This essay uses Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. Blasim’s story depicts the psychological struggles of an Iraqi emigrant relating to his embattled sense of belonging in a Dutch society due to the recurrent nightmares of his “traumatic” past. It challenges his assimilationist fantasies. I develop Lacan’s idea of ontological lack as a structural susceptibility that is exacerbated by actual experiences of trauma to underline how racialized refugees from the war-torn global South (...) are doubly vulnerable to experiencing subjective dehiscence between their efforts to forget past war traumas and the challenges of assimilating into (white) host nations. This essay uses Blasim’s story to illustrate a serious psychological issue experienced by racialized minority subjects in white/European host countries. (shrink)

Morality bears on what we should forget. Some aspects of our identity are meant to be forgotten and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. To make the case that forgetting is an integral part of our moral duties to others, the paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I make the case that forgetting is morally evaluable and I survey three kinds of forgetting: no-trace forgetting, archival (...) forgetting, and siloing. In §2, I turn to how we practice these forms of forgetting in our everyday lives and the goods these practices facilitate by drawing on examples ranging from the expunging of juvenile arrest records to the right to privacy. In §3, I turn to how my account can help us both recognize and address a heretofore neglected source of harm caused by technology and big data. In §4, I end by addressing the concern that we lack control over forgetting and thus can't be required to forget. I argue this challenge can be answered, but there’s a harder challenge that can’t. Forgetting is under threat. To address this challenge and preserve forgetting, we must change the world. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiry strives to be the unencumbered exploration of ideas. That is, unlike scientific research which is subject to ethical oversight, it is commonly thought that it would either be inappropriate, or that it would undermine what philosophy fundamentally is, if philosophical research were subject to similar ethical oversight. Against this, I argue that philosophy is in need of a reckoning. Philosophical inquiry is a morally hazardous practice with its own risks. There are risks present in the methods we employ, (...) risks inherent in the content of the views under consideration, and risks to the subjects of our inquiry. Likely, there are more risks still. However, by starting with the identification of these three risks we can demonstrate not only why an ethics of practice is needed but also which avenues are the most promising for developing an ethics for philosophical practice. Although we might be in the business of asking questions, we do not absolve ourselves of responsibility for the risks that inquiry incurs. (shrink)

In this paper I explore three challenges to the morality of belief. First, whether we have the necessary control over our beliefs to be held responsible for them, i.e., the challenge of doxastic involuntarism. Second, the question of whether belief is really the attitude that we care about in the cases used to motivate the morality of belief. Third, whether attitudes weaker than belief, such as credence, can wrong, I then end by turning to how answers to the previous challenges (...) suggest a way of extending the morality of belief to encompass a way of thinking of the moral mind more generally. (shrink)

It is no surprise that we should be careful when it comes to what we believe. Believing false things can be costly. The morality of belief, also known as doxastic wronging, takes things a step further by suggesting that certain beliefs can not only be costly, they can also wrong. This article surveys some accounts of how this could be so. That is, how beliefs wrong.

For this book the relevant question is: What is the universeand why? So far scientists engaged in this field of investigationoccupied themselves seriously with the answering of the whatpart of the question and have just started to answer the whypart, which should normally engage the philosophers. But thelatter, barring a few, are not fully equipped to go deep into thewhat part revealed by the scientists. The gap has to be filledup. The author has taken courage to bring the what and (...) whyparts in one comprehensive volume, and try to answer both.In fact modern science and philosophy are perhaps talkingabout the same thing but in different languages. The attemptto bridge the language gap is what is most important.Sri Manoranjan Basu, the author of this profound work wasnot only a scholar of great attainments but also a researcherand sadhaka of no mean stature. (shrink)

If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s The Hobbit I don’t need to tell you that Mirkwood is a dangerous place. As bad as we might feel for Thorin and company as they try to navigate the forest and fall prey to its traps, we should feel worse for ourselves. Our world is also dangerous and difficult, but in a different way. Although it’s some comfort that the spiders of our world are smaller, it is easier to travel through Mirkwood than it (...) is to know what to believe. At least when it comes to navigating Mirkwood the directions are clear. (shrink)

In this paper, we study two companions of a logic, viz., the left variable inclusion companion and the restricted rules companion, their nature and interrelations, especially in connection with paraconsistency. A sufficient condition for the two companions to coincide has also been proved. Two new logical systems—intuitionistic paraconsistent weak Kleene logic (IPWK) and paraconsistent pre-rough logic (PPRL)—are presented here as examples of logics of left variable inclusion. IPWK is the left variable inclusion companion of intuitionistic propositional logic and is also (...) the restricted rules companion of it. PPRL, on the other hand, is the left variable inclusion companion of pre-rough logic but differs from the restricted rules companion of it. We have discussed algebraic semantics for these logics in terms of Płonka sums. This amounts to introducing a contaminating truth value, intended to denote a state of indeterminacy. (shrink)

Nearly a million Indian women lack access to safe and dignified abortion services from public healthcare facilities and instead opt to induce abortions by themselves or with the help from unskilled and unauthorized practitioners. Unsafe abortions account for an estimated 9% of all maternal deaths in India despite the legalization of abortion on all grounds since 1971 via the MTP Act. However, the Act technically does not make any provision for abortion based on a woman’s request alone, subjecting her decision (...) to the approval of her healthcare provider, limiting reproductive autonomy. Moreover, the problem of female feticide through sex‐selective abortions has also contributed to a conflicting public agenda that prioritizes preventing the former over allowing women access to abortion services for other reasons. Women who are socio‐economically, culturally, and educationally vulnerable and minors may experience further abortion related stigmatization. These ethico‐legal considerations highlight the need for transition from a provider‐centered to a woman‐centered abortion service model. (shrink)

On Jaina, Bauddha, Nyaya, Vaiśeṣika, Sankhya, Yoga, Purva-Mimamsa and Vedānta systems of Indic philosophy.

On Lokāyata, Carvaka school of Hindu philosophy on materlialism.

Several digital contact tracing smartphone applications have been developed worldwide in the effort to combat COVID-19 that warn users of potential exposure to infectious patients and generate big data that helps in early identification of hotspots, complementing the manual tracing operations. In most democracies, concerns over a breach in data privacy have resulted in severe opposition toward their mandatory adoption. This paper examines India as a noticeable exception, where the compulsory installation of such a government-backed application, the “Aarogya Setu” has (...) been deemed mandatory in certain situations. We argue that the mandatory app requirement constitutes a legitimate public health intervention during a public health emergency. (shrink)

The paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is a high-stress environment for parents, families and health care professionals (HCPs) alike. Family members experiencing stress or grief related to the admission of their sick child may at times exhibit challenging behaviours; these exist on a continuum from those that are anticipated in context, through to unacceptable aggression. Rare, extreme behaviours include threats, verbal or even physical abuse. Both extreme and recurrent ‘subthreshold’ behaviours can cause significant staff distress, impede optimal clinical care and (...) compromise patient outcomes. The unique PICU environment and model of care may magnify stressors for both families and staff and the family-centred approach to care (FCC) central to paediatric practice, may also contribute to contextual challenges. Pervasive conflict in paediatric healthcare is harmful for patients, families, PICU staff and the institution more broadly. We propose that caring for children and caring for staff are inseparable goals and the latter has been inadvertently but detrimentally deprioritised as FCC has become a primary focus. A transparent and graded hierarchy of responses to variable levels of challenging behaviour is necessary to ensure that families are supported, while HCPs remain protected in the workplace. This requires establishing firm limits supported by all teams and levels of the institution. As such, we aim to identify and clarify the context and impact of challenging parent and family behaviour in the PICU and to offer potential, proactive mitigation strategies, based on reflections and stakeholder discussion following recent clinical challenges and experiences in our unit. (shrink)

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel (...) when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief. (shrink)

We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a case that challenges this (...) orthodoxy: the case of the supposedly rational racist. We live in a world that has been, and continues to be, structured by racist attitudes and institutions. As a result, the evidence might be stacked in favour of racist beliefs. But, if there are racist beliefs that reflect reality and are rationally justified, what could be wrong with them? Moreover, how do I wrong you by believing what I epistemically ought believe given the evidence? To address this challenge, we must recognize that there are not only epistemic norms governing belief, but moral ones as well. This view, however, is at odds with the assumption that moral obligation requires a kind of voluntary control that we lack with regard to our beliefs. This background assumption motivates many philosophers to try to explain away the appearance that beliefs can wrong by locating the wrong elsewhere, e.g., in an agent’s actions. Further, even accounts that accept the thesis that racist beliefs can wrong restrict the class of beliefs that wrong to beliefs that are either false or the result of hot irrationality, e.g., the racist belief is a result of ill-will. In this paper I argue that although the these accounts will capture many of the wrongs associated with racist beliefs, they will be only partial explanations because they cannot explain the wrong committed by the supposedly rational racist. The challenge posed by the supposedly rational racist concerns our epistemic practices in a non-ideal world. The world is an unjust place, and there may be many morally objectionable beliefs it justifies. To address this challenge, we must seriously consider the thesis people wrong others in virtue of what they believe about them, and not just in virtue of what they do. (shrink)

The problem of fake news and the spread of misinformation has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. The incentives and norms that give rise to the problem, however, are not unique to journalism. Insofar as academics and journalists are working towards the same goal, i.e., publication, they are both under pressures that pervert. This chapter has two aims. First, to integrate conversations in philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphilosophy to draw out the publishing incentives that promote analogous problems (...) of fake news and misinformation in academic research communities more broadly. Second, to argue for a (partial) solution. This chapter argues that research communities benefit when authors believe what they argue for in print and it warns against attempts to loosen our publication norms to permit publishing without belief. (shrink)

Paraconsistency is commonly defined and/or characterized as the failure of a principle of explosion. The various standard forms of explosion involve one or more logical operators or connectives, among which the negation operator is the most frequent and primary. In this article, we start by asking whether a negation operator is essential for describing explosion and paraconsistency. In other words, is it possible to describe a principle of explosion and hence a notion of paraconsistency that is independent of connectives? A (...) negation-free paraconsistency resulting from the failure of a generalized principle of explosion is presented first. We also derive a notion of quasi-negation from this and investigate its properties. Next, more general principles of explosion are considered. These are also negation-free; moreover, these principles gradually move away from the idea that an explosion requires a statement and its opposite. Thus, these principles can capture the explosion observed in logics where a statement and its negation explode only in the presence of additional information, such as in the logics of formal inconsistency. (shrink)

Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) formed a key component of the ‘new sociology of technology’, which emerged in mid-1980s and heralded the entry of social constructivist theory into the domain of technology from science. A large number of empirical case studies were generated using SCOT methodology in the following three decades, encompassing a wide range of technological artefacts or systems. This essay reviews the trajectory of SCOT as a distinct intellectual tradition in technology studies. First, an attempt is made to (...) appraise and classify the main strands of criticisms against SCOT that have come up over the years. Second, this essay discusses several new conceptual heuristics, which were successively incorporated by the original authors of SCOT, along with the concomitant broadening of analytical units and research questions. We conclude that, while SCOT demonstrated its resilience as a dynamic scholarly tradition and constantly adapted itself to address criticisms through the incorporation of new conceptual tools, the consequent methodological transition had profound implications for SCOT as a theory, somewhat undermining its original agenda and methodological distinctiveness in social studies of technology. (shrink)

This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.

Marriage distance is an important variable in human genetics. The distribution of marriage distance has been studied among the Santals, a large agricultural tribe of eastern India, in the neighbourhood of Giridih, Bihar. A Type III Pearsonian curve was fitted to the observed distribution; the fit was found to be good. Possible explanations have been suggested for the distribution pattern among the Santals and for the difference with respect to this pattern between the Santals and other populations.

Increasing evidence indicates that extracellular vesicles (EVs) secreted from tumor cells play a key role in the overall progression of the disease state. EVs such as exosomes are secreted by a wide variety of cells and transport a varied population of proteins, lipids, DNA, and RNA species within the body. Gliomas constitute a significant proportion of all primary brain tumors and majority of brain malignancies. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) represents grade IV glioma and is associated with very poor prognosis despite the (...) cumulative advances in diagnostic procedures and treatment strategies. Here, the authors describe the progress in understanding the role of EVs, especially exosomes, in overall glioma progression, and how new research is unraveling the utilities of exosomes in glioma diagnostics and development of next‐generation therapeutic systems. Finally, based on an understanding of the latest scientific literature, a model for the possible working of therapeutic exosomes in glioma treatment is proposed. (shrink)

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume (...) fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes. (shrink)

Articles on political and philosophical thoughts of Michel Foucault, French philosopher, in the last decade of his career.

In this chapter, the author models alternative structures in the informal credit market as devices for extracting surplus from the borrowers, and show how extremely exploitative moneylenders may have some superficial resemblance to markets with perfectly competitive moneylenders.

This book presents the main economic argument developed by Marx in the three volumes of Capital in a coherent and comprehensive manner. It also delves into three long-standing debates in Marxist political economy: the transformation problem, the Okishio theorem, and theories of exploitation and oppression. Starting with discussions of methodology, including dialectics and historical materialism, the book explains key concepts of Marxist political economy: commodity, value, money, capital, reserve army of labour, accumulation of capital, circuit of capital, reproduction schemas, prices (...) of production, profit, interest and rent. Scholars of economics, sociology, geography, political science, anthropology, and other kindred disciplines, will find here an accessible yet rigorous treatment of Marxist political economy. (shrink)

Legal structures may form barriers to, or enablers of, adoption of precision agriculture management with small autonomous agricultural robots. This article develops a conceptual regulatory framework for small autonomous agricultural robots, from a practical, self-contained engineering guide perspective, sufficient to get working research and commercial agricultural roboticists quickly and easily up and running within the law. The article examines the liability framework, or rather lack of it, for agricultural robotics in EU, and their transpositions to UK law, as a case (...) study illustrating general international legal concepts and issues. It examines how the law may provide mitigating effects on the liability regime, and how contracts can be developed between agents within it to enable smooth operation. It covers other legal aspects of operation such as the use of shared communications resources and privacy in the reuse of robot-collected data. Where there are some grey areas in current law, it argues that new proposals could be developed to reform these to promote further innovation and investment in agricultural robots. (shrink)

This paper is about an overlooked aspect—the cognitive or epistemic aspect—of the moral demand we place on one another to be treated well. We care not only how people act towards us and what they say of us, but also what they believe of us. That we can feel hurt by what others believe of us suggests both that beliefs can wrong and that there is something we epistemically owe to each other. This proposal, however, surprises many theorists who claim (...) it lacks both intuitive and theoretical support. This paper argues that the proposal has intuitive support and is not at odds with much contemporary theorizing about what we owe to each other. (shrink)

One of the central tenets of mainstream economics is Adam Smith's proposition that, given certain conditions, self-interested behavior by individuals leads them to the social good, almost as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. This deep insight has, over the past two centuries, been taken out of context, contorted, and used as the cornerstone of free-market orthodoxy. In Beyond the Invisible Hand, Kaushik Basu argues that mainstream economics and its conservative popularizers have misrepresented Smith's insight and hampered our understanding (...) of how economies function, why some economies fail and some succeed, and what the nature and role of state intervention might be. Comparing this view of the invisible hand with the vision described by Kafka--in which individuals pursuing their atomistic interests, devoid of moral compunction, end up creating a world that is mean and miserable--Basu argues for collective action and the need to shift our focus from the efficient society to one that is also fair. Using analytic tools from mainstream economics, the book challenges some of the precepts and propositions of mainstream economics. It maintains that, by ignoring the role of culture and custom, traditional economics promotes the view that the current system is the only viable one, thereby serving the interests of those who do well by this system. Beyond the Invisible Hand challenges readers to fundamentally rethink the assumptions underlying modern economic thought and proves that a more equitable society is both possible and sustainable, and hence worth striving for. By scrutinizing Adam Smith's theory, this impassioned critique of contemporary mainstream economics debunks traditional beliefs regarding best economic practices, self-interest, and the social good. (shrink)

Historical patterns of discrimination seem to present us with conflicts between what morality requires and what we epistemically ought to believe. I will argue that these cases lend support to the following nagging suspicion: that the epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. We can resolve these seeming conflicts by adopting a framework wherein standards of evidence for our beliefs to count as justified can shift according to the moral stakes. On this account, believing a paradigmatically racist (...) belief reflects a failure to not only attend to the epistemic risk of being wrong, but also a failure to attend to the distinctively moral risk of wronging others given what we believe. (shrink)

The powerful role that teachers can play in our development is the focus Binyamin, Jayusi, and Tamir’s chapter in this volume. They argue that teachers, in particular teachers that don’t share the same background as their students, can help counter the increasing polarization that characterizes our current era. In these critical notes I raise three challenges to their proposal. First, by exploring the mechanisms of polarization I demonstrate that polarization is not a problem unique to thick diversity or thick multiculturalism. (...) Second, the central premise of the authors’ proposal rests on the ability of greater contact to reduce prejudice. The contact hypothesis, however, has numerous backlash effects and unintended consequences that can increase prejudice rather than reduce prejudice. These backlash effects and unintended consequences raise serious doubts for the success of placing minority teachers in majority classrooms to reduce prejudice. Third, I raise concerns about how the proposal tokenizes minority teachers, the use of instrumental rationales for diversity, and the politics of deference and being-in-the-room privilege that also go unaddressed in their proposal. (shrink)

A number of conditioning experiments utilize food as a reward. Hunger is considered to be a critical factor governing the animal's behavior in these experiments. Despite its significance, most theories of animal conditioning fail to take hunger into consideration while analyzing the behavioral data. In this paper, we analyze the neuroscientific data supporting the hypothesis that hunger and food consumption affect the brain's dopamine system, which in turn governs the animal's behavior. According to this hypothesis, chronic hunger results in a (...) decrease in the extra-cellular dopamine levels in the animal's brain. This decrease is believed to trigger a series of reactions that increase the responsivity of the phasic dopamine system. A direct consequence of this is an increased vigor of all dopamine-dependent behaviors. The level of extra-cellular dopamine is also modulated by the process of food consumption via the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine. Food consumption raises the dopamine above the baseline level. This rise depends on the animals' hunger, which when satisfied increases the level of Acetylcholine, which causes the dopamine level to fall back to the baseline. Thus, extra-cellular dopamine governs the response vigor, with an increase in dopamine resulting in a more vigorous response. This paper makes two primary contributions. Firstly, we present an abstract mathematical model based on the above hypothesis. Our mathematical model is able to provide a simple explanation for a number of behavioral findings. Another contribution of this paper is the development of a neurocomputational Leabra model of dopamine and acetylcholine activity in the basal ganglia to incorporate hunger and satiation. The experimental results obtained from this neural model are also largely in agreement with behavioral findings. (shrink)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2021, held virtually in September 2021. The 16 full papers and 25 short papers presented together with 16 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: design of concrete diagrams; theory of diagrams; diagrams and mathematics; diagrams and logic; new representation systems; analysis of diagrams; diagrams and computation; cognitive analysis; diagrams as (...) structural tools; formal diagrams; and understanding thought processes. 10 chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)