The political articulation of sexual violence, as legally understood today, took place in India from 1970s onward. In succeeding decades, its definition broadened, positioning it in contexts of caste-based violence, of violence against women at workplaces, and of custodial violence. The Delhi gang rape case, in 2012, introduced another set of political and legal articulations, simultaneously revealing the very politics around them. This paper begins by tracking these phases and definitions, to emphasize one area where such violence has been vocalized (...) the most in recent years, i.e. institutes of higher education in India. Legal codes in this context, carry grave contradictions. Beside, altogether different interpretation occurs when these are applied within institutes of higher education via bureaucratic channels. Recorded cases have shown presence since 2013, except in some regions which appear in negligible measure. Therefore, alongside tracing the historical journey of political articulations of sexual violence in institutes of higher education, this paper takes the case of Raipur city, in the state of Chhattisgarh located in the central-eastern part of India, which has negligible presence in sexual violence crime records in the context of higher educational institutes. Based on a close reading of legal texts, and field visits conducted across institutions in Raipur between 2020–2022, I argue that the limitation of law in combating gender violence, appears not when it is neglected, but often when it is consciously reinterpreted against minority communities, despite claiming to protect those very communities. I attempt to reassess the potential of ‘law’ as a tool to combat gender violence, around existing debates around society and law. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

Aren Z. Aizura's Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment is one of the best nonfiction books I have read recently. I was interested in Aizura's work because of the several ways in which this book's subjects resonated with my reflections on gender nonconforming subjects, gender reassignment, and the medical-industrial complex with a focus on interrogating the West/non-West binary. It focuses on trans and gender nonconforming people, issues of mobility, and access to various technologies for bodily modification. This book, divided (...) in two parts, will be of interest to a variety of readers, especially scholars doing feminist studies, queer theory, feminist science and technology... (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)

Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography, the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply (...) as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spatial literary studies; its aim is also to suggest a new source of knowledge about the city of Allahabad through a community introspection of “doing culture” in the texts, bringing into view people’s shared experiences, beliefs, religious practices and traditions as offshoots of the postcolonial ethos. The article aims to re-contextualize the city’s longstanding multicultural ethics in the contemporary times of crisis, which may affect a shift in the city’s relevance: from regional concern to large-scale significance within ethnically diverse South Asian countries and beyond. (shrink)

With regards to ecology, there has been a constant struggle between the scientific perspective and the philosophical approaches. This commentary dwells on the nature and structure of voices emerging from feminist environmentalists. Analogous to the feminist understanding that environmental degradation is a symbol of masculine domination leading to the suppression of the feminine, this paper tries to excavate the nature of a feminist perspective to environmental ethics.

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)

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)

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)

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

Book Information World Poverty and Human Rights. World Poverty and Human Rights Thomas Pogge Cambridge Polity Press 2002 vii + 284 Paperback US$28, £18 By Thomas Pogge. Polity Press. Cambridge. Pp. vii + 284. Paperback:US$28, £18.

RésuméLe « Synopsis du Timée de Platon » de Galien, ouvrage clé pour l’étude du platonisme prémoderne, survit uniquement dans une édition dite « imparfaite » de 1951 qui présente pour la première fois le texte arabe survivant accompagné de sa traduction en latin. Les rédacteurs de la série « Plato Arabus » du Corpus Platonicum, à laquelle l’édition appartient, ont attribué les défauts de cette édition à la mort inopportune de Paul Kraus, qui l'a préparée, aidé par un autre (...) réfugié juif, Richard Walzer, pendant la période de la seconde guerre mondiale. Notre analyse de sources tirées d'archives démontrera que le travail sur ce volume était majoritairement celui de Kraus. Qui plus est, nous démontrons que Walzer et le rédacteur du Corpus Platonicum Raymond Klibansky ont marginalisé le travail de Kraus sur le projet dans l'optique d'avancer leurs propres carrières universitaires en tant que Juifs réfugiés en Grande-Bretagne. Nous allons également examiner la manière dont Walzer et Klibansky ont remanié le projet initial de Kraus – celui d'un corpus sémitique du platonisme – en un « Plato Arabus » plus étroit qui s'alignerait sur une étude du platonisme latin, projet qu'ils présumaient plus susceptible d'intéresser leurs mécènes britanniques. (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)

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)

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)

Cultural diversity is an inescapable reality and a concern in many businesses where it can often raise ethical questions and dilemmas. This paper aims to offer suggestions to certain problems facing managers in dealing with cultural diversity through the inspiration of Thomas Aquinas. Although he may be perceived as a voice from the distant past, we can still find in his writings helpful and original ideas and criteria. He welcomes cultural differences as a part of the perfection of the universe. (...) His systemic approach leads one to place the problem in its proper context, and to reflect on it from the perspective of virtue ethics, with a central role for practical wisdom and giving primacy to neighborly love and natural moral law. Rather than a set of rigid standards with no consideration of diversity Aquinas focuses on the common human ground, which allows for the indispensable dialogue between different positions. When dealing with practical questions, the problem is one of finding the right balance between general principle and cultural specifics, tolerance, and dialogue, always guided by practical wisdom. In this way, Aquinas’ approach is neither rigid ethical universalism with no consideration for diversity nor moral relativism with no place for any transcultural and absolute morals. (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)

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)

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)

Knowledge management hinges upon the presumption that workers within an organization possess knowledge that can be converted into concrete business improvements if the information is harvested and disseminated to others to whom it could be of use. True knowledge management must involve capturing the internal knowledge generated by a firm—its best thinking on products, customers, competitors and processes—and sharing it. Insofar as organizations are concerned, postmodernists argue that one view that has been in appropriately privileged is that of the organization (...) rather than the process of organizing. They draw our attention to the link between individual and collective identity. If there is a link between individual identity and how that individual behaves, there may also a link between collective identity and organizational action, for which a study on discourse ethics is essential. After considering the implications of knowledge management and the actual situation and work culture where the knowledge workers are in action, this paper raises and explores the questions wherein lies our individual identity and what its functional relation ship with the collective identity is. It has been envisaged in this article that through principles-driven cross-functional teams and innovative organizational mechanisms, sharing and conviction building need to be facilitated in modern organizations phasing out bureaucratic approaches and hierarchical power domination. Flexibility with a focused attitude is a must for organizations to adapt in a changing environment. (shrink)

A diplomacia das letras compreende a atividade literária de muitos homens de letras que estavam comprometidos nas questões públicas de seus estados, ou cuja carreira se dava em torno das cortes e centros de poder do Antigo Regime. Enquanto secretários, conselheiros, encarregados de negócios, próximos da política, eles tinham a possibilidade de observar as dinâmicas do poder e exprimir suas considerações sobre a história de seu tempo em sua produção literária (poemas, cartas, relatos de viagem, jornais etc.). Graças a estes (...) homens de letras, o conjunto dos valores da República das letras do século XVIII (a paz, a felicidade privada e pública, a tolerância etc.) entravam em cena na história política: sua luta por uma diplomacia disposta a abraçar os valores das Luzes mostra a importância da comunicação entre a cultura e a política, que é um dos mais fortes legados do século XVIII, e que deveria inspirar as relações internacionais ainda hoje. (shrink)

This paper exploits the fact that the variability in the inter-spike intervals, in the spike train issuing from a neuron, carries substantial information regarding the input to the neuron. A framework for neuronal information processing is proposed which utilizes the above fact to distinguish phenomenal from non-phenomenal mental representation. In the process, an explanation is offered as to what is it, in the nature of conscious mental states, that imparts them a subjective feeling – there is something it is like (...) to be in those mental states. To give empirical support, it is shown how the proposed framework can neatly explain, the delay in eliciting conscious awareness as observed by Libet and the related backwards referral in time. (shrink)

New York based Families For Freedom is among a handful of organizations that directly organize deportees and their families. Analyzing the organization’s resignification of criminalized men of color as caregivers, I argue that current deportation policies and practices reorganize care work and kinship while tying gender and sexuality to national belonging. These policies and practices severely compromise the ability of migrant communities to socially reproduce themselves. Furthermore, the convergence of criminalization and immigration enforcement renders the kinship ties of deportable men (...) illegible, and justifies their separation from their loved ones. Since FFF publicly supports men with criminal convictions, it reveals that its members become targets of deportation precisely because they do not and cannot conform to heteronormative prescriptions. (shrink)

An important question in epistemology is whether the KK principle is true, i.e., whether an agent who knows that p is also thereby in a position to know that she knows that p. We explain how a “transparency” account of self-knowledge, which maintains that we learn about our attitudes towards a proposition by reflecting not on ourselves but rather on that very proposition, supports an affirmative answer. In particular, we show that such an account allows us to reconcile a version (...) of the KK principle with an “externalist” or “reliabilist” conception of knowledge commonly thought to make that principle particularly problematic. (shrink)

This paper explores some parallels between the concept of action as it is deployed in two theoretical projects: constructing a virtue-ethical account of right action; and explaining human actions in causal terms. Although one project is normative and the other non-normative, I argue that they face essentially the same fundamental challenge: both have a difficult time dealing with the familiar fact that persons have the ability to act out of character. For virtue ethics, this fact threatens to undermine its most (...) distinctive account of what makes an action right, one that grounds rightness in virtuous character. For causal theories of action, it makes trouble for the idea that all human actions can be explained adequately within an event-causal framework. (shrink)

Proteoglycan 4 (PRG4), first identified in synovial fluid, is an extracellular matrix structural protein in the joint implicated in reducing shear at the cartilage surface as well as controlling adhesion‐dependent synovial growth and regulating bulk protein deposition onto the cartilage. However, recent evidence suggests that it can bind to and effect downstream signaling of a number of cell surface receptors implicated in regulating the inflammatory response. Therefore, we pose the hypothesis: Does PRG4 regulate the inflammatory response and maintain tissue homeostasis? (...) Based on these novel findings implicating PRG4 as an inflammatory signaling molecule, we will present and discuss several hypotheses regarding potential mechanisms by which PRG4 may be able to regulate inflammation. If future studies can demonstrate that PRG4 is a potent inflammatory mediator, this will change current paradigms in the musculoskeletal and ophthalmological fields regarding the how the inflammatory microenvironment is regulated in these tissues and potentially others. (shrink)

That the senselessness of violence – violence no longer a mere political means to a justified end outside it – is omnipresent in today’s world: the realization of this truth appears to have made obsolete today the conventional understanding of violence as mere political means. That the Greeks thought “bia,” which means violence, in its close proximity with “bio,” which means “life,” speaks not surprisingly a truth whose manifestation we perceive today more clearly than ever before, albeit the mode or (...) manner of this manifestation today was perhaps not known to the Greeks. Taking F.W.J. von Schelling’s reflection on evil and violence as the point of departure, this paper seeks to understand the relation between life and violence anew and attempts to show that at the heart of the phenomenon of evil lies the enigmatic and fascinating question of the image. (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)

Human development can be seen as the process of giving more effective expression to human values. Modern business philosophy has a certain viewpoint or perspective on human potential based on the secular humanistic values of the west and the scientific theories on the nature of man and his evolution. We are bound to welcome the New Paradigm in Business because it opens the path for a decisive step forward in evolution from an authoritarian, mechanistic, Taylorian era to a freer and (...) a more humanistic ethos in business. (shrink)