This essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into pandemicariat. To meet (...) our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like biopolitics, anatomo-politics, governmentality etc— and ideas like transmuted biosociality, truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat etc. Current conditions of truncated sociality render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more synthetic biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the pandemicariat against heavy odds. (shrink)

When Putnam wrote Reason, Truth and History, he thought that whatever the truth was, it could not entirely outrun justification. He moved away from this epistemic conception of truth—of truth as idealized rational acceptability—and his later view appears to recognize the fact that there are truths that may well be recognition transcendent. Wright (J Philos 97(6):335–364, 2000) has correctly observed that this change in Putnam’s views raises the question of how his current natural realism is different from metaphysical realism, a (...) view that Putnam has always been at pains to distance himself from. After all, metaphysical realism is the admission of the fact that truths can be recognition transcendent. In this paper, I will reflect on the distinction between metaphysical realism and natural realism, hoping to lay out certain aspects of Putnam’s later views on truth which underwrite this crucial distinction. (shrink)

This article introduces a dilemma regarding conceptual schemes and suggests a solution. The dilemma is about whether there are conceptual schemes or not. There are good reasons for maintaining either position. There must be conceptual schemes because theory is underdetermined by evidence. And there cannot be conceptual schemes because Davidson has given an almost unassailable argument against it. I resolve the dilemma by arguing that Davidson’s argument is based on a false dilemma generated by too strong a principle of charity. (...) This makes space for conceptual schemes without sacrificing the intelligibility of any. (shrink)

Interpretation of Hetvābhāsasāmānyanirukti of Gaṅgeśa, 13th cent., treatise on Nyaya philosophy; based on other classical commentaries.

ch. 1. Istorii︠a︡ sot︠s︡iologicheskikh ucheniĭ -- ch. 2. Nauchnai︠a︡ teorii︠a︡ obshchestva.

This paper brings together the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston in speech-act theory with the aim of providing a deeper understanding of the nature of divine speaking through the medium of Scripture. Despite the fecundity of Wolterstorff's seminal work on the philosophical theology of Scripture, aspects of his speech-act centric account are underdeveloped and would benefit from the contributions of William Alston. In particular, his account of divine speech-acts could be fruitfully expanded by incorporating the concept of ‘taking (...) responsibility’ that is central to Alston's analysis of the nature of illocutionary acts. This would elucidate both the way in which readers of Scripture encounter divine practical authority in the reading process and the nature of the response of faith that is demanded of them. (shrink)

Several recent papers dealing with Plato's position on the imperfection of the phenomenal world draw heavily on the differences between two kinds of predicates in order to show the following: In the middle dialogues, Plato posits Forms only as referents of what the writers call incomplete predicates. He does not posit Forms as referents for complete predicates. When interpreters ignore the differences between these kinds of predicates, they ascribe too radical a view regarding the imperfection of the phenomenal world to (...) the middle dialogues. The ontology of these dialogues includes sensible particulars which retain their identity over time even though they are continually changing in some respect or other. (shrink)

While Weber’s distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests is one of the most enduring aspects of his theoretical legacy, it has been subjected to little critical commentary. In this article, we revisit the theoretical legacy of interest-based explanation in social theory, with an eye to clarifying Weber’s place in this tradition. We then reconsider extant critical commentary on the ideal/material interest distinction, noting the primarily Parsonian rendering of Weber and the unproductive allegiance to ‘generic need’ readings of Weber’s action theory. (...) We reconstruct the basis of the ideal/material interest distinction in the work of Rudolph von Ihering and provide a sounder basis for its analytic role in Weber’s ‘grand’ project. (shrink)

A brief presentation of the major conclusions contained in the recently published monograph entitled "The Ascent to Law: Searches and Solutions," written over a period of many years. Chapter headings are: The law - an objective reality. The dogma of the law. The drama of scholarship. Searching. "The entire" substance of the law. Juridical constructs. The logic of laws. The secret of the law. Law - the highest purpose. Law in the life and fate of mankind.

The purpose of the present study was to address the shortcomings of Cronbach’s alpha concerning the semantic overlap between items. Using an example from a motivational measure, the correction of Cronbach’s alpha was applied by partialing out the effects due to conceptual overlap. The significance of Cronbach’s alpha was tested using simulated random data derived from the measure and by estimating the confidence intervals with known and unknown distributions. The results indicated that the uncorrected conceptual overlap coefficient alpha was equal (...) to 0.89 and 0.66 following the correction. After simulating the corrected statistical results, the distribution of alpha with random numbers had an estimate of 95%, equal to 0.41. The lower bound of the corrected alpha distribution was equal to 0.41, suggesting that the corrected alpha could easily belong to the distribution of alpha developed from simulated random numbers. Thus, the semantic overlap between items on a measure represents a significant threat to the validity of the alpha coefficient. (shrink)

Papers delivered at the joint meeting of the Hegel Society of America and the Hegel Society of Great Britain held at Merton College, Oxford, Sept. 1-4, 1981, to mark the 150th anniversary of Hegel's death. Includes bibliographical references and index.

This paper aims to introduce a robust framework for forecasting demand, including data preprocessing, data transformation and standardization, feature selection, cross-validation, and regression ensemble framework. Bagging ), boosting and extreme gradient boosting regression ), and stacking are employed as ensemble models. Different machine learning approaches, including support vector regression, extreme learning machine, and multilayer perceptron neural network, are adopted as reference models. In order to maximize the determination coefficient value and reduce the root mean square error, hyperparameters are set using (...) the grid search method. Using a steel industry dataset, all tests are carried out under identical experimental conditions. In this context, STACK1 and STACK2 models provided better performance than other models. The highest accuracies of R2 of 0.97 and 0.97 are obtained using STACK1 and STACK2, respectively. Moreover, the rank according to performances is STACK1, STACK2, XGBR, GBR, RFR, MLP, ELM, and SVR. As it improves the performance of models and reduces the risk of decision-making, the ensemble method can be used to forecast the demand in a steel industry one month ahead. (shrink)

Collingwood’s “Libellus de Generatione: An Essay in Absolute Empiricism” was a tract of strenuous philosophical revisionism; never published, perhaps unpublishable, supposedly destroyed, it survived. He begins by stressing his obligations to David Hume; he offers his thematic: “absolute denial of any such concept as substance and the resolution of all reality into the reality of experience.” “The reality of mind is the process of its experience, its life, and nothing else”. Or, “the mind is a mirror... whose being is solely (...) the activity of reflecting”; it has no “substance of its own of which this activity is only a reflection”. Collingwood’s entire career as student and teacher... (shrink)

Hegel’s idealism is generally perceived as a system of rational sublation (Aufhebung) of all empirical contingencies: nothing resists notional mediation which, in a movement of negation of negation, establishes a rational totality. Already Schelling opposed to this complete sublation an “indivisible remainder” of empirical contingency. However, a close reading of Hegel makes it clear that the concluding moment of a dialectical movement of sublation is an empirical remainder which totalizes it, like the body of Christ in Christianity. And the same (...) goes for the process of “negation of negation”: it concludes with a failure of negation, and its ultimate form is a failed suicide where the subject survives as a living dead. Such a reading of Hegel makes him a thinker of our time which is the time of a failed negation: most of us live as survivors of our death, with life dragging on in depressive apathy. (shrink)

Environmentalist philosophers often paint a holistic picture, stressing such things as the continuity of humanity with wider nature and our membership of the 'natural community' . The implication seems to be that a non-anthropocentric philosophy requires that we strongly identify ourselves with nature and therefore that we downplay any human/non-human distinction. An alternative view, I think more interesting and plausible, stresses the distinction between humanity and a nature valued precisely for its otherness. In this article I discuss some of its (...) main elements, and some of the difficulties involved with keeping nature's otherness in focus. Firstly (in sections 1-5), I try to clarify what I take to be the otherness-based position by distinguishing it from the apparently similar views of John Passmore, Robert Elliott and Keekok Lee, and some opposed holistic views, especially of J. Baird Callicott. Then, in the second half of the article (sections 6-7), I argue that if nature is valued in virtue of its otherness, this value is best thought of as an extrinsic, final and objective good, where 'objectivity' is a 'method of understanding', in Thomas Nagel's sense. Although I give some reasons for preferring an otherness account to certain alternative positions, I make no overall attempt to 'prove' that nature is valuable for its otherness. My aim is to show that, if it is, then this seems the best way to understand that value. (shrink)

Developing an intellectualist account of skill, Stanley and Williamson define skill as a kind of disposition to action-guiding knowledge. The present paper challenges their definition of skill. While we don’t dispute that skill may consist of a cognitive, a dispositional, and an action-guiding component, we argue that Stanley and Williamson’s account of each component is problematic. In the first section, we argue, against Stanley and Williamson, that the cognitive component of skill is not a case of propositional knowledge-wh, which is (...) typically indexical. In the second section, we seek to show that Stanley and Williamson face difficulties in arguing for a generic claim about skill as a kind of disposition, and they fail to defend intellectualism about skill based on the dispositional account. In the third section we argue that Stanley and Williamson need a more detailed account of the action-guiding aspect of skill to avoid several difficulties, including a threat of a regress. We close with some lessons for the debate over intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about skill. (shrink)