BackgroundIn this study, medical errors are defined as unintentional patient harm caused by a doctor’s mistake. This topic, due to limited research, is poorly understood in Malaysia. The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of doctors intending to disclose medical errors, and their attitudes/perception pertaining to medical errors.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was conducted at a tertiary public hospital from July- December 2015 among 276 randomly selected doctors. Data was collected using a standardized and validated self-administered questionnaire intending to (...) measure disclosure and attitudes/perceptions. The scale had four vignettes in total two medical and two surgical. Each vignette consisted of five questions and each question measured the disclosure. Disclosure was categorised as “No Disclosure”, “Partial Disclosure” or “Full Disclosure”. Data was keyed in and analysed using STATA v 13.0.ResultsOnly 10.1% intended to disclose medical errors. Most respondents felt that they possessed an attitude/perception of adequately disclosing errors to patients. There was a statistically significant difference when comparing the intention of disclosure with perceived disclosures. Most respondents were in common agreement that disclosing an error would make them less likely to get sued, that minor errors should be reported and that they experienced relief from disclosing errors.ConclusionMost doctors in this study would not disclose medical errors although they perceived that the errors were serious and felt responsible for it. Poor disclosure could be due the fear of litigations and improper mechanisms/procedures available for disclosure. (shrink)

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair ...

The concept śabad (Word) is central to Sikh scripture, doctrine, philosophy and spiritual praxis. This lecture offers a postsecular interpretation of this important concept and examines the passage of śabad from premodern scriptural sources to its entanglement in contemporary "wars of scholarship".

The Three Works Brought Together In This Collection Explore Buddhism As A Rich Source Of Literacy Legend, An Austere Ethical Guide, And A Contemporary Philosophy Very Relevant In The Modern World In View Of The Resurgence Of Interest In The Buddha And His Philosophy. Matthew T. Kapstein In His Introduction Provides A Concise Historical Overview Of Buddhism In India And The Renewal Of Interest In The Buddha`S Teachings And Also Situates The Works In Their Proper Contexts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Appreciation of Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy:Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing WorldJeffery D. Long (bio)"Sikhism," the Colonial Project, and Modernity1I do not use this adjective lightly, but in his brilliant volume Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022) Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair goes a considerable distance toward liberating sikhī—known more widely in the academic world as Sikhism—from the conceptual constraints that have (...) kept it from engaging with and informing global issues. In so doing, he does a service not only to the Sikh community and to sikhī itself, but to the world, for there is indeed much in Sikh thought from which the wider human community can benefit. By liberating sikhī from the constraining concept of religion, Mandair facilitates a process by which persons of any background can engage with gurmat ideas—that is, ideas drawn from the system of thought based upon the teachings of the Gurus of the Sikh tradition—and learn from their wisdom.Mandair skillfully deconstructs the concept of religion, building upon earlier work in which he demonstrates the colonial functionalities of this concept.2 When, through colonial knowledge-production processes, sikhī came to be conceived as a religion, Sikh thought was relegated to the realm of theology. This was a relegation, not an elevation, because under the dominant paradigm of modernity, theology is seen as a discourse that is relevant only to a specific religious community. It is thus perceived as lacking the universality [End Page 353] that is taken to inhere in the discourses of philosophy or science. When combined with the colonial situation of Sikhs under British rule, this relegation of Sikh thought to the realm of theology becomes a way of exerting power over the community. As Mandair explains,Once theology had become the primary regime of cultural translation, Sikh thinking was inevitably tethered to the social and political project of religious identification which was required primarily to facilitate governance of cultural differences or heterogeneity that characterized the indigenous populations [of India]. By doing so, it effectively locked Sikh activity within the confines of identity politics.(p. 10)Integral to British colonial policy in India was a project of defining communities, primarily on the basis of religion, but also deploying concepts such as caste and tribe. Through these definitions, the identities of Indians could be essentialized, and policies applied to them in ways that facilitated British dominance over Indian society.3Much has been written about the ways in which language is used to promote ideologies that serve to advance the power interests of some groups of people over others.4 No less an ideological mechanism than the Oxford English Dictionary has been brought to bear in the process of constraining sikhī and depriving it of the universal relevance that it ought naturally to possess. In Mandair's words, "By defining 'Sikhism' as the beliefs and practices of Sikhs, or as an Indian monotheistic religion founded in fifteenth-century India, the OED turns the Sikh aspect into a cliché—a religious type (monotheism), an ethnic type tied to a geographical location (Punjabi/North India) and a historical type (medieval India)" (p. 11).The damage that has been wrought by the modern colonial concept of religion globally is, of course, not limited exclusively to the Sikh community. It has been integral to the construction of a secular order in which what is regarded as religious thought is, again, relegated to a parochial realm of relevance only to members of specific communities. It further serves to marginalize these same communities, whose discourses come to be seen as lacking the universality of secular thought, which is presented as objective truth. As Mandair continues,The purpose of creating the modern category of 'religion' was to help authorize and naturalize secular rationality as the dominant form of modern consciousness, and as the essential language of conventional thinking, or 'common sense.' It is precisely this common sense which persuades us of the apparent naturalness of oppositions such as religion versus politics or materiality versus ideality, to give two well-known examples.(p. 11)To these two examples, one could add the opposition of religion and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikhism between Tradition and "Assemblage":Reflections on Arvind Mandair's Sikh PhilosophyAnanda Abeysekara (bio)Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World. By Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and tradition in Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I begin with a brief discussion (...) of a lecture titled "A Genealogy of Liberty" delivered by Quentin Skinner at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, which he would give again, with minor changes, in 2015 at the University of Chicago and in 2017 at Stanford University. At the outset of the lecture, joining forces with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, he says, "Here I am a Nietzschean, and it is reflected in my title"—contending that "concepts [like liberty] that have histories cannot have definitions." In giving a concise history of the rival "polemical" claims made by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Arendt, Taylor, and others about the concept of liberty, Skinner concludes that, contrary to what Anglo-American philosophy claims, there is not one "coherent way of thinking about liberty" in its contested genealogy. And "while each of these accounts is coherent in its own terms, you cannot combine them. This is genealogy. You can't get this to be the concept of liberty. You are going to have to make some choices, because they don't fit together. So what choice should you make? As to the answer, I leave that up to you" (Skinner 2016).The puzzle of how to think about such a genealogy was palpable in the questions from the audience that followed Skinner's lecture. Noteworthy was one question, about how the thinkers—for example from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill—in the history of the debate about liberty seem to "move around," their views seeming to "bleed into one another" (Skinner 2015). That is, isn't John Stuart Mill's view of liberty—as something that one can voluntarily renounce by internalizing the external views or customs—more or less the same as Hobbes' view of liberty as something free from external interference? And hence don't these competing views after all "fit together" within a single narrative? Ultimately, the concern here boils down to a question about the definition of liberty. [End Page 333]But what the presupposition in the question misses is that each of these positions—as Skinner carefully argues—is "ideological," "polemical," and "contested"; that is, these positions—even though Skinner does not say this explicitly—are marked by distinct forms of historical sensibility. That each of the historical positions, again as Skinner rightly argues, is "coherent" already grants that the sensibilities that define them within their specific conditions cannot be reproduced. That is, to extend Skinner's argument, these sensibilities cannot simply be "combined" within a seamless narrative because they presuppose relationships of power in which they have the force of intelligibility that they do in particular historical contexts. But the presumption about the meaning of a concept—for example the concept of "creativity" or "emptiness"—that can be readily and universally identified in a historical narrative is prevalent in other disciplines like Buddhist studies and South Asian studies, where, despite scholars using the term, genealogy remains poorly thought through (Abeysekara 2023; Walser 2018).1Largely absent in Skinner's genealogy is any discussion of the concept of "tradition" itself even though at times he alludes to "the tradition of liberty." This may not be a simple oversight on Skinner's part, but its very absence raises the question of whether liberalism itself is a discursive, embodied tradition in the ways a religious tradition works, as conceptualized by Talal Asad and others. Asad has described liberalism itself as a certain kind of "tradition" constituted by historical disputes (Asad 2009).2 And the broader implication of that argument is that, because it is a tradition animated by the very debates about what constitutes it, those who make claims about it are already situated within that tradition. And so it is unsound to speak of multiple traditions of liberty and, by extension, "multiple modernities... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikh Philosophy as a Philosophy-of-PracticeMonika Kirloskar-Steinbach (bio)Some recent publications on Indian philosophy argue that the colonial narrative about the philosophical traditions from the subcontinent was erroneous. It wrongly suggested that the erstwhile Brahmanic thought embodied by the darśanas was an exhaustive representation of philosophical activity on the subcontinent and that this activity came to a grinding halt with the onset of European modernity. In an attempt at rectifying this (...) story, one path proposed by philosopher Vrinda Dalmiya (Dalmiya 2016, p. 125) is to cognize and fix the "epistemophilic excesses" in the field, that is, the obsessive compulsion in conventional academic philosophy to engage in theory for theory's sake. In the study of Indian philosophy, this malady manifests as the practice of channeling philosophical analysis solely through a darśanic framing. This monofocal lens, however, is unable to reflect either the diversity of practices on the ground or values like intellectual freedom that drive some such practices.Arvind-Pal Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), discussed here in this forum, speaks to these concerns and offers a possible way forward. Sikh Philosophy advocates a liminal perspective from which to engage with the set of philosophical practices that emanated on the subcontinent around the figure of Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and the teachings of the Sikh gurus (gurmat). In the first part of my response, I will bring into this conversation Mandair's philosophical orientation to ask whether and how he would contribute to that debate. In the second part, I will project the haumai—one concept doing much of the work in Sikh Philosophy—as one viable path that may be able to contribute to the correction of the epistemophilia currently afflicting a judicious study of world-philosophical traditions.In my limited understanding, Mandair's rendition of the haumai may serve as one component that could be implemented fruitfully in broadening the perspective on Indian philosophy. Mandair observes that a postcolonial sensibility demands a philosophical orientation that does not continue its proprietary attitude toward philosophical positions. I share his view. Instead of parading these positions as possessions that embellish one's academic finesse, they should be considered as ways of navigating life adequately. In doing so, however, the making of such navigational routes may profit from a deliberate reflection on them from different standpoints. [End Page 348]Halting Exclusivist Historiographical Trends in PhilosophyTwo recent handbooks on Indian philosophy reflect the growing awareness that changes in the field's self-understanding are imperative, should imperialist and colonial historiographies that affect this understanding be upturned. Jonardon Ganeri's editorial introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy—"Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?"—argues that students of Indian philosophy should overcome the routinized fixation on the classical darśanas. In developing their accounts, they should factor in the "regionality, vernaculars, subaltern communities, [and] eccentrics" through which "scholarly networks, nodes of philosophical activity, transnational encounters, and contexts of philosophical invention" arose on the subcontinent (Ganeri 2017, p. 2). This broader approach would, in his view, not only be viable in halting the elitist and exclusivist historiography that was the default mode in the recent colonial past. In addition, it would be better equipped to grasp the richness of practices on the ground.Accordingly, his Handbook departs from the handbook genre on one core point: instead of delivering a supposedly comprehensive study of positions that would be indispensable to the reader to understand the intricacies of the field marked out as Indian philosophy, this Handbook chooses to narrate one multi-perspectival story about practices on the subcontinent that were philosophically motivated and are worthy of study today. It suggests through this move that there are other such possible stories that can be narrated. Relatedly, Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner's History of Indian Philosophy strives as well to make a case to go beyond the darśanic mold. It includes a variety of philosophical positions located on its peripheries. For example, Sikh philosophy, which notably is not included in the Ganeri volume, is incorporated here as a tradition that engaged darśanic practices. Balbinder Singh Bhogal, the author of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedThe Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullā Sadrā. By Christian Jambet. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006. Pp. 497. Hardcover $38.95.Analysis in Śaṅkara Vedānta: The Philosophy of Ganeswar Misra. Edited by Bijayananda Kar. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2006. Pp. xxv + 190. Hardcover Rs. 240.00.Bhakti and Philosophy. By R. Raj Singh. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Pp. 112. Hardcover $65.00.Brahman and the Ethos of (...) Organization. By Leonard R. Silos. Paseo de Roxas: Asian Institute of Management, 2006. Pp. xix + 344. Price not given.Buddhist Inclusivism: Attitudes Towards Religious Others. By Kristin Beise Kiblinger. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005. Pp. viii + 145. Hardcover $89.95.Classical Northern Wu Style Tai Ji Quan: The Fighting Art of the Manchurian Palace Guard. By Tina Chunna Zhang and Frank Allen. Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2006. Pp. xiii + 203. Paper $21.95.Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience. By Mikel Burley. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xiv + 226. Price not given.Comparative Philosophy and Religion in Times of Terror. Edited by Douglas Allen. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Pp. xiv + 257. Hardcover $62.00. Paper $32.00.Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge. By B. Alan Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. vii + 211. Hardcover $29.50, £19.00.Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind. By Tao Jiang. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 198. Paper $20.00.Dialogue Transcultural. Edited by Yue Diayun et al. Nanjing: Jiangsu Peoples Press, 2006. Pp. 335. Price not given.Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen. By Hee-Jin Kim. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 169. Hardcover $65.50. Paper $21.95.The Garden of Loneliness: A Translation of Jayshankar Prasad's Āṅsū, "Tears." By Charles S. J. White. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006. Pp. xv + 136. Hardcover Rs. 295. [End Page 608]The Happening of Tradition: Vallabha on Anumāna in Nyāyalīlāvatī. By Anna-Pya Sjödin. Stockholm: Elanders Gotab, 2006. Pp. 195. Price not given.Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature. By Reiko Ohnuma. 2006. Pp. xvii + 372. Hardcover $45.00, £29.00.Hwa Yu T'ai Chi Ch'uan: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Five-Word Song. By Glenn D. Newth. Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2007. Pp. xiii + 160. U.S. $18.95. Can $24.95.A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: 'Izz al-Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings. By Reza Pourjavady and Sabine Schmidtke. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006. Pp. xii + 274. Hardcover $130.00, €100.Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr's Cosmopolitical Vision. Edited by Stephen F. Schneck. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. x + 382. Paper $35.00.Myth and the Existential Quest. By Vassilis Vitsaxis and translated by Deborah Brown Kazazis and Vassilis Vitsaxis. Boston: Somerset Hall Press, 2006. Pp. 301. Hardcover $49.95. Paper $39.95.Nietzsche-Buddha-Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration. By Michael Skowron. Daegu: Kyungpook National University Press, 2006. Pp. 293. Paper $18.00, Won 17,000.Popularizing Buddhism: Preaching as Performance in Sri Lanka. By Mahinda Deegalle. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 241. Hardcover $65.00. Paper $21.95.Ramana Maharashi: The Sage of Arunachala. By Arvind Sharma. New Delhi: Penquin Group, 2006. Pp. 215. Hardcover Rs. 295.Readings in Han Chinese Thought. Edited and translated by Mark Csikszentmihalyi. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006. Pp. xxx + 220. Hardcover $39.95. Paper $14.95.Religions of Korea in Practice. Edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 542. Paper $24.95, £15.95.The Scripture on Great Peace: The Taiping jing and the Beginnings of Daoism. By Barbara Hendrischke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. x + 410. Hardcover $60.00, £38.95.The Self 's Awareness of Itself: Bhaṭṭa Rāmakantha's Arguments against the Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self. By Alex Watson. Vienna: Sammlung de Nobili, 2006. Pp. 433. Price not given... (shrink)

This book reflects upon the political philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, a towering intellectual figure in South Asian history, revered by many for his poetry and his thought. He lived in India in the twilight years of the British Empire and, apart from a short but significant period studying in the West, he remained in Punjab until his death in 1938. The book studies Iqbal's critique of nationalist ideology and his attempts to chart a path for the development of the 'nation' (...) by liberating it from the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the modern state structure. Iqbal frequently clashed with his contemporaries over his view of nationalism as 'the greatest enemy of Islam'. He constructed his own particular interpretation of Islam - forged through an interaction with Muslim thinkers and Western intellectual traditions - that was ahead of its time, and since his death both modernists and Islamists have continued to champion his legacy. (shrink)

In business ethics, there is a large body of literature focusing on the conditions, factors, and influences in the ethical decision-making processes. This work builds upon the past critical reviews by updating and extending the literature review found in Craft’s :221–259, 2013) study, extending her literature review to include a total of 141 articles. Since past reviews have focused on categorizing results based upon various independent variables, we instead synthesize and look at the trends of these based upon the four (...) ethical decision making categories: Awareness, Behavior, Judgment, and Intention. We focus on the moderation and mediation effects found within these studies and provide an in-depth analysis of future trends. Furthermore, we also highlight key statistical and methodological concerns, outline overarching trends, and directions of future research in empirical ethical decision making. (shrink)

Maximize Presupposition! is an economy condition that adjudicates between contextually equivalent competing structures. Building on data discovered by O. Percus, I will argue that the constraint is checked in the local contexts of embedded constituents. I will argue that this architecture leads to a general solution to the problem of antipresupposition projection, and also allows I. Heim’s ‘Novelty/Familiarity Condition’ to be eliminated as a constraint on operations of context change.

In this article, I examine children's reported experiences with stimulant drug treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in light of bioethical arguments about the potential threats of psychotropic drugs to authenticity and moral agency. Drawing on a study that involved over 150 families in the USA and the UK, I show that children are able to report threats to authenticity, but that the majority of children are not concerned with such threats. On balance, children report that stimulants improve their capacity (...) for moral agency, and they associate this capacity with an ability to meet normative expectations. I argue that although under certain conditions stimulant drug treatment may increase the risk of a threat to authenticity, there are ways to minimise this risk and to maximise the benefits of stimulant drug treatment. Medical professionals in particular should help children to flourish with stimulant drug treatments, in good and in bad conditions. (shrink)

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

Ethics consultation is a commonly applied mechanism to address clinical ethical dilemmas. However, there is little information on the viewpoints of health care providers towards the relevance of ethics committees and appropriate application of ethics consultation in clinical practice. We sought to use qualitative methodology to evaluate free-text responses to a case-based survey to identify thematically the views of health care professionals towards the role of ethics committees in resolving clinical ethical dilemmas. Using an iterative and reflexive model we identified (...) themes that health care providers support a role for ethics committees and hospitals in resolving clinical ethical dilemmas, that the role should be one of mediation, rather than prescription, but that ultimately legal exposure was dispositive compared to ethical theory. The identified theme of legal fears suggests that the mediation role of ethics committees is viewed by health care professionals primarily as a practical means to avoid more worrisome medico-legal conflict. (shrink)

The catch 22 situation in psychiatry is that for precise diagnostic categories/criteria, we need precise investigative tests, and for precise investigative tests, we need precise diagnostic criteria/categories; and precision in both diagnostics and investigative tests is nonexistent at present. The effort to establish clarity often results in a fresh maze of evidence. In finding the way forward, it is tempting to abandon the scientific method, but that is not possible, since we deal with real human psychopathology, not just concepts to (...) speculate over. Search for clear-cut definitions/diagnostic criteria in psychiatry must be relentless. There is a greater need to be ruthless and blunt in this, rather than being accommodative of diverse opinions. Investigative tests - psychological, serum, CSF, or neuroimaging - are only corroborative at present; they need to become definitive. Medicalisation appears most prominent in psychiatry; so, diagnostic proliferation and fuzziness appear inevitable. And yet, the established diagnostic entities need to forward greater and conclusive precision. Also, the need for clarity and precision must outweigh pandering to and mollifying diverse interests, moreso in the upcoming revision of diagnostic manuals. This is specially because the DSM-5, being an Association manual, may need to accommodate powerful member lobbies; and ICD-11 may similarly need to cater to diverse country lobbies. Finding precise biological correlates of psychiatric phenomena, whether through neuroimaging, molecular neurobiology and/or neurogenomics, is the right way forward. It is in the 1.5-kg structure in the cranium that all secrets of psychiatric conditions lie. Social forces, behavioural modification, psychosocial restructuring, study of intrapsychic processes, and philosophical insights are not to be discounted, but they are supplementary to the primary goal - studying and deciphering those brain processes that result in psychiatric malfunction. Experimental breakthroughs, both in psychiatric aetiology and therapeutics, will come mainly from biology and its adjunct, psychopharmacology; while supplementary and complementary breakthroughs will come from the psychosocial, cognitive and behavioural approaches; the support base will come from phenomenology, epidemiology, nosology and diagnostics; while insights and leads can hopefully come from many fields, especially the psychosocial, the behavioural, the cognitive and the philosophical. Major energies must now be marshalled towards finding biomarkers and deciphering the precise phenotype-genotype-endophenotype axis of psychiatric disorders. Energies also need to be focussed on unravelling those critical processes in the brain that tip the scale towards psychiatric disorders. At how those critical processes are set into motion by forces de novo, in utero, in the genes and their expression, by the environment's psychopathological social forces - stress, peer pressure, poverty, deprivation, alienation, malnutrition, discrimination of various types (caste, gender, race, etc.), mass conflicts (war, terror attacks, etc.), disasters (natural and man-made), religious/ideological fascism - or social institutions like marriage, family, work place, political governance, etc. Ultimately, we must decipher how the brain goes into malfunction when such varied forces impinge on it, which precise cortical areas and neuronal cellular and molecular processes are involved in such malfunction and its manifestation, as also which of these are involved when malfunction ceases and health is restored, and the psychosocial processes and institutions which aid such health restoration, as also those which promote well-being and help in primary prevention. Emphasis on the brain and its intimate neurological and molecular mechanisms will not impinge on, or nullify, importance of the 'mind,' wherein subtle and gross brain functions in the form of behaviour, thought and emotions in all their ramifications will continue to be the focus of psychological, cognitive, sociological, psychopharmacological, behavioural and philosophical research. Progress in brain research must move in tandem with progress in 'mind' research. (shrink)

The study of the temporal structure of events in natural language is of prime importance in linguistics. Though there has been recent progress on formal theories of events, these theories do not address certain syntactic and semantic properties peculiar to languages such as Hindi. This paper concentrates on properties related to perfectivity. It motivates a small number of semantic features for events and their objects, such as whether an object exists independently of an event, whether it is totally affected by (...) the event, and so on. It then formalizes these features. It also shows how they can be formalized in an algebraic framework and applied in a categorial grammar to derive the properties of verbal and nominal predicates. The result is an integration of descriptive semantics with algebraic theories of objects and events. (shrink)

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how (...) diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders. Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. (shrink)

Summary Liberals, from Mill to Rawls see personal autonomy as paramount in civil society. They see human dignity to consist essentially in personal autonomy, that is, ?in the ability of each person to determine for himself or herself a view of the good life? (Taylor, C. (1992) p. 27). Multiculturalism and ?The Politics of Recognition? p. 57 (Princeton, Princeton University Press). This emphasis on personal autonomy underlies much of liberal emphasis on freedom of conscience, justice, rights and fairness. Its core (...) thesis is that a just society seeks not to promote any particular view of the good life, but enables its citizens to pursue their own ends consistent with a similar liberty for all others. Yet, when some citizens in America attempted to pursue their own view of the good life, they came up against head?on conflict with the liberal state. These groups saw civic education with its emphasis on individual choice, on reflecting and weighing of alternative viewpoints and on personal autonomy, as threatening to their way of life and to their fundamental religious beliefs, and consequently they challenged the state in the courts. What ensued raised profound educational problems for educating children, parental rights, and the right of the State in a liberal democratic society, which are discussed in this paper. (shrink)

_The first part called the Preamble tackles: (a) the issues of silence and speech, and life and disease; (b) whether we need to know some or all of the truth, and how are exact science and philosophical reason related; (c) the phenomenon of Why, How, and What; (d) how are mind and brain related; (e) what is robust eclecticism, empirical/scientific enquiry, replicability/refutability, and the role of diagnosis and medical model in psychiatry; (f) bioethics and the four principles of beneficence, non-malfeasance, (...) autonomy, and justice; (g) the four concepts of disease, illness, sickness, and disorder; how confusion is confounded by these concepts but clarity is imperative if we want to make sense out of them; and how psychiatry is an interim medical discipline. The second part called The Issues deals with: (a) the concepts of nature and nurture; the biological and the psychosocial; and psychiatric disease and brain pathophysiology; (b) biology, Freud and the reinvention of psychiatry; (c) critics of psychiatry, mind-body problem and paradigm shifts in psychiatry; (d) the biological, the psychoanalytic, the psychosocial and the cognitive; (e) the issues of clarity, reductionism, and integration; (f) what are the fool-proof criteria, which are false leads, and what is the need for questioning assumptions in psychiatry. The third part is called Psychiatric Disorder, Psychiatric Ethics, and Psychiatry Connected Disciplines. It includes topics like (a) psychiatric disorder, mental health, and mental phenomena; (b) issues in psychiatric ethics; (c) social psychiatry, liaison psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, forensic psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry. The fourth part is called Antipsychiatry, Blunting Creativity, etc. It includes topics like (a) antipsychiatry revisited; (b) basic arguments of antipsychiatry, Szasz, etc.; (c) psychiatric classification and value judgment; (d) conformity, labeling, and blunting creativity. The fifth part is called The Role of Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality in Psychiatry. It includes topics like (a) relevance of philosophy to psychiatry; (b) psychiatry, religion, spirituality, and culture; (c) ancient Indian concepts and contemporary psychiatry; (d) Indian holism and Western reductionism; (e) science, humanism, and the nomothetic-idiographic orientation. The last part, called Final Goal, talks of the need for a grand unified theory. The whole discussion is put in the form of refutable points._. (shrink)

La literatura nacida en ámbito monástico o asociada al mismo, ofrece aspectos ponderables sobre la antropología teológica. Señalaremos algunos conceptos al respecto, sobre todo a partir de la memoria y la construcción de la propia identidad. El Himno de la Perla se caracteriza por haber sido objeto de disímiles interpretaciones, siendo considerado desde un texto iranio a una composición gnóstica. Presentaremos una lectura narrativa, tomando como categorías de aproximación el recuerdo y el olvido, a partir de las cuales plantearemos un (...) posible vínculo entre el Himno de la Perla y el Pseudo-Macario. Quispel, ya en 1967, estableció un parentesco de Teología (Verwandschaft der Teologie), destacando que también se encuentran paralelismos de forma. Tomando en cuenta este notable aporte, procuraremos indagar en la literatura pseudo-macariana acerca de tales parentescos con el Himno de la Perla y la literatura sobre el apóstol Tomás. (shrink)

The uniqueness of Psychiatry as a medical speciality lies in the fact that aside from tackling what it considers as illnesses, it has perchance to comment on and tackle many issues of social relevance as well. Whether this is advisable or not is another matter; but such a process is inevitable due to the inherent nature of the branch and the problems it deals with. Moreover this is at the root of the polarization of psychiatry into opposing psychosocial and biological (...) schools. This gets reflected in their visualization of scope, in definitions and in methodology as well. Whilst healthy criticism of one against the other school is necessary, there should be caution against hasty application of one's frame of reference to an approach that does not intend to follow, or conform to, one's methodology. This should be done within the referential framework of the school critically evaluated, with due consideration for its methods and concepts. Similarly, as at present, there is no evidence to prove one or the other of these approaches as better, aside from personal choice. We can say so even if there is a strong paradigm shift towards the biological at present. A renaissance of scientific psychoanalysis coupled with a perceptive neurobiology which can translate those insights into testable hypotheses holds the greatest promise for psychiatry in the future. This suggests the need for unification of diverse appearing approaches to get a more comprehensive and enlightened worldview. It requires a highly integrative capacity. Just as a physicist thinks simultaneously in terms of particles and waves, a psychiatrist must think of motives, emotions and desires in the same breath as neurobiology, genetics and psychopharmacology. However, the integration must be attempted without destroying the internal cohesiveness of the individual schools. This will give a fair chance for polarization in which a single proper approach in psychiatry could emerge, which may be a conglomerate of diverse appearing approaches of today, or one which supersedes the rest. A synthesis of cognitive psychology and neuroscience offers the greatest promise at present. (shrink)

While liberals see personal autonomy as paramount in civil society and as intrinsic to human dignity and human rights, others, such as communitarians, see group rights as intrinsic to human development and human welfare. Thus, while generally liberals give no or very little place in their thinking to right-bearing groups or collective entities, others see communities as conditions for self-fulfilment and individual freedom. This paper explores these two positions and argues that a cultural, pluralist, democratic society will be characterised by (...) a diversity of controversial moral positions at a range of levels. The paper offers discussion as a method of reconciling controversial moral positions, in general and in classrooms, in particular. (shrink)

The aim of this article was to discuss the modeling and control method of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. In the process of modeling, mechanism modeling and experimental testing are combined, especially the motor and propeller are modeled in detail. Through the understanding of the body structure and flight principle of the quadrotor UAV, the Newton–Euler method is used to analyze the dynamics of the quadrotor UAV, and the mathematical model of the UAV is established under the small angle rotation. Process (...) identifier is used to control it. First, the attitude angle of the model is controlled by PID, and based on this, the speed in each direction is controlled by PID. Then, the PID control of the four rotor aircraft with the center of gravity offset is simulated by MATLAB. The results show that the pitch angle and roll angle can be controlled by 5 degrees together without center of gravity deviation, and the PID can effectively control the control quantity and achieve the desired effect in a short time. Classical BP algorithm, classical GA-BP algorithm, and improved GA-BP algorithm were trained, respectively, with a total of 150 sets of training data, training function uses Levenberg-Marquardt, and performance function uses mean squared error. In the background of the same noise, the improved GA-BP algorithm has the highest detection rate, classical GA-BP algorithm is the second, and classical BP algorithm is the worst. The simulation results show that the PID control law can effectively control the attitude angle and speed of the rotor UAV in the case of center of gravity deviation. (shrink)

Charles Darwin remarked that “males, with their superior strength, pugnacity, armaments, unwieldly passion and love songs, are almost always the more active and most often, the initiators of sexual interactions”.1 Here, we propose that such male sex drive directly impacts the genome by leading to its progressive masculinization—genes that possess sex-specific effects on male fitness accumulate to a much greater extent and are generally more diverged.2,3 The larger proportion of male versus female fitness modifiers in combination with stronger sexual selection (...) may generate evolutionary signatures such as a greater sensitivity to male sterility4 and a paucity of X-linked male-specific genes.5-8 Male sex-drive theory complements the female-choice theory of sexual selection and allows for the genetic variation of costly sexual traits to be continuously replenished. BioEssays 27: 518–525, 2005. © 2005 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to examine critical ways of displacing the meaning of journey – as minor rhythms and motions of everyday life. The everyday and its cyclical nature embedded in a productive life within the capitalist social regime is seen as an unexotic site of quotidian struggle. It warrants our attention only when the body asserts its presence at the site of rebellion or resistance. This is frequently reported as an exception to the given norm. The concrete reality (...) of our given material conditions is always fermenting and churning towards the “not yet”. Patterns of the everyday are seen as an extraordinary event or rupture only when the body rebels. My contention is that this journey of the body-politic is not embedded in a certain moment of its arrival or departure, from point A to B, but marked by dynamic, shifting vectors that are capable of a “leap”. In, against and beyond the spectre of capital, this paper will try to outline and discuss these minor perforations in time through the Shaheen Bagh protests and the migrant exodus during the pandemic in India. (shrink)

Pylyshyn's target article argues that perception is not inferential, but this is true only under a narrow construal of inference. A more general construal is possible, and has been used to provide formal theories of many visual capacities. This approach also makes clear that the evolution of natural constraints need not converge to the “veridical” state of the world.