Niranjan Ramakrishnan examines the surprising extent to which Gandhi's writings still provide insight into current global tensions and the assumptions that drive them. This book explores how ideas Gandhi expressed over a century ago can be applied today to issues from terrorism to the environment, globalization to the 'Clash of Civilizations.' In particular it looks at Gandhi's emphasis on the small, the local, and the human – an emphasis that today begins to appear practical, attractive, and even inescapable. Written (...) in an accessible style invoking examples from everyday happenings familiar to all, this concise volume reintroduces Gandhi to today's audiences in relevant terms. (shrink)

Research on attention has been closely linked with possible advances in the study of consciousness. Various theories and models have been proposed for attention in the past 50 years. Behavioural, computational, and neuroscientfic approaches have been successful in improving our understanding of attentional processes. Given the current status of attention research, what can we say about the relationship between attention and consciousness? This paper discusses the possible relationships between attention and consciousness. Findings from cognitive science and neuroscience relevant to the (...) elucidation of this relationship are discussed. Recent findings from phenomena that have a bearing on this relationship such as inattentional amnesia, change blindness, attentional blink, perceptual stabilization, and afterimages are described. The implications of the results of these phenomena for attention and awareness are also discussed. It is proposed that top-down attention is not a unitary phenomena and such a characterization may provide a way to interpret some of the results from these findings. (shrink)

The role of various organizational pressures in influencing performance of firms has been an interesting research topic in a variety of fields and has received the attention of researchers working in the field of environmental strategy. Although there are previous studies that have looked at the influence of various pressures in influencing firms’ environmental strategies, our study provides a more holistic analysis considering a variety of such pressures in a single framework. We discuss a research study to analyze how pressures (...) from internal and external stakeholders of a firm, economic pressures, environmental regulations, and pressures of environmental compliance have affected environmental performance of firms using data collected from manufacturing firms in the United Kingdom. We have found that internal stakeholders provide the greatest impact in shaping environmental performance of firms, closely followed by economic pressures, environmental regulations, and external stakeholders in that order. Fears of penalties due to environmental compliance have the least impact, although this pressure also has a positive and significant impact on environmental performance. (shrink)

Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter (...) begins with a personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

What ought one to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement? Faced with this question, one naturally hopes for an answer that is principled, general, and intuitively satisfying. We want to argue that this is a vain hope. Our claim is that a satisfying answer will prove elusive because of non-transparency: that there is no condition such that we are always in a position to know whether it obtains. When we take seriously that there is nothing, including our own (...) minds, to which we have assured access, the familiar project of formulating epistemic norms is destabilized. In this paper, we will show how this plays out in the special case of disagreement. But we believe that a larger lesson can ultimately be extracted from our discussion: namely, that non-transparency threatens our hope for fully satisfying epistemic norms in general. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work - in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost (...) no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book 'Reasons and Persons' (1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

Many targets of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway are regulated by TCF transcription factors, which play important roles in animal development, stem cell biology, and oncogenesis. TCFs can regulate Wnt targets through a “transcriptional switch,” repressing gene expression in unstimulated cells and promoting transcription upon Wnt signaling. However, it is not clear whether this switch mechanism is a general feature of Wnt gene regulation or limited to a subset of Wnt targets. Co-repressors of the TLE family are known to contribute to (...) the repression of Wnt targets in the absence of signaling, but how they are inactivated or displaced by Wnt signaling is poorly understood. In this mini-review, we discuss several recent reports that address the prevalence and molecular mechanisms of the Wnt transcription switch, including the finding of Wnt-dependent ubiquitination/inactivation of TLEs. Together, these findings highlight the growing complexity of the regulation of gene expression by the Wnt pathway. Wnt targets are regulated by a “switch” where TLE co-repressors are displaced from TCFs by β-catenin, leading to activation of transcription. Recent reports challenge this view and suggest that additional processes, including exchange of specific TCF proteins and Wnt-dependent ubiquitination of TLEs, play important roles in the Wnt transcriptional switch. (shrink)

This volume, an important contribution to dialogic and Bakhtin studies, shows the natural fit between Bakhtin’s ideas and the pluralistic culture of India to a global academic audience. It is premised on the fact that long before principles of dialogism took shape in the Western world, these ideas, though not labelled as such, were an integral part of intellectual histories in India. Bakhtin’s ideas and intellectual traditions of India stand under the same banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages (...) and social speech types and, therefore, the affinity between the thinker and the culture seems natural. Rather than being a mechanical import of Bakhtin’s ideas, it is an occasion to reclaim, reactivate and reenergize inherent dialogicality in the Indian cultural, historical and philosophical histories. Bakhtin is not an incidental figure, for he offers precise analytical tools to make sense of the incredibly complex differences at every level in the cultural life of India. Indian heterodoxy lends well to a Bakhtinian reading and analysis and the papers herein attest to this. The papers range from how ideas from Indo-European philology reached Bakhtin through a circuitous route, to responses to Bakhtin’s thought on the carnival from the philosophical perspectives of Abhinavagupta, to a Bakhtinian reading of literary texts from India. The volume also includes an essay on ‘translation as dialogue’ – an issue central to multilingual cultures – and on inherent dialogicality in the long intellectual traditions in India. (shrink)

A cohesive power of a structure is an effective analog of the classical ultrapower of a structure. We start with a computable structure, and consider its effective power over a cohesive set of natural numbers. A cohesive set is an infinite set of natural numbers that is indecomposable with respect to computably enumerable sets. It plays the role of an ultrafilter, and the elements of a cohesive power are the equivalence classes of certain partial computable functions determined by the cohesive (...) set. Thus, unlike many classical ultrapowers, a cohesive power is a countable structure. In this paper we focus on cohesive powers of graphs, equivalence structures, and computable structures with a single unary function satisfying various properties, which can also be viewed as directed graphs. For these computable structures, we investigate the isomorphism types of their cohesive powers, as well as the properties of cohesive powers when they are not isomorphic to the original structure. (shrink)

Current EEG research emphasizes gamma band coherence as a signature of functional integration, that is, the solution to the binding problem. We note that spatial patterns of coherent neural activity are also observed at other EEG frequencies. If these oscillations reflect Nunez's resonant modes, they offer a solution to the binding problem that emerges naturally from the architecture of cortical connections.

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

We show, for various classes of totally ordered structures, including o‐minimal and weakly o‐minimal structures, that every definable partial order on a subset of extends definably in to a total order. This extends the result proved in for and o‐minimal.

Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating sense...

To understand the variations in the financial characteristics, we examine the dynamical behaviors by considering the chaotic financial model with external force. First, the dynamical characteristics are analyzed by introducing the external driven force in the price index with commodity demand. We discover that the presence of an external force causes the alternate occurrence of oscillatory and steady states as a function of time. Interestingly, we find the existence of bifurcation delay during the transition from oscillatory to steady state or (...) vice versa. Bifurcation delay is a phenomenon in which the bifurcation does not occur at the actual bifurcation point but rather at a later time, which is referred to as bifurcation delay. To confirm the delay in bifurcation, we estimate the actual bifurcation point and compare it to the observed bifurcation transition. Furthermore, to understand the variations in the bifurcation delay, we estimate the delay time between each consecutive cycle and find random fluctuations in the BD. Following that, the BD is virtualized via a transformed phase portrait. In addition, we show decreasing the value of average BD while increasing the frequency of external forcing. Second, the presence of BD is explored by incorporating external forces into the investment demand with unit investment cost. We discover the existence of a similar phenomenon with a constant bifurcation delay. (shrink)

A proper elementary extension of a model is called small if it realizes no new types over any finite set in the base model. We answer a question of Marker, and show that it is possible to have an o-minimal structure with a maximal small extension. Our construction yields such a structure for any cardinality. We show that in some cases, notably when the base structure is countable, the maximal small extension has maximal possible cardinality.

Dynamical analysis, chaos suppression and electronic implementation of the synchronous reluctance motor without external inputs are investigated in this paper. The different dynamical behaviors found in the SynRM without external inputs are illustrated in the two parameters largest Lyapunov exponent diagrams, one parameter bifurcation diagram, and phase portraits. The three single controllers are designed to suppress the chaotic behaviors found in SynRM without external inputs. The three proposed single controllers are simple and easy to implement. Numerical simulation results show that (...) the three proposed single controllers are effective. Finally, the dynamical behaviors found in the SynRM without external inputs and the physical feasibility of the three proposed single controllers are validated through circuit implementation on OrCAD-PSpice software. (shrink)

We prove that a function definable with parameters in an o-minimal structure is bounded away from ∞ as its argument goes to ∞ by a function definable without parameters, and that this new function can be chosen independently of the parameters in the original function. This generalizes a result in [1]. Moreover, this remains true if the argument is taken to approach any element of the structure , and the function has limit any element of the structure.

The nature of the relationship between environmental performance and firm performance of corporations is a long standing and contentious issue in the literature. This study is intended to advance this debate by arguing for the existence of curvilinear relationship and empirically testing the same using survey data on UK manufacturing firms. FP is captured in terms of growth in sales and market share. Our results show evidence for a quadratic relationship—as firms improve their EP, they seem to achieve much higher (...) levels of FP. These results are consistent with the resource-based view of a firm; as firms engage in EP activities, they are able to gain inimitable knowledge that helps in further learning to further improve performance. Based on our results, we suggest that new studies focus on strategies to extend the period of increasing returns and maximizing the benefits of the positive association between EP and FP. (shrink)

We examined proactive and reactive control effects in the context of task-relevant happy, sad, and angry facial expressions on a face-word Stroop task. Participants identified the emotion expressed by a face that contained a congruent or incongruent emotional word. Proactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of previous trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Reactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of current (...) trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Previous trial negative emotions exert greater influence on proactive control than the positive emotion. Sad faces in the previous trial resulted in greater reduction in the Stroop interference for happy faces in the current trial. However, current trial angry faces showed stronger adaptation effects compared to happy faces. Thus, both proactive and reactive control mechanisms are dependent on emotional valence of task-relevant stimuli. (shrink)