attempts to solve "the problem of knowledge" by exposing the Great Illusion of Philosophy: confusing seeing with the seen. --A. T. T.

For eradication of acute poverty, it is vital to factor in the human experience of it. Building social capital and networks that nurture, empower, and consistently reinforce a new shared economic identity can provide rich socioeconomic dividends. For states tackling extreme poverty at scale, building and strengthening social capital are essential public goods investments.

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair ...

We studied the dynamics of large networks of spiking neurons with conductance-based (nonlinear) synapses and compared them to net- works with current-based (linear) synapses. For systems with sparse and inhibition-dominated recurrent connectivity, weak external inputs in- duced asynchronous irregular firing at low rates. Membrane potentials fluctuated a few millivolts below threshold, and membrane conductances were increased by a factor 2 to 5 with respect to the resting state. This combination of parameters characterizes the ongoing spiking activity typ- ically recorded in (...) the cortex in vivo. Many aspects of the asynchronous irregular state in conductance-based networks could be sufficiently well characterized with a simple numerical mean field approach. In particular, it correctly predicted an intriguing property of conductance-based net- works that does not appear to be shared by current-based models: they exhibit states of low-rate asynchronous irregular activity that persist for some period of time even in the absence of external inputs and with- out cortical pacemakers. Simulations of larger networks (up to 350,000 neurons) demonstrated that the survival time of self-sustained activity increases exponentially with network size. (shrink)

The rediscovery of biblical and Talmudic notion of responsibility is an alternative in the context of theological reflection, in relation the shortcomings ethics of the philosophical project of modernity. In this context, the rescue of the uniqueness of this responsibility reveals a fruitful relationship between Jewish thought and moral theology. This article, in order to demonstrate this fecundity, evidences the force of ethical wisdom of Old Testament, from the perspective of the jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

Slow money, or patient nurturing capital directly invested locally in small firms in food and basic industries, is a new term but an old notion. It gains revival in times of crisis, especially after the recent financial crisis, as people search for meaning and a way out of the ruinous effects of uncontrolled capitalism. This article traces the roots of the movement to Gandhian thought. It examines the cases of the CIGALES clubs of microangels in France and the more recent (...) case of the slow money alliance to ferret out the basic principles and strategies of these movements and how they are aligned with Gandhian values. (shrink)

Isolated feedforward networks (FFNs) of spiking neurons have been studied extensively for their ability to propagate transient synchrony and asynchronous firing rates, in the presence of activity independent synaptic background noise (Diesmann et al., 1999; van Rossum et al., 2002). In a biologically realistic scenario, however, the FFN should be embedded in a recurrent network, such that the activity in the FFN and the network activity may dynamically interact. Previously, transient synchrony propagating in an FFN was found to destabilize the (...) dynamics of the embedding network (Mehring et al., 2003). Here, we show that by modeling synapses as conductance transients, rather than current sources, it is possible to embed and propagate transient synchrony in the FFN, without destabilizing the background network dynamics. However, the network activity has a strong impact on the type of activity that can be propagated in the embedded FFN. Global synchrony and high firing rates in the embedding network prohibit the propagation of both, synchronous and asynchronous spiking activity. In contrast, asynchronous low-rate network states support the propagation of both, synchronous spiking and asynchro- nous, but only low firing rates. In either case, spiking activity tends to synchronize as it propagates, challenging the feasibility to transmit information in asynchronous firing rates. Finally, asynchronous network activity allows to embed more than one FFN, with the amount of cross talk depending on the degree of overlap in the FFNs. This opens the possibility of computational mechanisms using transient synchrony among the activities in multiple FFNs. (shrink)