Ces dernières années, il y a eu de nombreuses discussions à propos des coûts croissants des risques naturels. Jusqu’à présent, pour la première fois dans l’histoire l’humanité a pu se prémunir contre les caprices de la nature de manière significative. Le développement économique a fourni la meilleure protection contre les cataclysmes naturels. L’intervention du gouvernement dans l’économie a contrarié la croissance économique et retardé la possibilité pour les gens de prendre des mesures efficaces afin d’atténuer l’impact des sinistres naturels. Dans (...) la mesure où les forces du marché ont pu opérer, toute une série d’options ont permis de prédire, prévenir et dédommager les coûts de ces risques.In recent years, there have been a lot of discussions about the increased costs of natural hazards. Yet, the fact is that for the first time in history mankind has been able to insulate themselves from the vagaries of nature to a significant extent. Economic development has provided the best protection against natural cataclysms. Government intervention in the economy has adversely affected economic growth and retarded the ability of the people to take effective measures to mitigate the impact of natural hazards. To the extent the market forces have been allowed the space to operate, a whole range of options has evolved to predict, prevent and offset the costs of these hazards. (shrink)

Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self-evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. (...) Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors. (shrink)

The crystallization behaviour of Fe 70.8 Nb 3.7 Cu 1 Al 2.7 Mn 0.7 Si 13.5 B 7.6 alloy prepared in the form of amorphous ribbons by melt-spinning technique was studied using differential scanning calorimetry and the temperature variation in resistivity. An X-ray diffaction and transmission electron microscopy study showed the formation of f -Fe and/or Fe 3 nanoparticles after the first stage of crystallization. The activation energy for this nanophase formation was 68 kcal mol m 1 . The brittleness (...) of the alloy increased with the formation of nanoparticles after heat treatment. Superior soft magnetic properties were achieved when the material was heat treated at 790 K for 15 min. The particle size at the optimum heat treatment condition for superior soft magnetic properties was found to be 6.0 - 0.5 nm which was less compared than for the Fe-Nb-Cu-Si-B system. The observed coercivity value at the optimum heat treatment condition was found to be 0.32 A m m 1 . The presence of Al in the alloy reduced the particle size and the magnetic anisotropy energy of the system, which resulted in superior soft magnetic properties of the heat-treated materials. (shrink)

Gandhi’s writings on the issue of Caturvarṇa, despite their apparent lacunas, dogmatic tones and seeming inconsistencies, are available to a convincing reconstruction. With this purpose in view, the first section of this paper will attempt to give an anti-foundational reading of Caturvarṇa—where varṇa is seen to be based neither on the different proportions of the three guṇas (sattva, rajas and tamas), nor on a system of hereditary professions, but as abstract dimensions that are not mutually exclusive—and at best serves to (...) give an orientation to our cognition and actions. This reading, while borrowing heavily from Shri Aurobindo’s reading of Caturvarṇa, will seek to give it a more neutral and expansive direction, shorn of all associated suggestions of intransigence and empirical contingencies, in order to effect the best possible synthesis with Gandhi. The second section of this paper will concentrate on appropriate portions of Gandhi’s commentary on Gῑtā, trying to track down Gandhi’s reservations against any psychological determinism with respect to varṇa. His direct but scattered observations on varṇa and caste will be addressed in the last section—to see how far our neutral reading of Caturvarṇa can be responsibly reconciled with his distinction between varṇa and caste—indicating a way to dissolve the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on varṇabheda and jātibheda. Overall, this paper attempts a paradigmatic reconstruction of Gandhian Caturvarṇa in the light of his approach to the notion of niṣkāma karma. (shrink)

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the "doing" (dispassionately?) versus "being" (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer's (...) very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process. (shrink)

The body in-pain has regularly been relegated to "the dark side"of Western biomedicine, academic research, and even everyday life. Following Starhawk's aptly titled resuscitation of "the dark"as a fertile source of spiritual transformation (Dreaming the Dark, 1982), this essay examines the ways in which intractable pain can open up the body to "a new body in the making" —one that engages with pain kinesthetically as well as discursively. This essay explores three ethnographic cases emerging from three different American fieldvvork sites. (...) An Internet mailing list called WITSENDO constitutes the first case; through often daily participation in this electronic mailing list, women suffering from endometriosis co-create a virtual community that strikingly mitigates their experiences of chronicand intense pain. The shift in how long-term clients of acupuncture care regard needling is the locus of the second case. Acupuncture treatments in American clinical settings often negotiate an American cultural assumption that needles are painful; this second case documents what happens to patients' "fear" of needles and experiences of pain after regular acupuncture treatments. The third case focuses on adepth interview with an American doula who provides labor support for women primarily in hospital settings, this interview explores the conditions under which American women in labor experience pain and how alternative birth professionals define and conceive of pain during childbirth.These three ethnographic cases highlight the cultural construction of pain by delving into the ways that pain sufferers and health care practitioners engage with the body-in-pain. Such engagements occur in the realm of language - both discursive and kinesthetic language. (shrink)

India is a rising power in the multipolar world. This book showcases India's endogenous political ideas and strategic thinking, both of which are the key resources that underpin and drive this rise. Kautilya's Arthashastra is a major source of these ideas. It is a premodern treatise on statecraft and a foundational text of political science. So far, political science and international relations theory have largely ignored Kautilya, or, at best, labelled him merely as the 'Indian Machiavelli'. Such a characterisation vastly (...) undervalues the riches and depth of the contributions of Kautilya - a contemporary of Aristotle - whose contributions can be compared more appropriately to those of Artistotle's politics. Kautilya's contributions are recognised by such masters of western political theory as Max Weber and Hans J. Morgenthau. But in South Asia, Kautilya has remained adrift of the academic mainstream and has been given little prominence in public life, both intellectually and politically. Despite such scholarly negligence, everyday life in India - in terms of the institutions and process that constitute it - has remained deeply grounded in the political heritage of pre-modern India, succinctly codified in Kautilya's Arthashastra. These themes are explored in this book through such bridge concepts as the 'modernity of tradition' and the 're-use of the past' in tackling contemporary political problems. These concepts are the key factors that explain the resilience and stability of India's hybrid political institutions and democratic system. 'Kautilya's Arthashastra: an Intellectual portrait - Classical Roots of Modern Politics in India' is an indispensable key to understanding contemporary India and a major contribution to South Asian area studies, comparative politics and global political theory. (shrink)

Among the clothes Ariadne is wearing in this scene is a finely woven headdress which Catullus terms a ‘mitra’ . Commentators have defined this mitra variously as a ‘scarf’ , a ‘cap or bonnet’ and a ‘kind of hairnet’ . In Greek literature, a ‘mitra’ is any piece of cloth worn by women in various ways to tie up their hair. While the word came to be used by Latin writers, it seems to have retained its specifically (...) Greek associations. Varro refers to ‘mitra’ as a Greek word: mitra et reliqua ferre in capite postea addita cum vocabulis Graecisd. (shrink)

The best evidence in favour of a claim to knowledge warranties not the possibility of our not being wrong, so says the sceptic. Whatever grounds a putative knower has for some claim, always there exists a gap between the grounds and the claim. Anti-sceptical stands take the form of attempts either to bridge or close the gap. The Cartesian approach for bridging up the gap consists in specifying a guarantee for the subjective ground of beliefs that would secure them from (...) sceptical attacks and elevate them to the status of knowledge. The guarantee is to be sought in the goodness of a deity, which by virtue of its sheer goodness will ensure our not being led into deception in matters of evidences for knowledge-claims, provided our epistemic endowments are used responsibly. Some not satisfied with the Cartesian tradition sought the guarantee elsewhere—in some basic self-justifying and self-evident beliefs providing foundation to our system of beliefs, which conjoined with the evidences for our claims to knowledge make such claims immune to sceptical attacks. (shrink)

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and (...) re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance). (shrink)

In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine some of the key concepts of Jaina religion from an environmental perspective. The paper focuses on Jain’s parasparopagraho jīvānām or interconnectedness. The common concerns between Jainism and environmentalism constituted in a mutual sensitivity towards living beings, a recognition of the interconnectedness of life forms and a programme to augment awareness to respect and protect living systems. The paper will also investigate how ahiṃsā or non-violence is understood in the Jain community (...) and also how this concept bears a positive influence in maintaining ecological balance. The paper aims to show that the practice of non-violence is limited not only to actions but extends to words and thoughts. In this process, I attempt to show the development of “intellectual ahiṃsā” where non-violence is rooted in Jain anekāntavāda that is in the tolerance of other religions, thoughts and believes. The Jain’s radical egalitarianism does away with the charges of anthropocentricism labelled against it. In fact, the Jain virtue ethics, compassion and tolerance are instrumental in creating an environment that was conducive to peaceful and productive multi-sectarian interaction both in society and ecology. (shrink)

The recent spectacular progress in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has resulted in new ethical dilemmas. Though women occupy a central role in the reproductive process, within the ART paradigm, the importance accorded to the embryo commonly surpasses that given to the mother. This commentary questions the increasing tendency to position the embryonic subject in an antagonistic relation with the mother. I examine how the mother’s reproductive autonomy is compromised in relation to that of her embryo and argue in favour of (...) doing away with the subject-object dyad between them, particularly in the contexts of surrogacy and abortion. I also engage with the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016. A critical discussion of the privacy judgment passed by the Supreme Court of India helps examine how personal autonomy of the body and mind extends to include the reproductive autonomy of women as well. (shrink)

While scholarly research on the relationship between female board representation and strategic decision-making has gained momentum, employee policy outcomes have remained relatively understudied. Integrating theory from the ethics of care perspective with research on the glass ceiling and workplace voice, we seek to understand the circumstances under which female directors influence policy changes for firm employees. We argue that firms with increasing female board representation are more likely to enact human capital development policies benefiting firm employees. However, this positive relationship (...) will ultimately diminish as boards accrue an increasing number of female directors. We further predict that the presence of a female leader at the firm (serving in the role of either the CEO or the board chair) will moderate this diminishing effect. Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms, we find support for our hypotheses. The findings from this study provide evidence that while female board representation is positively related to human capital development policies, this effect is nuanced and impacted by the presence of female leadership at the top of organizations. Our paper extends existing research on the nature of female directors’ influence on ethical decisions, emphasizing the impact of these directors on employees. (shrink)

The last 20 years have seen a staggering growth in the practice of off-shoring clinical research to low-and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs), a growth that has been matched by the neoliberal policies adopted by host countries towards attracting trials to their shores. A recurring concern in this context is the charge of exploitation, linked to various aspects of off-shoring. In this paper, I examine Alan Wertheimer's approach and offer an alternative view of understanding exploitation in this context. I will (...) suggest that the justification for the enterprise of research is largely dependent on its integration within a health system from which participants regularly benefit and I argue that an attention to a principle of reciprocity will enable us to better recognize and address exploitation in international research. (shrink)

According to the Economic Survey of India, 2012–2013, the real estate sector contributed 5.9 % of the India’s total Gross Domestic Product in the Financial Year 2011–2012, while remaining the second largest employment generator after agriculture in India. The urban population in India is projected to touch 600 million by 2030, from 377 million in 2011, thereby fuelling a housing shortage of around 26 million. However, the perception of Construction industry, like other sectors of the economy, is that of creating (...) “human habitat in a manner generally focussed on profitability without consideration of its long-term impacts.” Under such circumstances, Tata Housing Development Company Limited, a closely held Public Limited Company under 99.86 % subsidiary of Tata Sons, is the first Indian real estate company to have reported the triple bottom-line Global Reporting Initiative G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in its Sustainability Report FY 2013–2014. THDCL aims to volunteer its resources to the extent it can reasonably afford, to sustain the environment and to improve the quality of life of the people of the area in which it operates. This Situational Case Study, targeted towards management students and practitioners, and social and developmental workers in the areas of Corporate Governance, Strategic Management, Business Environment, Business Policy and Community Welfare, aims to identify the community engagement model of THDCL; analyse it in terms of its implementation and impact; and initiate discussion about the role of strategic partnerships under Corporate Social Responsibility in an emerging economy. This work may be used for developmental related workshops/training programmes for students and working professionals of innovation, CSR, sustainability, social and developmental sectors and shared, among others, in various Chambers of Commerce and Academic forums on the same. It is, however, not intended to serve as an endorsement, source of data or illustration of effective or ineffective management. Certain names and information could have been disguised for confidentiality. (shrink)

Human embryonic moral status in the embryo debate in the Indian religious school of thoughts is a challenging issue. The paper tries to figure out whether ontological status implies moral status of embryo. Consciousness is an important determinant of animation of human embryo. In this paper an attempt had been made to understand the concept of man and soul in the Hindu philosophical thought. In the process we would also make a critical review of embryology in the Hindu philosophical thought. (...) The study would adopt a conceptual elucidation of morality. The paper made an elaborative study of Puruṣa as found in the Saṃkhya Philosophy and the study of consciousness and animation would try to resolve the related question, when does life begin to have that value? Embryo-protectionist regards embryos as a potential person. The Gita says the human person is individual self-called āttmā, whose nature is of pure consciousness, Brahman/Puruṣa. Consciousness constitutes the essentiality of individual Self. Human embryo developments are elaborately studied in the Yajñavalkya Smṛti, Garbha Upaniṣad, and Suśruta Saṃhitā. The self that remain latent in the embryo gets impetus with the association of consciousness until then it cannot be a human personality. In Hinduism sanctity of life gets combined with autonomy and self-determination. The sanctity of life applies both to the fetus as well as to the overall welfare of the society. The embryo being in an interim stage and the soul not being destroyed upon body annihilation, it may be claimed that since destruction or annihilation of the physical form does not destroy the soul, beneficial embryo research should thus not be abhorrent. The Hindu ethics as examined here precludes the consideration of the situation at hand, and causing the least harm and work according to one’s dharma. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers’ bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a framework (...) within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004. (shrink)

As the world has been left reeling by the large and continuous loss of human lives due to the current pandemic, Pope Francis offered "Urbi et Orbi" (To the City and the World) in his blessings. He led a recitation of the Lord's Prayer on the feast of the Annunciation which was live streamed around the world, renewing his invitation to pray incessantly for the cure of the sick as well for the medical caregivers. As places of worship across the (...) world are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people of faith need to either offer prayers within the restricted walls of their homes or make use of the virtual platforms available. One way to sustain communal worship is to rely on technology and that is how some of the temples and Gurudwaras in India are engaging with their communities. They have resorted to audio kirtan (call and response chanting) and songs through which they are delivering sermons and messages to their devotees. Whilst many temples have remained closed, some temples and Gurudwaras are still not ready to follow the restrictions implemented against gatherings. Flouting lockdown, several devotees have assembled outside the local temples of West Bengal and Patna on the occasion of Ram Navami and to offer Pujas (prayer rituals) seeking relief from COVID19. However, the annual festivals to honour Lord Ram at Ayodhya – where thousands gather – have been called off. (shrink)

Religion has a considerable influence over the public’s attitudes towards science and technologies. The objective of the paper is to understand the ethical and religious problems concerning the use of embryo for research in assisting conception for infertile couples from the perspective of Catholic Christians. This paper seeks to explain our preliminary reflections on how religious communities particularly the Catholic Christian communities respond to and assess the ethics of reproductive technologies and embryo research. Christianity as a whole lacks a unified (...) and definitive statement on when an embryo becomes a person, although fundamentalist Christians tend to be opposed to embryo experimentation. Roman Catholics tend to believe that the embryo should be treated as human life from the moment of conception or fertilisation. As opposed to this preconception I have tried to point out that a foetus is a clump of cells and lacks individuality as a conscientious human being and thus can be used for research for therapeutic reason. The paper concluded that the Church accepts techniques on embryo that respect their life. So they would allow procedures that are akin with healing and improvement of life without involving undue risks. The Church feels children should arise out of act of love between man and his wife in co-operation with God. In this regard, it may be pointed out though the creation of a child through a conjugal act in a wed lock is the preferred method since it is the most natural, least expensive one. But that does not mean, it should be the only acceptable means to conception. To state a child born using ARTs would be less perfect compared to a child born through conjugal act of husband and wife is absurd one to be mentioned. (shrink)

In this commentary, we take up Yearby’s call for racism-sensitive research and apply this to the discourse regarding race and diversity in COVID vaccine research. We consider whether efforts...

Influential neoclassical economist Lionel McKenzie has made major contributions to postwar economic thought in the fields of equilibrium, trade, and capital accumulation. This selection of his papers traces the development of his thinking in these three crucial areas.McKenzie's early academic life took him to Duke, Princeton, Oxford, the University of Chicago, and the Cowles Commission. In 1957, he went to the University of Rochester to head the economics department there, and he remains at Rochester, now Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics. (...) McKenzie's most significant research was undertaken during a period that saw the development of the major themes of neoclassical economics and the use of fundamental mathematical methods to do so. McKenzie contributed to both aspects of this research program. He helped shape the direction of the field and, at Rochester, influenced generations of future scholars. In 2002, The MIT Press published McKenzie's Classical General Equilibrium Theory, a detailed summary of the model and methodology. This book, collecting his most important papers in the form in which they were originally published, can be seen as a companion to that one. The many state-of-the-art results achieved in McKenzie's original papers present sophisticated theoretical work that will continue to be important to future developments in the discipline. (shrink)

The current study was a cross-sectional research and aimed to investigate the factor structure, internal consistency, and validities of the Persian version of the Teasing Questionnaire-Revised. Forward and backward translations of the TQ-R were performed; face and content validities were determined based on comments by a sample of psychology students and specialists. Using the cluster sampling method, 290 participants were recruited, and 201 valid data were analyzed. The factor structure was assessed by confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis. The result of (...) the confirmatory factor analysis did not confirm the proposed three, four, and five-factor models. EFA revealed four factors with 23 items, explaining 52.03% of the total variance. The internal consistency of the Persian version of Teasing Questionnaire 23 was in the excellent range, and its expected associations with external correlates supported the measure’s convergent validity. The findings indicated that the Persian version of the TQ-R has sound psychometric properties and can be used as a valid and reliable tool in research and clinical outcomes. (shrink)

Urbanization affects concurrent human-animal interactions as a result of altered resource availability and land use pattern, which leads to considerable ecological consequences. While some animals have lost their habitat due to urban encroachment, few of them managed to survive within the urban ecosystem by altering their natural behavioral patterns. The feeding repertoire of folivorous colobines, such as gray langur, largely consists of plant parts. However, these free-ranging langurs tend to be attuned to the processed high-calorie food sources to attain maximum (...) benefits within the concrete jungle having insignificant greenery. Therefore, besides understanding their population dynamics, the effective management of these urbanized, free-ranging, non-human primate populations also depends on their altered feeding habits. Here, we have used a field-based experimental setup that allows gray langurs to choose between processed and unprocessed food options, being independent of any inter-specific conflicts over resources due to food scarcity. The multinomial logit model reveals the choice-based decision-making of these free-ranging gray langurs in an urban settlement of West Bengal, India, where they have not only learned to recognize the human-provisioned processed food items as an alternative food source but also shown a keen interest in it. However, such a mismatch between the generalized feeding behavior of folivorous colobines and their specialized gut physiology reminds us of Liem's paradox and demands considerable scientific attention. While urbanization imposes tremendous survival challenges to these animals, it also opens up for various alternative options for surviving in close proximity to humans which is reflected in this study, and could guide us for the establishment of a sustainable urban ecosystem in the future. (shrink)

In January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 s before midnight.

Teacher professional identity is a characteristic of a teacher, which should be developed in a long, consistent, and progressive process and usually shapes in any specific educational and social context. In addition to several factors influencing TPI, such as university education and empowerment courses, experience seems to play a significant role. Moreover, the role of psychological factors is highly undeniable in the formation and development of TPI. Attributional style is defined as the consistent way by which people can explain the (...) reasons for the occurrence of good or bad events. Besides considering ASs as one of the crucial variables for academic success, it can be regarded as one of the aspects of shaping one’s identity in general and the teacher’s identity in particular. In order to study the relationship between AS and TPI of teachers regarding their experience, two questionnaires were distributed among 317 Iranian English as foreign language teachers, and about 80% returned them. The researchers ran correlational analyses and they came up with a positive and significant relationship between TPI and teacher attributional styles of teachers. Moreover, experienced teachers proved to have a significant difference from novice teachers regarding their TPIs. The findings of this study would hopefully be advantageous for teacher educators to educate pre-service teachers by ways of constructing identity, and they may be applicable for Iranian EFL teachers to know and focus on different aspects of their professional identity. Moreover, they learn how to manage the intervening factors and shape and empower different domains of their PI, such as teaching experience, by means of exploring and knowing their ASs. (shrink)

When Sasaki Sokei-an founded his First Zen Institute of North America in 1930 he suggested that bringing Zen Buddhism to America was like "holding a lotus against a rock and waiting for it to set down roots." Today, Buddhism is part of the cultural and religious mainstream. Flowers on the Rock examines the dramatic growth of Buddhism in Canada and questions some of the underlying assumptions about how this tradition has changed in the West. Using historical, ethnographic, and biographical approaches, (...) contributors illuminate local expressions of Buddhism found throughout Canada and relate the growth of Buddhism in Canada to global networks. A global perspective allows the volume to overcome the stereotype that Asia and the West are in opposition to each other and recognizes the continuities between Buddhist movements in Asia and the West that are shaped by the same influences of modernity and globalization. Flowers on the Rock studies the fascinating and ingenious changes, inflections, and adaptations that Buddhists make when they set down roots in a local culture. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Buddhism, religious life in Canada, and the broader issues of multiculturalism and immigration. Contributors include Michihiro Ama, D. Mitra Barua, Paul Crowe, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Mavis Fenn, Kory Goldberg, Sarah F. Haynes, Jackie Larm, Paul McIvor, James Placzek, and Angela Sumegi. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

In his 1939 essay, “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us,” John Dewey described democracy as “a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished.”1 While this may seem an odd definition, it is emblematic of the reconstructive tendency in Dewey’s philosophy. If we are to achieve a truly democratic society, we must reconstruct democracy itself (...) – our personal lives must become more democratic if we are to have hopes for our political institutions. And central to this reconstruction, as Dewey points out in this essay, is a recognition of the roles of communication and education in the interest of democratzing ends. It seems hardly worth mentioning the role played by information technology in our contemporary modes of communication and education, given the centrality of the personal computer and the Internet in our everyday lives. For most of us in this room, and especially for those under the age of 25, it is difficult to remember a time before the home computer, before e-mail and instant messaging. But it is vitally important to bear in mind that the technological advantages of Western life are not universal – large.. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often (...) conflated: knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education. (shrink)

This paper proposes a model of the Artificial Autonomous Moral Agent (AAMA), discusses a standard of moral cognition for AAMA, and compares it with other models of artificial normative agency. It is argued here that artificial morality is possible within the framework of a “moral dispositional functionalism.” This AAMA is able to “read” the behavior of human actors, available as collected data, and to categorize their moral behavior based on moral patterns herein. The present model is based on several analogies (...) among artificial cognition, human cognition, and moral action. It is premised on the idea that moral agents should not be based on rule-following procedures, but on learning patterns from data. This idea is rarely implemented in AAMA models, albeit it has been suggested in the machine ethics literature (W. Wallach, C. Allen, J. Gips and especially M. Guarini). As an agent-based model, this AAMA constitutes an alternative to the mainstream action-centric models proposed by K. Abney, M. Anderson and S. Anderson, R. Arkin, T. Powers, W. Wallach, i.a. Moral learning and moral development of dispositional traits play here the fundamental role in cognition. By using a combination of neural networks and evolutionary computation, called “soft computing” (H. Adeli, N. Siddique, S. Mitra, L. Zadeh), the present model reaches a certain level of autonomy and complexity, which illustrates well “moral particularism” and a form of virtue ethics for machines, grounded in active learning. An example based on the “lifeboat metaphor” (G. Hardin) and the extension of this model to the NEAT architecture (K. Stanley, R. Miikkulainen, i.a.) are briefly assessed. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)