In his award-winning book _The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development_, J. N. Mohanty charted Husserl's philosophical development from the young man's earliest studies—informed by his work as a mathematician—to the publication of his _Ideas_ in 1913. In this welcome new volume, the author takes up the final decades of Husserl's life, addressing the work of his Freiburg period, from 1916 until his death in 1938. As in his earlier work, Mohanty here offers close readings of Husserl's main texts (...) accompanied by accurate summaries, informative commentaries, and original analyses. This book, along with its companion volume, completes the most up-to-date, well-informed, and comprehensive account ever written on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy and its development. (shrink)

Professor Lewis and I have some important differences of opinion regarding the identity and distinctness of conscious persons, which it will be well to try to clarify on the present occasion, first of all by enumerating a number of points on which we are, I think, in agreement. Both of us believe in the existence of individual persons, each of whom can be said to live in a ‘world’ of his own intentional objectivity, a world ‘as it is for him’, (...) which differs in a considerable extent, both in content and emphasis, from the world as it is for anyone else. Both of us further believe that all these intentionally objective worlds for a large part coincide in content, and are in fact excerpted from a more comprehensive real world which is common to us all, and which, in addition to in some sense including all such intentionally objective worlds, also includes many real material objects which exist regardless of our intentionality, and which further includes our own material bodies, which appear in so central a manner in each of our intentionally objective worlds. Both of us believe in matter as a transcendent reality, as well as an intentional object, and are content to accept the dicta of science as to the most probable view of its structure. We are in fact quite Cartesian and Lockean in our belief in the primary and secondary qualities of matter. We believe further that our intentional subjectivity is geared causally into our material objectivity, and that the gearing takes place, in some inscrutable manner, in our nervous systems. We both also believe that our intentional subjectivity transcends bodily mechanisms and instrumentalities, and can be liberated from the latter, but that, when thus liberated, our subjectivity may still affect some sort of an intentionally objective material body such as we wear in dreams, a body in which it will manifest itself to itself and to others much as we do in our dreams and fantasies. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of my essays on philosophy of logic from a phenomenological perspective. They deal with the four kinds of logic I have been concerned with: formal logic, transcendental logic, speculative logic and hermeneutic logic. Of these, only one, the essay on Hegel, touches upon 'speculative logic', and two, those on Heidegger and Konig, are concerned with hermeneutic logic. The rest have to do with Husser! and Kant. I have not tried to show that the four logics (...) are compatible. I believe, they are--once they are given a phenomenological underpinning. The original plan of writing an Introduction in which the issues would have to be formulated, developed and brought together, was abandoned in favor of writing an Introductory Essay on the 'origin'- in the phenomenological sense -of logic. J.N.M. Philadelphia INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGIN OF LOGIC The question of the origin of logic may pertain to historical origin (When did it all begin? Who founded the science of logic?), psychological origin (When, in the course of its mental development, does the child learn logical operations?), cultural origin (What cultural - theological, metaphysical and linguisti- conditions make such a discipline as logic possible?), or transcendental constitutive origin (What sorts of acts and/or practices make logic possible?). (shrink)

The degrees of formality into which speech can be graded are in no sphere more obvious than in expressions of address and third-person reference. Methods of naming vary according to many factors: the formality of the circumstances in which naming takes place, the nature of the subject under discussion, and the ages, sex, and relative status of the speaker and addressee. Conventions of naming sometimes reflect the rigidity or otherwise of social divisions. In some societies or circles address between superior (...) and subordinate is non-reciprocal: the speaker with the greater prestige will adopt one form of address, the subordinate another. In other societies when unequals address each other both may use the same formal method of address: the difference of prestige is not explicitly acknowledged. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a characterisation of religion and the Religious Spirit, basing itself on the Platonic assumption that there are Forms, salient jewels of simplicity and affinity, to be dug out from the soil of vague experience and cut clear from the confusedly shifting patterns of usage, which will give us conceptual mastery over the changeable detail in a given sector. It will further be Platonic in that it will not seek to discount the deep (...) gulfs between the species into which religion qua genus divides itself, i.e. its theistic, polytheistic and atheistic subvarieties, taking it to be of the essence of a true genus to extend itself over mutually exclusive species, only being what it is by including in its sense the alternatives which are thus mutually exclusive. And my treatment will be Platonic, thirdly, in that it will endeavour to delimit the Religious Spirit by, on the one hand, setting it over against what it excludes, all purely this-world talk and life which is quite irreligious, and by, on the other hand, opposing it to forms of talk and life which fall short of it in various ways or which deviate from it variously, thereby likewise contributing to our understanding of what it is. The practice of Plato, which could study the deviations from his ideal city in order to confirm his notion of its structure and excellence, and which also paired every ideal pattern with its opposite— piety with impiety, justice with self-interested tyranny, etc.—is plainly one to be followed: Plato, as we know from a citation from his contemporary Hermodorus in one of the Aristotelian commentators, always set beside the ‘in itself’ of the pure Form the deviant and the wholly negative which were nonetheless part of its sense. Religion will therefore stand before us as a target that it is possible to fall short of or miss altogether as well as to hit squarely, and we shall try by a series of glancing darts to end by hitting it squarely. (shrink)

The background and purpose of this paper require some explanation. It is not the product of a New Testament scholar, able to weigh and balance theories as to date, origin and doctrinal background of the text attributed to St John, nor to assess the identification of its author with the beloved Disciple elsewhere mentioned or with the author of the Apocalypse, nor to consider his relationship to Gnostics or Stoics or Essenes or other influences in the contemporary Jewish or Christian (...) ambience. It is only the effort of one who recognizes in St John's Gospel, if read with an appropriate hermeneutic, a supreme mystico-religious document which can provide guidance at every turn of the spiritual life, but which, if read in another manner, becomes only the expression of a hard-line particularism, which is not less unacceptable in that it acclaims a particular standing in a special relation to another particular on which we all depend for our existence and for all our properties. Conceive of God, or the supreme object of worship, as a particular among particulars, and as much other than ourselves as other things and persons are other, and religious reverence becomes a repugnant form of heteronomous idolatry, wrought up, moreover, with the blind acceptance of a large number of historic and cosmic myths. But conceive of God as being something beyond category-differences, and which as much transcends particularity as it transcends any form of abstract universality, and which incorporates in strict identity all those values of Truth, Love, Beauty, Justice, etc. which are all simply universality in action, and which, moreover, as much transcends personality and personal relationships as it also may have in them its supreme expression, and religion and worship at once acquire a perfect sense and reference. (shrink)

Certain organoid subtypes are particularly sensitive. We explore whether moral intuitions about the heartbeat warrant unique moral consideration for newly advanced contracting cardiac organoids. Despite the heartbeat’s moral significance in organ procurement and abortion discussions, we argue that this significance should not translate into moral implications for cardiac organoids.

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

The article Deflating the "DBS causes personality changes" bubble, written by Frederic Gilbert, J. N. M. Viaña and C. Ineichen, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 19 June 2018 without open access.

L'interprétation de l'eschatologie paulinienne est dominée par la question de son rapport avec l'apocalyptique juive. Les points communs, soulignés par J.C. Beker à la suite de E. Käsemann, ne sont pas contestables, mais ne doivent pas occulter des différences notables, qui tiennent à la prééminence du Christ dans la vision paulinienne des événements de la fin. Ni l'attente ni le retard de la parousie ne semblent avoir eu, quoi qu'on en dise, d'influence décisive sur la pensée de l'Apôtre, mais bien (...) plutôt la réconciliation avec Dieu par la Croix et l'inauguration d'une humanité nouvelle dans la résurrection du Christ.Les lettres deutéropauliniennes ne rnodifient pas fondamentalement cette eschatologie, si ce n'est qu'elles accentuent encore l'emprise de la christologie sur la vision de la fin : à ceux qui attendent les ascensions célestes promises par la littérature apocalyptique, Paul répond qu'ils possèdent déjà leur être ressuscité avec le Christ, qui trône bien au-dessus de tous les être célestes. Ses idées sur le jugement dernier et la rétribution finale sont parfois dépendantes de celles du judaïsme, souvent imprécises et limitées, mais c'est toujours sa connaissance du Ressuscité, second Adam, qui conduit sa réflexion et l'aide à déchiffrer le destin final de l'humanité dans le Christ. The interpretation of pauline eschatology is dominated by the question of its rapport with Jewish apocalypse. The common points, underlined by J.C. Beker following E. Käsemann, cannot be contested, but should not hide the notable differences, which are based on the pre-eminence of Christ in the Pauline vision of the final events. Neither the expectation nor the delay of the Parousia does not seem to have had, despite what is said, a decisive influence on the Apostle’s thinking. He was concerned more about reconciliation with God through the cross and the inauguration of a new humanity by the resurrection of Christ.The deuteropauline letters do not fundamentally modify this eschatology, except in so far as they accentuate the dominance of Christology on the vision of the end. For those who await the celestial ascensions promised by apocalyptic literature, Paul answers that they already possess their resurrected being with Christ, who sits well above are celestial beings. These ideas on the Last Judgement and the final retribution are sometimes dependent on those of Judaism, often imprecise and limited, but it is always Paul's knowledge of the Resurrected, the second Adam, which directs his reflection and helps to decipher the final destiny of humanity in Christ. (shrink)

The text of the fourth-century veterinary writer Pelagonius, recently edited for the first time this century and greatly improved by K.-D. Fischer, poses many problems for an editor. The Latinity of Pelagonius himself in the epistles which precede various chapters is awkward and difficult to understand. Much of the rest of the work is a compilation, not all of it Pelagonius' own work, based on a variety of sources from the magical to the scientific. The work survives largely in a (...) single manuscript, codex Riccardianus 1179, a. 1485 . In this paper I pass over intractable questions of spelling and concentrate on more substantial problems of text and interpretation, some of which concern punctuation. (shrink)

According to the Hindu tradition, the origin of the various philosophical ideas that were developed in the philosophical systems lies in the Vedas, a body of texts that seem to have been composed around two thousand years Before the Common Era (BCE). While the Vedas contain a myriad of different themes, ranging from hymns for deities and rules of fire sacrifices to music and magic, there is no doubt that one finds in them an exemplary spirit of inquiry into “the (...) one being” (ekam sat) that underlies the diversity of empirical phenomena, and into the origin of all things. (“Was there being or non‐being at the beginning?”) One finds also predelineations of such concepts of ṛta (truth or moral order), karma and the afterlife, and the three qualities (or guṇas: sattva, rajas, and tamas) constituting nature (prakṛti). It is in the Upaniṣads (a group of texts composed after the Vedas and ranging from 1000 bce to the time of Gautama, the Buddha), that the thinking, while still retaining its poetic flavor, develops a more strictly philosophical character. While still concerned with many different themes belonging to cosmology (“How did the one being become many?”) and psychology (“What does the empirical person consist of?”), the Upaniṣads contain attempts to reinterpret, in symbolic terms, the elaborate Vedic sacrifices, and to defend, in many different ways, one central philosophical thesis – that is, the identity of Brahman (the highest and the greatest, the source of all things) and ātman (the self within each person). With this last identification, a giant step was taken by the authors of the Upaniṣads, a step that was decisive for the development of Indian philosophy. The Vedas had already decided, famously in the Nāsadiya Sukata, that at the beginning of things there must have been being and not non‐being (for something cannot come out of nothing); now this primeval being was said to be the same as the spirit within. The highest wisdom was intuitively realizing this identity of subject and object (tat tvarn asi). How to know it was the issue. Suggestions ranged from contemplative meditation to austere self‐mortification. The idea of yoga and a picture of the yogin make their appearance – possibly having a different origin – and blend with the central thesis of the Upaniṣads. If the reality underlying outer appearance is the universal spirit within, is then the world merely phenomenal appearance (like the magician's creation, māyā), or is the brahman‐ātman to be construed as the indwelling spirit of all things? These become the leading disputational questions amongst the commentators on the Upaniṣads, and amongst the various schools of the Vedānta philosophy. (shrink)

If the good is what people desire or strive after, the Indian thinkers very early on developed a theory of hierarchy of goods: these are artha (material wealth), kāma (pleasure), dharma (righteousness), and mokṣa (spiritual freedom). Leaving aside the question about precisely how the first two in this list have to be ranked, one might suggest that the first two are what human beings do strive after, while the last two are what they ought to strive after. Such a distinction (...) between what human beings in fact strive after and what they ought to strive after is indicated in a distinction between the śreya (morally good) and the preya (pleasant) found in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, although it may have to be conceded that the is – ought distinction did not come to the forefront of Hindu moral thinking. One may as a matter of fact construct an argument to prove that even mokṣa, the supreme value, is not a mere ought – to‐be. The argument would run as follows: we do want to get rid of pain and enjoy a state of happiness. This natural desire, by implication, may be extended to a complete freedom from pain and enjoyment of an uninterrupted state of bliss (even if no one ordinarily posits this as his or her goal). It is only on reflection, and after reaching the first two goals and finding oneself dissatisfied with them, that one self‐consciously posits the last two goals – the third to begin with and, as a result of experiencing a similar dissatisfaction once it has been reached, subsequently the fourth and highest good, which is not a mere ought‐to‐be but an ideal state of being. If the English phrase “the highest good” translates into niḥśreyasaḥ in Sanskrit, then mokṣa is that state of excellence than which there is nothing greater and which leaves, upon attainment, nothing else to be desired. (shrink)

The Ars Veterinaria of the fourth-century writer Pelagonius has hitherto been known only from the MS. Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana 1179 , a codex copied in 1485 for Politian from an early manuscript. Apart from this there have only been some palimpsest fragments from Bobbio.

Although the biographies known collectively as the Historia Augusta purport to have been written by six different biographers, it has often been thought that their similarities are so numerous that they must be the work of a single author. In this article I shall deal with a piece of linguistic evidence which supports this view. The two scholars who have treated the language of the H.A. in most detail, E. Wölfnin and E. Klebs, attempted to show that certain linguistic features (...) which are not spread evenly among the Scriptores point to multiplicity of authorship. (shrink)

It is well known that mitto comes to mean ‘put’ in late Latin and that it shows reflexes with this sense in the Romance languages . But the nature of this semantic change has not been fully explained, nor has the relationship of the word with other placing-terms in Latin. E. Löfstedt has stated simply that it ‘takes over the meaning ot ponere’.2 But as pono itself remains common in all types of Latin, the question arises whether the two words (...) did really come into conflict. It is the purpose of the first two sections of this article to show that for a considerable period pono and mitto occupied complementary places in a lexical system. This system exhibits a definite structure which remains unaltered from early Latin to at least the sixth century A.D., though its component terms undergo some changes. In section I pono and the words which in earlier Latin performed the functions later assumed by mitto will be discussed. In section I I we shall move on to mitto itself. It will be necessary to consider the nature and motivation of the transition ‘throwput’ as it appears in Latin. (shrink)

The demonstration by E. Wölfflin that between the Histories and Annals Tacitus progressed towards a more archaic and artificial style is well known. From the outset Tacitus adhered to the traditional Roman view that history should be composed in an archaic language remote from everyday usage ; but he was apparently at first not fully aware of the possibilities of the archaizing style. New archaisms and artificial usages suggested themselves as he advanced ; and others, which he had used sporadically (...) even early in the Histories, were allowed to oust ordinary alternatives completely. (shrink)

The introduction of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) in controlled donation after circulatory determination of death (cDCDD) protocols is by some regarded as controversial and ethically troublesome. One of the main concerns that opponents have about introducing NRP in cDCDD protocols is that reestablishing circulation will negate the determination of death by circulatory criteria, potentially resuscitating the donor. In this article, I argue that this is not the case. If we take a closer look at the concept of death underlying the (...) circulatory criterion for determination of death, we find that the purpose of the criterion is to show whether the organism as a whole has died. I argue that this purpose is fulfilled by the circulatory criterion in cDCDD protocols, and that applying NRP does not negate the determination of death or resuscitate the donor. (shrink)

All recent memory theories of hippocampal function have incorporated the idea that the hippocampus is required to process items only of some qualitatively specifiahle kind, and is not required to process items of some complementary set. In contrast, it is now proposed that the hippocampus is needed to process stimuli of all kinds, but only when there is a need to associate those stimuli with other events that are temporally discontiguous. In order to form or use temporally discontiguous associations, it (...) is essential to maintain some memory of the first component until the second component has occurred. When the temporal gap to he spanned is small, and the number of items to be temporarily retained is low, a limited-capacity, short-term store is sufficient to allow associations to be formed. Such a store is presumed to operate in parallel with the hippocampus in normal animals. Hippocampal damage disrupts a much higher-capacity store that has a slower decay rate, and so leaves animals with only a very limited ability to form temporally discontiguous associations. Hippocampal damage, however, is not held to affect the long-term storage of associations of any kind, if they can be formed. Analyses of both new and existing data are presented to show that by classifying tasks in terms of the need to use a temporary memory store to retain temporally discontiguous information one can cut right across existing classifications as well as achieve a better fit to the data. The hippocampus thus seems best described as a high-capacity, intermediate-term memory store. (shrink)

The paper addresses three main issues drawing on Husserl’s writings on logic. First, what gives the logical objects their objective status, given the fact that these are intimately connected with human mental processes? Second, if logical objects are objective then how is logical knowledge at all possible? The answer to this question leads to a transcendental foundation of formal logic. Third, how do the principles of logic apply to the real world? This question can be addressed by positing a formal (...) ontology. Against Russell and Whitehead, it has been pointed out that even if logical implication does not in any way depend on human mind, inference is definitely mind-dependent. But this thesis does not necessarily lead to psychologism, as has been pointed out by contemporary Indian logicians. Indian theories of inference deal with the question of truth and falsity but lack a formal ontology. Both pure logic and modern physics claim to be independent of human existence. This claim becomes evident in the conversation between Heisenberg and Tagore. Husserl had distinguished between logical grammar and logic of consequences. The notions of truth and falsity are relevant only in the context of logic of consequences. However, none of the well-known theories of truth, correspondence, coherence or pragmatic theory is free from defects. Following in the footprints of the Advaita Vedantins, it has been maintained that falsity is more fundamental than truth. In the process of cognitive history, a proposition is taken to be true, unless its falsity is proven. Hence the conclusion: since Philosophy is search for the truth, all Philosophy—infinitely—is a gradual rejection of all claims to truth and finally, destroys itself. (shrink)