Building legal domain ontologies is a prominent challenge in the ontology engineering community. The ontology builders confront issues such as the complexity of the legal domain, the difficulty of applying existing ontology engineering approaches, and the intention of developing legal models faithful to realities. In this paper, we discuss constructing a well-founded legal domain ontology, named CargO-S, for the traceability of goods in logistic sea corridors. For building CargO-S, a pattern-oriented approach is applied, supported by ontology-driven conceptual modeling, ontology layering, (...) and ontology reuse processes. CargO-S is grounded in the unified foundational ontology UFO by using the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML. Besides, ontology layering is proposed to simplify the development process by dividing CargO-S into three layers located at different granularity levels: upper, core, and domain. For building the upper and core layers, conceptual ontology patterns are reused from the foundational ontology UFO and the legal core ontology UFO-L. These patterns are applied, either by extension or analogy with legal rules, for building the domain layer. CargO-S is then validated by implementing the ontology as OWL and SWRL rules. Finally, the performance and the semantic accuracy of CargO-S are evaluated using a dual evaluation approach. (shrink)

Current understanding of Mill as a founding father of liberalism is a Cold War creation. Discarding this conception opens the way to a general reassessment of his thought: who was the historical Mill? He did not define himself as liberal and there is no simple template. Most obviously he is a pluralist, defined by a plural heritage received through his father. This framework permitted great creativity in political and social theory, but it was diffuse. The one clear unifying theme is (...) a unique conception of a hierarchy of intellect founded on the inexorable accumulation of positive knowledge. The one important exception to this is political economy. What stands out overall is his individuality, where Mill embodies his own ideal. So apart from political economy, where he could be identified in more conventional terms, his nineteenth-century legacy was personal and incalculably diffusive rather than doctrinaire. This left it ripe for twentieth-century re-invention. (shrink)

This book provides a radical rethinking of the prominent Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore, exploring how his philosophy of education relates to the ideas of Western theorists such as Kant, Plato and Aristotle. Tagore's thoughts on pedagogy, university and formal education are subjected to a fascinating critique within Ghosh's transcultural framework, referencing a wide range of thinkers across varying time periods, places, and cultures, and developing a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of thinking and writing. The book (...) changes the way we have so far thought about the educationist Tagore, and will be of interest to scholars and specialists of literature, Indian history, and philosophy of education. It is political, deeply philosophical and has a transcultural take on our understanding of a variety of issues relating to Tagore and to philosophy of education in general. (shrink)

Papers presented at the National Seminar on Language, Interpretation and Understanding: Hermeneutics from East-West Perspective, held in 2005 at the University of North Bengal in India.

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today.Qualifying the "non-historian" as an "able" interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between ...

Ghosh introduces the term 'plastic turn' and gives a new direction for how we can interpret and experience the turn today. By what he calls the material-aesthetic, he opens up a fresh direction in our experience and understanding of plastic through the correspondence that plastic as a material brings with the aesthetic that it inspires and figures"-.

How do people reason about their opponent in turn-taking games? Often, people do not make the decisions that game theory would prescribe. We present a logic that can play a key role in understanding how people make their decisions, by delineating all plausible reasoning strategies in a systematic manner. This in turn makes it possible to construct a corresponding set of computational models in a cognitive architecture. These models can be run and fitted to the participants’ data in terms of (...) decisions, response times, and answers to questions. We validate these claims on the basis of an earlier game-theoretic experiment about the turn-taking game “Marble Drop with Surprising Opponent”, in which the opponent often starts with a seemingly irrational move. We explore two ways of segregating the participants into reasonable “player types”. The first way is based on latent class analysis, which divides the players into three classes according to their first decisions in the game: Random players, Learners, and Expected players, who make decisions consistent with forward induction. The second way is based on participants’ answers to a question about their opponent, classified according to levels of theory of mind: zero-order, first-order and second-order. It turns out that increasing levels of decisions and theory of mind both correspond to increasing success as measured by monetary awards and increasing decision times. Next, we use the logical language to express different kinds of strategies that people apply when reasoning about their opponent and making decisions in turn-taking games, as well as the ‘reasoning types’ reflected in their behavior. Then, we translate the logical formulas into computational cognitive models in the PRIMs architecture. Finally, we run two of the resulting models, corresponding to the strategy of only being interested in one’s own payoff and to the myopic strategy, in which one can only look ahead to a limited number of nodes. It turns out that the participant data fit to the own-payoff strategy, not the myopic one. The article closes the circle from experiments via logic and cognitive modelling back to predictions about new experiments. (shrink)

This paper presents an attempt to bridge the gap between logical and cognitive treatments of strategic reasoning in games. There have been extensive formal debates about the merits of the principle of backward induction among game theorists and logicians. Experimental economists and psychologists have shown that human subjects, perhaps due to their bounded resources, do not always follow the backward induction strategy, leading to unexpected outcomes. Recently, based on an eye-tracking study, it has turned out that even human subjects who (...) produce the outwardly correct ‘backward induction answer’ use a different internal reasoning strategy to achieve it. The paper presents a formal language to represent different strategies on a finer-grained level than was possible before. The language and its semantics help to precisely distinguish different cognitive reasoning strategies, that can then be tested on the basis of computational cognitive models and experiments with human subjects. The syntactic framework of the formal system provides a generic way of constructing computational cognitive models of the participants of the Marble Drop game. (shrink)

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one-upmanship, we encounter a presumptuousness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one’s own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one’s own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, (...) neuter the possibilities of knowledge-sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the Chinese know as history. Accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense-generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a resurgent interest in the philosophical dimension of cultural products—cinema, in particular. Rather than analyzing the production, dissemination and reception of particular films through literary, cultural, sociological or psychological theories, one considers film as “doing the work” of theory/philosophy. This essay argues that cinema's possibility of being/becoming philosophy will emerge only if one remains open to the inconsistencies of the cinematic text, rather than seek to posit a mythical point of origin that reduces representation (...) to its effective functionality, thereby announcing the death of thinking. Following the ways in which Adorno and Horkheimer indicate the deep ontological significance of the myth of origin involved in the logic of Enlightenment, this essay attempts to offer responsibility, vigilance and hesitation as alternative ways of engaging with thought. Cinema, this essay finally claims, can offer a model with which thinking, as philosophy proper, can be recovered from its mythical origin. (shrink)

There are two important aspects of any democratic decision: aggregation of preferences and deliberation about preferences. They are essential and complementary components of any decision making process. While the well-studied process of aggregation focuses on accumulating individual preferences without discussing their origin [4], deliberation can be seen as a conversation through which individuals justify their preferences, a process that might lead to changes in their opinions as they get influenced by one another. Till now, there has been a lot of (...) work on the ‘aggregation’ aspect (e.g., [12, 14, 6]). However, some recent work has focussed on the deliberation aspect as well [8, 9, 10, 15]. Sometimes, deliberation does not lead to unanimity in preferences, but the discussion can lead to some ‘preference uniformity’ (see how deliberation can help in bypassing social choice theory’s impossibility results in [5]), which might facilitate their eventual aggregation. In addition, the combination of both processes provides a more realistic model for decision making scenarios. In light of this status quo, our focus is on the formal study of achieving such preference uniformities, e.g., single-peaked, single-caved, single-crossing, value-restricted, best-restricted, worst-restricted, medium-restricted, or group-separable profiles. In this short abstract we provide our preliminary ideas towards achieving singlepeakedness of preference profiles via deliberation. In what follows, we define two preference upgrade operators based on [8, 9] and provide a preliminary discussion on how single-peaked preference profiles can be achieved through such operations. We will delve into the details of the logical language in the main paper. (shrink)

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or (...) post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

On Indic philosophy in the light of Buddhism; transcript of author's lectures; includes bibliography of the author.

The present paper deals with the idea of understanding Vedic ethics as a code of righteous living, in the light of Mīmāṁsā philosophy. The paper also intends to reflect upon the possibility of such methods as a means of attaining liberation. In other words, the Vedas provide us with prescriptive codes of right and wrong actions. It commands us about duties and non-duties, through the performance of rituals, in order to lead a good life. We know that human endeavours are (...) primarily based on attaining the desired, and to prevent the unwanted ends. Hence, the entire effort of human actions lies in the fact that we want to attain the cessation of sufferings. This paves the way for studies in Soteriology, and the question arises that, could the Vedas be considered as a literature on Soteriology. The paper consists of a number of sections. The initial ones involve the linguistic analysis of the Vedic statements based on Sanskrit grammar and semantics. These are aimed at depicting the manner in which Vedic sentences act as prescriptive ethical codes. The latter ones deal with the questions raised by the opposing schools, namely Sāṁkhya-Yoga, against the idea of considering Vedas as a supreme sanction of means, leading beings to their salvation from empirical sufferings, and their plausible responses. Keywords: duties, ends, sacrifices, knowledge, liberation. (shrink)

Atish R. Ghosh is Chief of the Policy Review Division of the Policy Development and Review Department of the International Monetary Fund.

fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists.

The present paper shows whether there is cognition without any content. Generally, “cognition” means “cognition of something.” But in the Advaita Vedanta system of philosophy there is pure knowledge having no content called contentless cognition leading to certain philosophical problems.

The concern of this paper is to critique the political conception of nationalism as a theory of the nation-state. The basic point of the critique is that when the interests of the nation and the principles of the state coincide there emerges a fierce sense of national identity which endangers moral indifference to outsiders, the people within and outside the national boundary, without remorse. Here the attempt to uphold national identity is something more than nationhood. Besides involving territorial identity, common (...) language, custom and culture essential to the idea of a “nation,” it also upholds the consciousness of these as determining separate rights and allegiances, the idea of attachment to a nation and its interests. Such a consciousness can emerge only on the adoption of certain populist ideas such as racism, ethnicity and even such popular elusive myths as the “greatness” of a nation, the urge for the maintenance of “national character,” etc. Such “nationalist xenophobia” leads to the intensification of the distinction between the “own” and the “other,” “national” and the “alien,” the “citizen” and the “migrant” leading to “ethnic disharmony,” “colour bias,” hatred and suspicion of persons with whom one has lived closely as neighbours for decades. The most popular is the economic discourse of the “migrants” putting the “nationals” out of work. All this has its toll on multi-culturalism and humanitarian concerns. Many affluent nations have become cold to human misery, suffering and deaths from wars, terrorism, acute poverty, political persecution, environmental degradation, etc. This has created an “existential” crisis for millions of people on earth. (shrink)