There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample to causal accounts, we argue that there are no causal factors at play in answering questions (i) and (ii). Causality enters only in connection with action.

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, one of the principal Upaniṣads, we find a venerable and famous story where the god Prajāpati separately instructs three groups of people (gods, humans, and demons) simply by uttering the syllable “Da.” In this paper, our concern is not with ethics but theories of meaning and interpretation: How can all divergent interpretations of a single expression be correct, and, indeed, endorsed by the speaker? As an exercise in cross-cultural philosophical reflection, we consider some of the leading (...) modern theories of meaning—those of Grice, Quine, and Davidson—in order to see if the Upaniṣadic story receives a natural home in any of them. We conclude that the story is best understood through Grice’s theory of meaning rather than Quine’s or Davidson’s. (shrink)

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s Paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP?, and (iii) What should be done about SP? By developing a logic-based account of SP, it is argued that (i) and (ii) must be divorced from (iii). This account shows that (i) and (ii) have nothing to do with causality, which plays a role only in addressing (iii). A counterexample is also presented against the causal account. Finally, the causal and logic-based (...) approaches are compared by means of an experiment to show that SP is not basically causal. (shrink)

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death. Ambedkar diagnoses...

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper attempts a careful reading of chapter I of Division Two, particularly section 53, on death in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Our aim is to deconstruct some of Heidegger’s assumptions while imagining the margins of his text that could warrant a comparison and contrast with the biblical theological material of ….

The social sciences are at a remarkable confluence of events. Advances in computing have made it feasible to analyze data at the scale of the population of the world. How can we combine the depth of inquiry in the social sciences with the scale and robustness of statistics and computer science? Can we decompose complex questions in the social sciences into simpler, more robustly testable hypotheses? We discuss these questions and the role of machine learning in the social sciences.

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. ….

This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. The work is entirely philosophical in its intent and does not aspire to defend a faith-perspective. The horizon for this exposition follows the spirit of Ambedkar’s critique of Brahmanic (...) superiority inherent in this entire system of religious thought: we must expose what lies in the heart of modern Hinduism to reveal its inner-contradictory entanglements, which are not exactly innocuous. A phenomenological-deconstructive inspiration motivates our own critical theoretical-philosophical conceptualizations beyond Ambedkar’s basic attestation to liberate India from Hinduism. The enterprise derives from a speculative appropriation and extension of the depths of (CC.) ‘Religion,’ the penultimate chapter of Hegel’s indomitable Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The aim of the paper is to advance new philosophical theses in an unrelenting metaphysical critique of Hinduism– beyond Ambedkar’s writings–but also in a manner that is irreducible to the Western philosophical cosmos within which the nineteenth-century Hegel inhabited. The paper argues that the internal contradictions and aporias of mortality, immortality, self, bodyhood, time, and eternity in the Hindu Upanishads can be contrasted with Hegel’s speculative Western-Christological propositions to expose a greater metaphysical complexity that escapes Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions alike. Therefore, the paper falls within the scope of comparative philosophies of religion. (shrink)

This paper will pose the question of the future minoritization of the white, gentile, Christian European and EuroAmerican identity, which has dominated world history from colonization through the post-Cold War historical present. The question is not how this is coming to an end in the near future as empirical fact and in what manner, but an attempt to imagine another future, another identity than what has been proscribed in the past. In order to move into this alterity, we will engage (...) in a critical reading of Derrida’s essay “Abraham, The Other,” in the volume titled emJudeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida./em By examining the philosophical complexity of Derrida’s quasi-autobiographical reflection on his Jewish identity, we can prepare the conditions for how the future gentile white European identity could look when not grounded in its self-edifying monotheism of a white, Christiandominated political and cultural state. The relation between the future diversification of European identity is not just a matter of postcolonial immigration and multiculturalism. It has to do with the ontological problem of how to understand the origin and telos of gentile white European identity in its Christian heritage and metaphysics (from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) when simple notions of origin and end are erased. This brings in the philosophical problem of historical time, movement, and epochal shifts between today’s Europe and another Europe, today’s future and what is other to that. Derrida’s text provides a guide into what is other to monotheism, unicity, oneness, and—by extension, we will argue—gentile whiteness, Christianness too, which is not simply the opposite of polytheism and today’s racial diversity, i.e., non-white and non-western Christian minorities in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the “west” in general. Having said that, this does have obvious implications regarding justice and equality as European and “western” societies in general diversify. Linking the most archaic, or the farthest in distance beyond the mythic origin of Abraham and therefore of Jewish biblical-historical identity, raises the prospects of “another” Abraham. This Other is not rooted in historical memory. This paper argues that Derrida’s reflections will help us understand an alternative future whose metaphysics is yet to be written, one that is not simply a repetition of the contents of the history of (gentile) religion and philosophy in Europe and its linear, successive, chronological historical time-frame, i.e., the Gregorian calendar./p. (shrink)

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper will articulate the conditions of thinking about the transition of Division II in Heidegger’s Being and Time in order to imagine the architecture of the missing Division III, which never appeared in the published Part I of Being and Time. The paper explores questions of temporality, historical temporality, and...

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper examines Ambedkar’s critical view of certain distortions, contradictions, and instabilities in democratic norms, constitutional validity, and citizens’ rights in India’s secular, constitutional, legal, pluralistic democracy. Through a strident deconstruction utilizing Hegelian resources, the paper exposes the contortions and contradictions underpinning Hindu metaphysics in some of its most abstract texts, namely...

This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death. Ambedkar diagnoses that Gandhi’s act of self-sacrifice conceals a type of subtle coercion of certain political decisions during India’s independent movement from British colonialism. In order to unpack philosophical assumptions in (...) Ambedkar’s statement, this paper examines Derrida’s startlingly original insights into animality, law, and sovereignty in confronting two of the Western tradition’s giants in political philosophy, namely Hobbes and Schmitt. My intuition is that Derridean deconstruction can be expanded further by deploying certain Hegelian resources. My ultimate aim is to show how Western notions of man, soul, God, the sovereign, and the state begin to dissolve when examining the Hindu metaphysical cosmology of the caste system. My thesis and concluding reflections argue that only by destroying that cosmological system of politico-metaphysical inequality can a true democratic notion of the sovereign state emerge in the Indian context. (shrink)

India dropped its target of 500 GW of renewable energy capacity fossil fuel sources by 2030. Its responsibilities the United Nations Framework Convention Climate Change [UNFCCC],and reducing radiations by one billion tonnes by the end of the decade at the COP26 conference, held in Glasgow in November 2022. Researchers are continually searching for inexhaustible and reasonable energy sources. Solar energy is one of the greenest sources of energy and is also one of the cleanest. The most important factor in using (...) solar energy is the location of the solar power plant. The main objective of this study is to find the best location for a new solar power plant in a specific region called Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh in India. Here we offer an extension of ELECTRE III method as two-phase Pythagorean neutrosophic elimination and choice translating reality PN-ELECTRE-III) method to adapt with fuzzy, ambiguous, unsure, and indeterminate criteria. The Pythagorean neutrosophic numbers [PNNs] used by the group decision support system of PN-ELECTRE III to measure performance of the alternatives. The options are entirely outclassed in the subsequent stage in view of the past stage's evaluations of them. By defining PNN we describe the technique of indifference threshold functions, preference treshold and veto threshold functions, which provide a more stable basis to drop outranking relations. By calculating the concordance credibility, discordance credibility and net credibility degrees of each alternative, the ranking module of the PN-ELECTRE III approach is made simpler. In order to confirm the applicability of the strategy suggested in this paper, the location selection problem for solar plants is finaly solved. (shrink)

In this study, we develop a new theoretical framework of Coping Intelligence which examines relationships between coping strategies and organizational commitment among boundary spanning employees. We collected data from 452 boundary spanning salespeople using multiple sources. Results demonstrate that a formative model of Coping Intelligence is superior to a reflective model and that problem-focused coping contributes to CI which, in turn, is related to affective and normative commitment. Further, our more parsimonious formative model illustrates that positive problem-focused coping and negative (...) emotion-focused coping contribute to both affective and normative commitment. After controlling for gender and salespeople’s commission in separate analyses, results remain significant. We provide additional insights: Females are likely to use emotion-focused coping than males, but gender is not related to organizational commitment. Salespeople’s commission is positively related to both affective and normative commitment but unrelated to coping strategies. We shed new lights on boundary spanning employees’ Coping Intelligence and organizational commitment and offer theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to coping strategies and business ethics. (shrink)

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. (...) By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference. (shrink)

Considerations of justice and concern for well-being support conducting mental health research and addressing ethical concerns specific to mental health research are critical. We discuss these concerns, provide recommendations to enable the ethical conduct of mental health research, and argue that participants’ interests should be given primary weight in resolving apparent dilemmas. We also comment on provisions of two legislative actions in India relevant to mental health research: Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2016 and the Mental Health Care Act (...) 2017. Both conform to the 2006 United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities of which India is a signatory. Both provide protections and enumerate rights relevant to people with mental health conditions but with differing focus. The commonalities and differences between the three are discussed in the background of international literature on research in mental health conditions. Studies involving deception and future directions for ethical requirements regarding genetic research are discussed. (shrink)

This essay will attempt a line-by-line reading of Lacan’s famous “The Mirror Image as Formative I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949) published in the collected volume of essays, Ecrits (1966). The article attempts to show that Lacan’s essay opens a space of primordiality, whereby we can revisit Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity and the Cogito, terms that originate with Descartes and evolves to Kant’s Critiques of dogmatic metaphysics, particularly in Heidegger’s Being and Time. These are steps Heidegger takes to (...) set up his attempted critique of Hegel, who in turn tries to surpass the history of philosophy rooted in modern subjectivity, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). However, missing in Lacan’s essay and what remains unarticulated in Heidegger’s Being and Time is the following: relation between time, movement, and the space of primordiality where all notions of factical existence dissolve. Being born in time, developing in time, being in or at time, and being-towards-death, as Heidegger struggles to deconstruct – by way of his unique appropriation of phenomenology in Being and Time – can be questioned. Indeed, what Heidegger fails to develop, and he admits it explicitly, is the other side of his ‘one-sided’ treatment in the investigation: he only analyzed death as a possibility of Dasein’s greatest possibility to ‘be-Whole’ authentically (1962, 277) and completely neglected ‘being-towards-birth’ as the ‘other end’ of Dasein’s movement (1962, 425). We will argue that one is never born as a biological fact of existence, a social construction assigned at physical birth, like a gender or sex, or any religious notions of a created being from God the Creator, or any notions of rebirth, reincarnation, or resurrection, namely from religions in the West, like Roman Catholic Christianity, and the East, like Hinduism. Rather, ‘being-towards-birth’ in relation to the linear time of flowing now-points (past as no longer now, present as now, future as yet to be now), or ‘being-within-time,’ (Heidegger 1962, 457) is temporalized other than a dateable origin in spatialized time or history. (shrink)

We continue the investigation of Gregory trees and the Cantor Tree Property carried out by Hart and Kunen. We produce models of MA with the Continuum arbitrarily large in which there are Gregory trees, and in which there are no Gregory trees.

This paper attempts a careful reading of chapter I of Division Two, particularly section 53, on death in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our aim is to deconstruct some of Heidegger’s assumptions while imagining the margins of his text that could warrant a comparison and contrast with the biblical theological material of the New Testament. In parallel by reading the Synoptic Gospel of Mark on Jesus’s agony in the garden prior to his arrest, trial, death, and resurrection, we can initiate (...) a series of comparisons and contrasts. For Heidegger, there is no conception or idea beyond death, and yet death itself as a possibility, even as the greatest possibility to be, is not like any other point in time that a human being can experience, grasp, remember, or anticipate while they are alive. It is not the witnessing of the medically certified death of another person or animal. Out of this paradox, we will argue for a greater philosophical degree of complexity that Jesus the human being experiences when it comes to the possibility of death and the impossibility to surmount it. In the same token we cannot exclude the theological doctrine of the single hypostatic substance (as two natures) of the historically finite person Jesus as human flesh and divine transcendence. So philosophically speaking, his death is unique even though its event as physical expiration on the Cross is like any other human being. However, the physical death of the human called Jesus does not answer the question of the meaning of death in the split-natured unified hypostatic substance of Christ, the Second Person of the Triune Christian God, which includes the First Person of the Father and the Third Person of the Holy Spirit. By tracing a series of complicated philosophical relations, we hope to contribute to the fields of philosophical theology, albeit a heterodox one, and the philosophy of religion while attending to the inherent secular limits that Heidegger’s philosophy requires in so far as he imagines his project as ‘ontological,’ and not ‘theological’ or ‘historical.’ We conclude with certain philosophical speculations to what is other to both Heidegger’s ontology and mainstream Christian theology. (shrink)

This work is a two-division study of twentieth century philosophies of history in Europe. Fields engaged in the study are transcendental philosophy, speculative metaphysics, theology, historiographical theory, and intellectual history. The main question concerns the historical finitude of History and its temporal horizon. The work explores the unsolved consequences of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time in twentieth-century German and French philosophies of History.

This article will offer a close reading of sections 74 and 75 of “Chapter V: Temporality and Historicality” of Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our goal is to expand on a speculative metaphysical reconstruction of Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, when Jesus is finished speaking to the disciples and is addressing the Father alone. This is right before his Passion, namely the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and ultimate Resurrection. The work is not situated in either abstract (...) systematic or biblical theology, which seeks to defend faith, particularly using modern continental philosophical resources, such as the early Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Then again, it is not a philosophy of religion either, in the sense that it is not concerned with investigating the nature or essence of religion. Rather, it is trying to move within Being and Time to construct anew its ‘missing Division Three’ by creating new terms and distinctions beyond what is offered in the first Two Divisions. Our hypothesis is this: the supersession of Being and Time requires an imaginative metaphysical expansion of hidden secrets buried in the Gospel regarding a strange double temporalization in the discourse of Jesus to his Father. These two temporal planes are phenomenologically irreducible to either the linear sequence of events of his life as narrated in the four Gospels; or the history of theological attempts, particularly twentieth-century theological giants (Barth, Tillich, Rahner, Moltmann, Pannenberg), to think about the time-eternity-history relation with regard to the Kairos (through the Incarnation of the Son) at the fulfilled time and the Parousia, namely the Second Coming at the eschatological end of time. The article concludes with certain criteria regarding judgements on the undecidability of theism vs. atheism when attempting to go beyond Heidegger’s Being and Time. The ontological consequences, and therefore meaning of such an undertaking at a step beyond Being and Time, remain indiscernible for specific reasons. (shrink)

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper excavates certain impulses that are buried in Pierre Klossowski’s 1968 edition of his original 1947 work, Sade My Neighbor. We argue that the self-suffocating nature of our historical present reveals the problem of an epochal threshold: in which twenty-first century democracy itself is threatened with death and violence in delusional ….

This first article is part of a two-article series labeled Parts I and II. In Part I, we will attempt a close reading of Division Two of Heidegger’s greatest work, Being and Time (1927). We will execute a granular analysis of a few lines and phrases in section 65 in Chapter III, section 69 in Chapter IV, and sections 72 and 74 in Chapter V; those sections cover ‘primordial ecstatic, finite, unified, authentic temporality’ (Heidegger 1962, 380) and the ‘equiprimordiality of (...) the unity of the ecstases’ (Heidegger 1962, 378), ‘the whitherings and horizontal schemas,’ (Heidegger 1962, 416), and the ontological distinction of movement/Bewegtheit and the Western metaphysical tradition on spatialized motion/Bewegung (Heidegger 1962, 427) respectively. Attempting to show the connectedness of these problems in a manner different from Being and Time, itself, requires a bracketing of how we renew our engagement with Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel even after Heidegger’s attempted ‘destruction’ (Heidegger 1962, 41) of the ontological and metaphysical traditions of the West. We want to set up the possibility of reengaging Heidegger on a cryptic moment in the 1962 English translators’ footnote on the ‘swoon’ and ‘clairvoyance’ (Heidegger 1962, 436) that immediately precedes Heidegger’s great articulation of the ‘moment of vision for its time’ and the possibility of an ‘authentic understanding of fate, which is historicality’ (Heidegger 1962, 437). In Part I, we will resume the possibility of an abstract metaphysical undertaking about a four-dimensional temporality that Heidegger could not and did not articulate in Being and Time. This first article constitutes Part I, which then sets up Part II to appear in a second article. In the second article, we will attempt a direct appropriation of Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1813-1816), particularly on his enigmatic introduction of the term ‘quadruplicity’ (Hegel 2010, 746), which comes at the very end of his greatest and most complex work. (shrink)

This work is a two-division study of twentieth century philosophies of history in Europe. Fields engaged in the study are transcendental philosophy, speculative metaphysics, theology, historiographical theory, and intellectual history. The main question concerns the historical finitude of History and its temporal horizon. The work explores the unsolved consequences of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time in twentieth-century German and French philosophies of History.

This paper will articulate the conditions of thinking about the transition of Division II in Heidegger’s Being and Time in order to imagine the architecture of the missing Division III, which never appeared in the published Part I of Being and Time (1927). The paper explores questions of temporality, historical temporality, and Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel at the end of Being and Time while enlisting the resources of his very late lecture of 1962 – “On Time and Being” – to (...) lay down the conditions of possibility to reconstruct the missing Division III. The paper argues that this feat has yet to be adequately accomplished given 90 years that have elapsed since the publication of Being and Time. (shrink)