This volume explores on the material, social, and ideological aspects of Asoka's reign in light of advances made in archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics. Thematically divided into three parts, the first to pillars and rocks, which bear his inscriptions. The second part examines the interconnectedness of the edicts, their monumentality, and the different concept of kingship they conveyed. The third part analyses the making of the cultural memory of Asoka and raises pertinent questions crucial for understanding the relationship between the past (...) and the present. The essays outline the importance of Asoka not only for the Indian nation-state but also for the entire Buddhist world of South and South-east Asia. Moving away from conventional periodization of Indian history, it raises important questions on the beginning of history and archaeology in the modern period. The book examines the extent to which nineteenth century initiatives have affected the study of Asoka and his reign. (shrink)

Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women’s advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey (...) from 1977 through 2016, we show that gender attitudes have more than one underlying dimension and that these dimensions have changed at different rates over time. Using latent class analysis, we find that the distribution of respondents’ attitudes toward gender equality has changed over the past 40 years. There has been an increase in the number of egalitarians who support equality in public and private spheres, while the traditionals who historically opposed equality in both domains have been replaced by ambivalents who feel differently about gender equality in the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, successive birth cohorts are becoming more egalitarian, with Generation-Xers and Millennials being the most likely to hold strong egalitarian views. The feminist revolution has succeeded in promoting egalitarian views and decreasing the influence of gender traditionalism, but has yet to convince a substantial minority that gender equality should extend to both public and private spheres of social life. (shrink)

According to the classical account, propositions are sui generis, abstract, intrinsically-representational entities and our cognitive attitudes, and the token states within us that realize those attitudes, represent as they do in virtue of their propositional objects. In light of a desire to explain how it could be that propositions represent, much of the recent literature on propositions has pressured various aspects of this account. In place of the classical account, revisionists have aimed to understand propositions in terms of more familiar (...) entities such as facts, types of mental or linguistic acts, and even properties. But we think that the metaphysical story about propositions is much simpler than either the classical theorist or the revisionist would have you believe. In what follows, we argue that a proper understanding of the nature of our cognitive relations to propositions shows that the question of whether propositions themselves represent is, at best, a distraction. We will argue that once this distraction is removed, the possibility of a very pleasing, minimalist story of propositions emerges; a story that appeals only to assumptions that are shared by all theorists in the relevant debate. (shrink)

Examines the postmodern implications of Whitehead’s metaphysical system.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page 19-20, August 2012.

How fine-grained are the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes? Are the contents of our beliefs individuated solely in terms of the objects, properties, and relations that figure in their truth conditions, or rather in terms of our concepts, or modes of presentation of those objects, properties, and relations? So-called Millians famously maintain the former whereas their Fregean rivals hold the latter. Though much ink was spilled on the question of grain, relatively little was ever achieved by way (...) of consensus. We think the lack of consensus itself cries out for explanation. In this paper, we sketch a pluralist resolution (or, better, a dissolution) of the debate that flows from some extremely minimal commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions and the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In doing so, we focus on the Act-type conception of propositions of Hanks (2015) and Soames (2010, 2016) and our own (2019) favored deflationary account, Minimalism. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Modern medicine has put a new twist on one of our most fundamental values: self-determination. Although advance directives may be used to request treatment, this volume limits its focus to their more common function--the refusal of treatment. Timely and comprehensive, it provides a stimulating overview of this relevant topic, addressing such questions as: What are the individual and societal benefits of advance directives? Does an advance directive tamper with the sanctity of life? Will normalizing directives have an adverse effect on (...) the practice of medicine? Should a patient specify treatments to be withheld within a directive? What legal sanctions should apply against those who ignore directives? and What is a physician's role in helping his patient formulate an appropriate directive? (shrink)

The fact that many who are currently interested in spirituality tum to non-Christian sources is related to Augustine’s view of divine omnipotence. which was expressed supremely in his anit-Donatist and anti-Pelagian writings. Distinguishing cosmological, theological, and axiological freedom helps us see Pelgius as right on the second even though Augustine was right on the third. Process theology, by defending cosmological freedom against modem thought, theological freedom against pre-modem thought, and an element of truth in Donatism, provides the basis for a (...) post-modem spirituality. (shrink)

Criminal labeling is an important process in the typical modern hegemony, serving not only to name and marginalize selected criminals but also to underscore and rationalize the hegemony’s norms. In the contemporary United States, such labeling is especially harsh and reductive. It predictably involves the established criminal justice institutions—police departments, criminal courts, and prisons—and also a wide range of community spokesmen, political figures, and the mass media. Yet despite the hegemony’s apparent determination to criminally label individual men and women and (...) also entire social groups and classes, many popular songs identify and sympathize with the people who have been labeled. Indeed, the criminals themselves are often the most winning voices in those songs’ lyrics. A consideration of three singer/songwriters and three popular songs from different genres reveals how these voices humanize the criminal, thereby problematizing the hegemony’s tendency to label criminals and to reify and then condemn crime. Overall, the selected voices from American popular music illustrate the role the popular arts might play in challenging the hegemony. (shrink)

Treatise on fundamentals of Jaina philosophy.

Book Review of What are Mental Representations.

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets (...) in India.Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But (...) a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

Social Thought in Indic Civilization presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the pre-colonial social thought. It draws on the methodologies and research traditions of history, political science and sociology to look at major themes and social processes to provide a comprehensive understanding of the society in the historical setting contextualized in the social and political relations of the time. The arguments, facts, themes and interpretations presented in the book are usually not found in the mainstream academic narratives. This book explores a (...) range of key themes such as non-violence in religious praxis; dharma in Indic social traditions; medicinal concepts and institutions; ideas and praxis of Shastrarth; knowledge traditions and institutions; music traditions; and Stritva in texts and praxis. This study highlights the impact of colonial rule on the 'construction of knowledge' from a Western (colonial) perspective and how it ignored the importance of Indian political thought of the pre-colonial period. (shrink)

We compute the model-theoretic Grothendieck ring, \\), of a dense linear order with or without end points, \\), as a structure of the signature \, and show that it is a quotient of the polynomial ring over \ generated by \\) by an ideal that encodes multiplicative relations of pairs of generators. This ring can be embedded in the polynomial ring over \ generated by \. As a corollary we obtain that a DLO satisfies the pigeon hole principle for definable (...) subsets and definable bijections between them—a property that is too strong for many structures. (shrink)

Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

20 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and a greater focus on the conditions under which it is performed, in reality, anti-trafficking discourse remains in the grip of polarised positions on sex work even as the carceral (...) effects of anti-trafficking law become evident and the Swedish model of criminalising the purchase of sexual services spreads. In this article, I demonstrate how despite the recent discursive shifts to ‘modern slavery’ and ‘forced labour’, the anti-trafficking transnational legal order itself reinforces, rather than diffuses cultures of sex work exceptionalism. The growing international sex workers’ movement has offered resistance, yet a closer look at the movement and the widespread support that it has garnered for decriminalisation from international organisations, while valuable, helps reveal the greatest cost yet of anti-trafficking discourse, namely, the inability of the sex workers’ movement to produce a sophisticated theory of regulation to reduce levels of exploitation within sex work, one which is commensurate with the informality and heterogeneity of sex markets the world over. Finally, to the extent that neoabolitionist projects derive legitimacy from interventions abroad, especially in the global South, I chronicle the edifice on which it rests in one such context, namely India, to demonstrate how countries in the global South are not merely conduits for the global North’s preoccupation with moral gentrification through neo-abolitionism, but rather, that the circuits of global governmentality while influential, are highly contingent, thus producing opportunities for creative forms of mobilisation by sex workers. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)