Being inherently different from any other lifesaving organ transplant, uterine transplantation does not aim at saving lives but supporting the possibility to generate life. Unlike the kidneys or the liver, the uterus is not specifically a vital organ. Given the non-lifesaving nature of this procedure, questions have been raised about its feasibility. The ethical dilemma revolves around whether it is worth placing two lives at risk related to surgery and immunosuppression, amongst others, to enable a woman with absolute uterine factor (...) infertility to experience the presence of an organ enabling childbirth. In the year 2000, the first uterine transplantation, albeit unsuccessful, was performed in Saudi Arabia from where it has spread to the rest of the world including Sweden, the United States and now recently India. The procedure is, however, still in the preclinical stages and several ethical, legal, social and religious concerns are yet to be addressed before it can be integrated into the clinical setting as standard of care for women with absolute uterine factor infertility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Christian’s Appreciation of the BuddhaBonnie ThurstonEs gibt, so glaube ich, in der Tat jenes Ding nicht, das wir >Lernen< nennen.—Hermann Hesse, SiddharthaI must warn you at the beginning that what follows is an embarrassingly personal reflection—a confession even—and not a scholarly essay. I cannot be dispassionate about the Buddha, to whom in a roundabout way I owe both my status as an ordained Christian minister and perhaps the (...) greatest joy of my life, the study and practice of the Christian scripture. How? In February 1970 I was given a copy of Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, a fictionalized account of the Buddha’s life. Already an active Christian, it was this gift, received my senior year in high school, that introduced me to Buddhism and to the reality of spiritual journey and the possibility of enlightenment. While I know the Buddhist meaning of that term, it serves for Christians as well, because our God could not leave us in darkness but made light the first creature (Gen. 1:1–5) and came among us as light (John 1:1–5). 1 When in the fall of 1970 my brother traveled to Japan, the memento I requested was a small statue of the Buddha. It is beside me as I write. In 1983 when we moved to Germany, the second book I bought in German was Siddhartha; the first was the New Testament.Over the years I have had the opportunity to continue to study the life of the Buddha and the spread and development of his teachings. By the Buddha, of course, I mean Sakyamuni (“sage of the Sakyas”) Buddha (“enlightened one”), son of Suddhodana and Maya, whom they called Siddhartha (“wish fulfilled” or “goal realized”) and whom we also know as Gotama or Gautama (literally “superior cow”), whose dates are given variously as 560–480 B.C. or 460–380 B.C. 2 I am appreciative of what I have learned—applying the root meaning of that word, appretiare: “to see” or “to appraise.” The Buddha has helped me to see and to appraise or evaluate many aspects of life. The appreciation that follows, then, is both a grateful recognition as of benefits received and a sensitive awareness or an estimate. I have tried both to view the Buddha clearly and to appraise what he has meant in my life. In essence, Buddhism and the Buddha have been for me the means of establishing a personal, internal religious clarity about what I do believe, passionately. In a deeply Buddhist sense, the Buddha has been my raft. But he has not been my Savior.There is, as Tillich noted in Christianity and the Encounter with World Religions, a point “in the depth of every living religion... at which the religion itself loses its importance, and that to which it points breaks through its particularity.” 3 It has [End Page 121] helped me to understand religions as fingers and the Divine Reality as the moon to which they point. And I am convinced that Tillich’s breakthrough point is usually reached by means of deep penetration into one religious tradition. Jacques-Albert Cuttat was exactly correct: “The more deeply a person probes into his own religious faith, the more he is able to understand the religious faith of others from the inside; conversely, the more a person explores religious connections other than his own, the more he deepens his understanding of his own religion.” 4 This has been my experience. Dialogue with the Buddha has given me great clarity about the Christ. And the study and practice of Christianity has afforded me my glimpses of the moon.What, then, do I appreciate about the Buddha? What have I learned from him? To help focus my answer, I read or reread a number of different accounts of his life 5 and noted six specific aspects of his life and teaching (his quest itself; his powers of analysis; his pragmatism; his moral vision; his compassion; and the outcome of living, his ‘way’) that have attracted and taught me.First, I am appreciative of the Buddha’s quest itself. To put it simply, according to the accounts... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:Buddhist Lessons in The Waste LandThomas Michael LeCarnerMany critics have argued that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a poem that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was too reductive. He replied, "Nonsense, I may have expressed for them (...) their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He did not want to be the poet of a "lost generation" of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and material things ephemeral.The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot's work, largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholarship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through the lens of Eliot's graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist doctrine of samsāra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome [End Page 402] with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot's understanding of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common misconceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions as a psychological projection of Europeans' discontent with their own lives in an uncertain time.Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have studied Eliot's graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck published a study that examines the impact that Eliot's coursework and professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third year, Eliot took a course entitled "Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan" with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which are characterized as "descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was founded in the second century A.D. by Nāgārjuna, the Indian Buddhist philosopher." Nāgārjuna is widely considered the most influential Buddhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading proponent of the Mādhyamika ("Middle Way") philosophy.The central teaching of Nāgārjuna was the doctrine of śūnyatā, or as it is often translated, "emptiness." For Mahāyāha Buddhists, all things are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise of Mahāyāha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one standard text, "the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empirical content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, śūnyatā, of the true Buddha... (shrink)

In this article, I cast doubt on an apparent truism, namely, that if evidence is available for gathering and use at a negligible cost, then it’s always instrumentally rational for us to gather that evidence and use it for making decisions. Call this ‘value of information’ (VOI). I show that VOI conflicts with two other plausible theses. The first is the view that an agent’s evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. The second is the view that epistemic (...) rationality requires us to update our credences by conditionalization. These two theses, given some plausible assumptions, make room for rationally biased inquiries where VOI fails. I go on to argue that this is bad news for defenders of VOI. (shrink)

According to Bayesian orthodoxy, an agent should update---or at least should plan to update---her credences by conditionalization. Some have defended this claim by means of a diachronic Dutch book argument. They say: an agent who does not plan to update her credences by conditionalization is vulnerable (by her own lights) to a diachronic Dutch book, i.e., a sequence of bets which, when accepted, guarantee loss of utility. Here, I show that this argument is in tension with evidence externalism, i.e., the (...) view that an agent's evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. I argue that this tension casts doubt on the idea that diachronic Dutch books can be used to justify or vindicate updating plans. (shrink)

This paper is about a tension between two theses. The first is Value of Evidence: roughly, the thesis that it is always rational for an agent to gather and use cost‐free evidence for making decisions. The second is Rationality of Imprecision: the thesis that an agent can be rationally required to adopt doxastic states that are imprecise, i.e., not representable by a single credence function. While others have noticed this tension, I offer a new diagnosis of it. I show that (...) it arises when an agent with an imprecise doxastic state engages in an unreflective inquiry, an inquiry where they revise their beliefs using an updating rule that doesn't satisfy a weak reflection principle. In such an unreflective inquiry, certain synchronic norms of instrumental rationality can make it instrumentally irrational for an agent to gather and use cost‐free evidence. I then go on to propose a diachronic norm of instrumental rationality that preserves Value of Evidence in unreflective inquiries. This, I suggest, may help us reconcile this thesis with Rationality of Imprecision. (shrink)

This essay explores a problem for Nyāya epistemologists. It concerns the notion of pramā. Roughly speaking, a pramā is a conscious mental event of knowledge-acquisition, i.e., a conscious experience or thought in undergoing which an agent learns or comes to know something. Call any event of this sort a knowledge-event. The problem is this. On the one hand, many Naiyāyikas accept what I will call the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge, the view that a conscious experience or thought is a knowledge-event (...) just in case it is true and non-recollective. On the other hand, they are also committed to what I shall call Nyāya Infallibilism, the thesis that every knowledge-event is produced by causes that couldn’t have given rise to an error. These two commitments seem to conflict with each other in cases of epistemic luck, i.e., cases where an agent arrives a true judgement accidentally or as a matter of luck. While the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge seems to predict that these judgements are knowledge-events, Nyāya Infallibilism seems to entail that they aren’t. In this essay, I show that Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, the 14th century Naiyāyika, solves this problem by adopting what I call epistemic localism, the view that upstream causal factors play no epistemically significant role in the production of knowledge. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within (...) everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that evolutionary debunking arguments against morality constitute a type of epistemological objection to our moral beliefs. In particular, the debunking force of such arguments is not supposed to depend on the metaphysical claim that moral facts do not exist. In this paper I argue that this standard epistemological construal of EDAs is highly misleading, if not mistaken. Specifically, I argue that the most widely discussed EDAs all make key and controversial metaphysical claims about the nature of (...) morality or the possibility of moral truth that belie their apparently epistemological character. I show that the debunking force of these EDAs derives largely from metaphysical claims about morality and their implications for the possibility of moral reduction, rather than from epistemological worries associated with the existence of an causal/non-moral explanation of our moral judgments. The paper briefly concludes with a dilemma that I believe confronts all EDAs such as those discussed in this paper: either such arguments are unsound, or else they prove too much, debunking our knowledge of science and the external world, as well as morality. (shrink)

Recently, several epistemologists have defended an attractive principle of epistemic rationality, which we shall call Ur-Prior Conditionalization. In this essay, I ask whether we can justify this principle by appealing to the epistemic goal of accuracy. I argue that any such accuracy-based argument will be in tension with Evidence Externalism, i.e., the view that agent's evidence may entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. This is because any such argument will crucially require the assumption that, independently of all empirical evidence, (...) it is rational for an agent to be certain that her evidence will always include truths, and that she will always have perfect introspective access to her own evidence. This assumption is in tension with Evidence Externalism. I go on to suggest that even if we don't accept Evidence Externalism, the prospects for any accuracy-based justification for Ur-Prior Conditionalization are bleak. (shrink)

A ‘companions in guilt’ strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016 Cowie, C. 2016. Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94/1: 115–30.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against (...) all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist. I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical if and only if epistemic reasons are. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate some recent virtue-ethical accounts of right action [Hursthouse 1999; Slote 2001; Swanton 2001]. I argue that all are vulnerable to what I call the insularity objection : evaluating action requires attention to worldly consequences external to the agent, whereas virtue ethics is primarily concerned with evaluating an agent's inner states. More specifically, I argue that insofar as these accounts are successful in meeting the insularity objection they invite the circularity objection : they end up relying (...) upon putatively virtue-ethical considerations that themselves depend on unexplained judgments of rightness. Such accounts thus face a dilemma that is characteristic of virtue-ethical accounts of right action. They avoid the insularity objection only at the cost of inviting the circularity objection: they become intuitively plausible roughly to the extent that they lose their distinctively virtue-ethical character. (shrink)

We read with interest Dominic Wilkinson’s article “Frailty Triage: Is Rationing Intensive Medical Treatment on the Grounds of Frailty Ethical?” on the utility of the Clinical Frailty Score in...

This first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato's Timaeus considers the role of Galen of Pergamum in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit for epistemic authority – the right to define and explain natural reality. Aileen Das situates Galen's work on disciplinary boundaries in (...) the context of medicine's ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as superior knowers of the cosmos vis-à-vis doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities. (shrink)

This paper questions a few assumptions of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s theory of ordinary verbal cognition (laukika-śābdabodha). The meaning relation (vṛtti) is of two kinds: śakti (which gives us the primary referent of a word) and lakṣaṇā (which yields the secondary referent). For Gaṅgeśa, the ground (bīja) of lakṣaṇā is a sort of inexplicability (anupapatti) pertaining to the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings. In this connection, one notices that the case of lakṣaṇā is quite similar to that of one variety of postulation, namely, (...) śrutārtāthāpatti, where the subject hears only a part of a sentence and immediately grasps the words that are needed to render the sentential meaning complete. Unless he does that, sentential meaning, i.e., the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings shall suffer from the same inexplicability that characterizes instances of lakṣaṇā. In fact, in the ‘Śaktivāda’ section of Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa himself draws a parallel between the cognition of sentential meaning in a śrutārthāpatti-like case and the cognition of sentential meaning in an instance of lakṣaṇā. However, Gaṇgesa himself treats Śrutārthāpatti as a piece of inferential cognition. If there is no fundamental difference between cases of śrutārthāpatti and cases of lakṣaṇā, then the cognition of sentential meaning in instances of lakṣaṇā must also be inferential in essence. In that case, we must admit, against Gaṅgeśa’s view, that such cognition of sentential meaning cannot be accommodated within the framework of verbal cognition (śābdabodha). Therefore, I conclude that some revision is needed in Gaṅgeśa’s theory of verbal cognition with respect to lakṣaṇā. (shrink)

In Sanskrit philosophy, the closest analogue of intuition is pratibhā. Here, I will focus on the theory of pratibhā offered by the Sanskrit grammarian Bhartṛhari (fifth century CE). On this account, states of pratibhā play two distinct psychological roles. First, they serve as sources of linguistic understanding. They are the states by means of which linguistically competent agents effortlessly understand the meaning of novel sentences. Second, states of pratibhā serve as sources of practical knowledge. On the basis of such states, (...) both human and non-human agents unreflectively know which actions they should perform under which circumstances. Given these two roles of pratibhā, modern commentators have often claimed that states of pratibhā, as understood by Bhartṛhari, are intuitions. In this article, I will reconstruct Bhartṛhari's view and to explore its consequences, I will argue that, if Bhartṛhari’s theory of pratibhā is right, then a form of human exceptionalism – which makes rationality a unique trait of human beings – becomes difficult to maintain. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 34-36.

In this essay, my aim is to explain Vātsyāyana’s solution to a problem that arises for his theory of liberation. For him and most Nyāya philosophers after him, liberation consists in the absolute cessation of pain. Since this requires freedom from embodied existence, it also results in the absolute cessation of pleasure. How, then, can agents like us be rationally motivated to seek liberation? Vātsyāyana’s solution depends on what I will call the Pain Principle, i.e., the principle that we should (...) treat all aspects of our embodied existence as pain. If we were to follow this advice, we would come to apply the label of pain to all aspects of our embodied existence, including pleasure. This would undermine our attachment to our own embodied existence. I show that this fits with Vātsyāyana’s general theory of motivation. According to this theory, by manipulating the labels using which we think about the world and ourselves, we can induce radical shifts in our patterns of motivation. (shrink)

Within the climate justice debate, the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle holds that those who benefit from greenhouse emissions associated with industrialization ought to pay for the costs of mitigating and adapting to their adverse effects. This principle constitutes a claim of inter-generational justice, and it is widely believed that the non-identity problem raises serious difficulties for any such claim. After briefly sketching the rationale behind ‘beneficiary pays,’ this paper offers a new way of understanding the claim that persons in developed societies (...) have benefited from industrialization. It argues that when we think of the claim in this new way, it evades the non-identity problem entirely. Some objections to this approach are then considered and rebutted. The paper concludes by comparing the present, relatively modest solution to the nonidentity problem with a much more ambitious attempt from the recent literature. (shrink)

Of Pain Content Type Journal Article Pages - Authors Saitya Brata Das, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India Journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy Online ISSN 1757-0646 Print ISSN 1757-0638 Journal Volume Volume 3 Journal Issue Volume 3, Number 1 / 2011.

In classical South Asia, most philosophers thought that the self (if it exists at all) is what the first-person pronoun ‘I’ stands for. It is something that persists through time, undergoes conscious thoughts and experiences, and exercises control over actions. The Buddhists accepted the ‘no self’ thesis: they denied that such a self is substantially real. This gave rise to a puzzle for these Buddhists. If there is nothing substantially real that ‘I’ stands for, what are we talking about when (...) we speak of ourselves? In this paper, I present one Buddhist answer to this question, an answer that emerges from the work of the Abhidharma thinker Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century CE). (shrink)

This paper questions a few assumptions of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s theory of ordinary verbal cognition (laukika-śābdabodha). The meaning relation (vṛtti) is of two kinds: śakti (which gives us the primary referent of a word) and lakṣaṇā (which yields the secondary referent). For Gaṅgeśa, the ground (bīja) of lakṣaṇā is a sort of inexplicability (anupapatti) pertaining to the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings. In this connection, one notices that the case of lakṣaṇā is quite similar to that of one variety of postulation, namely, (...) śrutārtāthāpatti, where the subject hears only a part of a sentence and immediately grasps the words that are needed to render the sentential meaning complete. Unless he does that, sentential meaning, i.e., the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings shall suffer from the same inexplicability that characterizes instances of lakṣaṇā. In fact, in the ‘Śaktivāda’ section of Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa himself draws a parallel between the cognition of sentential meaning in a śrutārthāpatti-like case and the cognition of sentential meaning in an instance of lakṣaṇā. However, Gaṇgesa himself treats Śrutārthāpatti as a piece of inferential cognition. If there is no fundamental difference between cases of śrutārthāpatti and cases of lakṣaṇā, then the cognition of sentential meaning in instances of lakṣaṇā must also be inferential in essence. In that case, we must admit, against Gaṅgeśa’s view, that such cognition of sentential meaning cannot be accommodated within the framework of verbal cognition (śābdabodha). Therefore, I conclude that some revision is needed in Gaṅgeśa’s theory of verbal cognition with respect to lakṣaṇā. (shrink)

As Alfandre and colleagues describe in “Between Usual and Crisis Phases of a Public Health Emergency: The Mediating Role of Contingency Measures”, efforts to maintain standards of care durin...

How do senior business executives rank their preferences for various ethical principles? And how strongly do the executives believe in these principles? Also, how do these preference rankings relate to the way the executives see the future (wherein business decisions play out)? Research on these questions may provide us with an appreciation of the complexities of ethical behavior in management beyond the traditional issues concerning ethical decision-making in business. Based on a survey of 585 vice presidents of U.S. businesses it (...) was found that: (1) there is a distinct set of principles of ethical conduct that is considered favorable as opposed to another set considered unfavorable among a comprehensive list of 14 ethical principles; (2) the executives believed overwhelmingly that their own individual ethical preferences are better than those of other executives; (3) the strength of their preferences for ethical principles is associated with whether the executives are relatively near-future oriented or more distant-future oriented; and (4), there are very few significant differences in terms of gender, age, education level, private/public education, prestigious/other schools, business/non-business academic backgrounds, and length of job experience. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher COVID-19 infection rates among South Asians in general, and Punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. Two counter-narratives are discussed. The first substitutes the negative image of the Sikh Punjabi Canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of Sikh humanitarianism and community service. The second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious jobs, (...) poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. We argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of South Asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. The second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. (shrink)

In A Confection of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), the twelfth-century philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa addresses a version of Meno’s paradox. This version of the paradox was well known in first millennium South Asia through the writings of two earlier Sanskrit philosophers, Śabarasvāmin (4th–5th century ce) and Śaṃkara (8th century ce). Both these thinkers proposed a solution to the paradox. I show how Śrīharṣa rejects this solution, and splits the old paradox into two new ones: the paradox of triviality and the paradox of (...) incoherence. I argue that these paradoxes are connected to Śrīharṣa’s broader pessimism about the possibility of successful rational inquiry into certain philosophical questions. (shrink)

In the Open darkness and light, remembrance and oblivion, coming into existence and disappearing in death play their originary co-belonging, or co-figuration. Existence belongs to this opening and is exposed to its coming to presence: it is on the basis of this originary opening, this originary historical which is revealed to this mortal being called ‘man,’ on the basis of this revelation, man founds something like politics and history. There thus comes into existence out of this freedom, out of this (...) “play space”2, this field called ‘polis’3 where there takes place war and festival, where historical revolutions tear apart history, brings ruptures and discontinuities in the very mode of his existence, where man seeks the foundation of his own foundation, where occurs the dialectics of negativity between man and man, where man puts at stake his own death, his own dissolution, and by the power of his own dissolution stands in relation to the total world that he seeks to dominate. This means that man’s attempts to metaphysically found his own political and historical existence must presuppose a far more originary non-foundation, the differentiating revealing of the open, the ungrounded spacing play, or playing space of natality and mortality. (shrink)

Recent work suggests that DNA replication origins are regulated by the number of multiple mini‐chromosome maintenance (MCM) complexes loaded. Origins are defined by the loading of MCM – the replicative helicase which initiates DNA replication and replication kinetics determined by origin's location and firing times. However, activation of MCM is heterogeneous; different origins firing at different times in different cells. Also, more MCMs are loaded in G1 than are used in S phase. These aspects of MCM biology are explained by (...) the observation that multiple MCMs are loaded at origins. Having more MCMs at early origins makes them more likely to fire, effecting differences in origin efficiency that define replication timing. Nonetheless, multiple MCM loading raises new questions, such as how they are loaded, where these MCMs reside at origins, and how their presence affects replication timing. In this review, we address these questions and discuss future avenues of research. (shrink)

Saitya Brata Das argues that in Kierkegaard's work we find a radical eschatological critique, not only of the liberal-humanist pathos of modernity but also the political theology of Carl Schmitt, that seeks to legitimise the sovereign power of the state by an appeal to a divine or theological foundation. Relating Kierkegaard's notion of 'Christianity without Christendom' to the Schellingian eschatological critique of sovereignty, he shows how Schelling's insistence on the eschatological difference between religion and politics is transformed and further intensified (...) in Kierkegaard's critique of historical reason. Such an exception without sovereignty, Das argues, is the very task of our contemporary time. (shrink)

When we reason about strategic games, implicitly we need to reason about arbitrary strategy profiles and how players can improve from each profile. This structure is exponential in the number of players. Hence it is natural to look for subclasses of succinct games for which we can reason directly by interpreting formulas on the (succinct) game description rather than on the associated improvement structure. Priority separable games are one of such subclasses: payoffs are specified for pairwise interactions, and from these, (...) payoffs are computed for strategy profiles. We show that equilibria in such games can be described in Monadic Least Fixed Point Logic (MLFP). We then extend the description to games over arbitrarily many players, but using the monadic least fixed point extension of existential second order logic. (shrink)

Intersexuality, particularly in the global South, remains an under‐researched field of study. In my in‐progress doctoral research project, I explore the cultural, social, and medical discourses that influence how key stakeholders such as healthcare providers make decisions about the sex and gender assignment of the intersex child in India. In this paper I interrogate some of these ideas around gender assignment of intersex people in India, paying particular attention to the context of son preference. I am interested in exploring how (...) decisions of gender assignment by medical professionals are guided by ideas of son preference. Focusing on four qualitative, semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews across two cities with medical doctors from different specializations, this paper is a preliminary attempt to examine some of the factors that guide medical professionals in making decisions about gender assignment of intersex children and explore the dynamics of the decision‐making process. Specifically, I explore the factors that inform doctors’ decision‐making and locate these decision‐making processes within the broader socio‐cultural context of India. (shrink)

The use of single-use items is now ubiquitous in medical practice. Because of the high costs of these items, the practice of reusing them after sterilisation is also widespread especially in resource-poor economies. However, the ethics of reusing disposable items remain unclear. There are several analogous conditions, which could shed light on the ethics of reuse of disposables. These include the use of restored kidney transplantation and the use of generic drugs etc. The ethical issues include the question of patient (...) safety and the possibility of infection. It is also important to understand the role of informed consent before reuse of disposables. The widespread practice of reuse may bring down high healthcare costs and also reduce the huge amount of hospital waste that is generated. The reuse of disposables can be justified on various grounds including the safety and the cost effectiveness of this practice. (shrink)

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

The search for definitions is ubiquitous in Sanskrit philosophy. In many texts across traditions, we find philosophers presenting their theories by laying down definitions of key theoretical categories, by testing those definitions, and by refuting competing definitions of the same theoretical categories. Call this the method of definitions. The aim of this essay is to explore a challenge that arises for this method: the paradox of definitions. It arises from the claim that the method of definitions is either (i) redundant (...) because it does not provide us any knowledge that we did not already possess, or (ii) impossible to successfully pursue because it leads to an infinite regress. Neither of these alternatives should be acceptable to the defender of this method. To focus our discussion, I will show how this challenge arose for—and was arguably resolved by—early Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika thinkers active in the first millennium CE and at the very beginning of the second millennium. In response to the paradox of definitions, these Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika thinkers claimed that the purpose of a definition is to remove either metaphysical ignorance about the distinction between theoretically significant kinds or kind-membership, or metalinguistic ignorance about the meaning or the application-conditions of theoretically significant terms. I will show how this discussion helps us to ward off certain misconceptions about the method of definitions in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. (shrink)