Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 37-48, May–June 2022.

Dignity of risk is a simple concept that is surprisingly hard to enact, honor, and prioritize in health care. The term was coined 50 years ago by Robert Perske in an article entitled "The Dignity of Risk and the Mentally Retarded". And as I have written in "Discharge Decisions and the Dignity of Risk", "the concept involves respect for persons, self-determination, and attempts to minimize paternalism or parentalism". Most simply, the dignity of risk embraces respecting or honoring an individual's choices (...) or decisions even in the face of potential harms.The central tension between safety/protection and autonomy/self-determination is at the core of the concept, but it also involves appraisals... (shrink)

Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews (...) and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and ‘translatedness’ in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future. (shrink)

Mrs. Smith's eyes filled with tears as she said, “I feel like I've done something wrong. Are they punishing me because I've been refusing therapy and won't go to a nursing home?” She acknowledged that she hadn't always listened to her doctors but said that she knew better now and wanted to go home and see if she could make it work. Many staff members at our rehabilitation hospital had explained their safety concerns to her, and some had enlisted her (...) adult daughter, with whom she lived, to convince her too. The rehabilitation team had called on the ethics consultation service, of which I am a part, to help figure out whether Mrs. Smith had the capacity to make an informed refusal of discharge recommendations. (shrink)

This article tries to explore the shifts in contemporary urban Bengali cinema and map and historicize the main trends in relation to changes in the political fortunes of the city. In this context, the article tentatively wishes to accomplish two things: one, to show the main trends in urban Bengali film-making, post-1990s; and two, to read closely two recent Bengali films, in a search for ways of mapping this newness. The article first identifies three new possibilities in Bengali cinema: first, (...) the inward-looking, often apolitical sketches that celebrate liberal development and psychosomatic indulgences, second, the sentimental, community-based films that sometimes take political changes on board as well, and attempt to bridge the rural-urban divide; third, cult-ish films of a newer pedigree that show impatience with old Left and progressive values, and are also technically experimental and avant-garde. The second objective of the article is to discuss specifically two contemporary filmmakers – Moinak Biswas and Suman Mukhopadhay – and place their films within this ferment. (shrink)

This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments and their postcolonial afterlives. As temporary landscapes, silts and sediments pose (...) a unique problem for historians, for they leave scanty archival traces. When they emerge in the state archive it is as sites of conflict, rather than sites of life. They also emerge as a problem for science to map and solve. This essay gathers some snippets of the fragmentary journey of shoals as they emerge and disappear in the scientific and legal archive. Focusing on three moments of interruption in the colonial and postcolonial encounters with the littorals of the Bengal Delta, it argues that the inability of scientific discourse to come up with a conceptual grammar was conducive to new legal articulations about these spaces. Unfortunately, the consequences of this are playing out in the contemporary moment as a humanitarian crisis. (shrink)

Spivak's essay on ethics and politics is infused with a concern to bring forward the way the 'literary' works in the production of ethics and politics. The notion of ethics that she uses here is far removed from an inventory of moral principles or moral action. Instead, the ethical, here, is something like a much broader notion of a mentality, or sensibility, which remains part of ones being.

This article deals with the concept of greed as pertaining to Business Ethics in today’s world, considered part of the system of the study Ethics as such, in the backdrop of the recent happenings in the financial world in the USA, whose repercussions have been felt all over. The analysis draws inspiration from the words in the Mahabharata, both with a view to improving the existing theories in place in the West today, as well as having a handle on greed (...) management so needed to set liberalism on the right footing. The article brings into focus the secular spirituality imbedded in the epic relating to the concept harmony, without recourse to God parlance, a virtue around which the ethical considerations move, bringing a needed improvement on the Virtue Ethics of today, and harmonizing the three conflicting ethical theories of the day. Greed management is effective only when we look beyond science to the area of values putting the right emphasis on Virtue Ethics. (shrink)

"This is an original work by an eminent teacher of Philosophy and Religion who can present the best results of Indian and Western scholarship and evaluate them in the light of unbiased insight. The chapters on comparison of Bengal Vaisnavism with Christianity and Existentialism are highly stimulating. The book is indispensable to those advanced students of oriental philosophy and religions who are devoted to research work, since no knowledge or oriental philosophy and religion will be complete without a clear understanding (...) of Vedanta and the different types of Vaisnavism.". (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 1-4, December 2011.

This book presents a rethinking of the world legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in this era of unspeakable global violence. Through interdisciplinary research, key Gandhian concepts are revisited by tracing their genealogies in multiple histories of world contact and by foregrounding their relevance to contemporary struggles to regain the ‘humane’ in the midst of global conflict. The relevance of Gandhian notions of ahimsa and satyagraha is assessed in the context of contemporary events, when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with (...) the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial capital to reduce the world to a state of international lawlessness. Covering a wide and comprehensive range of topics such as Gandhi’s vegetarianism and medical practice, his successes and failures as a litigator in South Africa, his experiments with communal living and his concepts of non-violence and satyagraha. The book combines historical, philosophical, and textual readings of different aspects of the leader’s life and works. _Rethinking Gandhi in a New World Order_ will be of interest to students and academics interested in peace and conflict studies, South Asian history, world history, postcolonial studies, and studies on Gandhi. (shrink)

Self Learning Material Bachelor of Arts Philosophy Semester Iv BPYC Western Philosophy: Modern Block-2 Rationalism.

As ethics consultants on a busy consult service in a large urban setting, we would approach this case by gathering more information and context. This involves clarifying the clinical facts, underst...

This chapter aims to examine parallels between two ancient Indian philosophical schools, Jaina (Jainism) of Mahāvīra and Ajñāna (Unending Agnosticism) of Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta. Jaina and Ajñāna traditions were a part of the Non-Vedic larger Śramaṇa movement of seventh to sixth-century BCE India, where Śramaṇa were monastics, who dwelled in forests and lived a retired life, focussing themselves in the search of discovering the knowledge of truth, reality and existence. Sañjaya and Mahāvīra were contemporaries and were a prominent and well-known Śramaṇa (...) of their time. The chapter is broadly divided into two parts, with two sections each. The first part aims to discuss Sañjaya’s ajñānavāda (epistemological method) and Mahāvīra’s doctrine of anekāntavāda (metaphysical pluralism) and saptabhanginaya (sevenfold predication). The second part aims to explore the logical relationship and similarities between ajñānavāda and anekāntavāda and its metaphysical consequences, and conclusively the major part of the paper will discuss the claim first made by the German Jaina scholar Hermann Jacobi, about the possible influence that Sañjaya’s ajñānavāda had on the establishment of Mahāvīra’s anekāntavāda. In brief, the chapter intends to present and discuss the contemporary scholarship claims on Sañjaya and his possible influence it had on the development of the Jaina thought. (shrink)

During the Post Vedic period, the ascetic tradtion of the Śramaṇa which comprosed of various sects and their particular philosophies emerged as a form of a movement against orthodoxy in ancient India. Śramaṇas were wanderers who lived a retired life and focussed in seeking truth and emancipation if there was any. The paper explores the tradition and discusses the orientation of the various denominations that existed at the time within the Śramaṇa movement. The paper attempts to compare and show relationship (...) between the Śramaṇa and the Brāhamanas. Brāhmanas were people who adhered to the Vedic knowledge and paid importance in performing social, monetary and everyday life duties. The major concern of the paper is to present Ajñānavāda as a unique school within the Śramaṇa tradition in terms of their philosophical approach. The paper focusses on the Ajñāna thinker Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta, and shows how the appraoch taken by him went at that time beyond the philosophies of the Śramaṇas and the Brāhamanas. (shrink)

The major challenge in complex disease genetics is to understand the fundamental features of this complexity and why functional alterations at multiple independent genes conspire to lead to an abnormal phenotype. We hypothesize that the various genes involved are all functionally united through gene regulatory networks (GRN), and that mutant phenotypes arise from the consequent perturbation of one or more rate‐limiting steps that affect the function of the entire GRN. Understanding a complex phenotype thus entails unraveling the details of each (...) GRN, namely, the transcription factors that bind to cis regulatory elements affected by sequence variants altering transcription of specific genes, and their mutual feedback relationships. These GRNs can be identified through their rate‐limiting steps and are best uncovered by genomic analyses of rare, extreme phenotype families, thus providing a coherent molecular basis to complex traits and disorders. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 145-158, December 2011.

As I organize a pile of ethics consult chart notes in New York City in mid‐April 2020, I look at the ten cases that I have co‐consulted on recently. Nine of the patients were found to be Covid positive. The reasons for the consults are mostly familiar—surrogate decision‐making, informed refusal of treatment, goals of care, defining futility. But the context is unfamiliar and unsettling. Bioethicists are in pandemic mode, dusting off and revising triage plans. Patients and potential patients are fearful—of (...) the disease itself and of the amplification of health disparities and inequities. There is much to contemplate, but as I go through my cases, I worry about disability, about biases and racist stereotypes. In this pandemic, historically marginalized communities are at risk of further disenfranchisement. (shrink)

I am leading a debriefing session—the second part of a three-part model we have started for ethics consultations at our rehabilitation hospital. The debriefing is loosely organized. We begin with follow-up from a recent ethics consultation. For some team members, this is a time to learn how ethics was involved and how things got resolved. I then ask for their responses to the case: what went right, what went wrong.One team member remarks, "I was angry at Maria's daughter. She never (...) let anyone get a word in edgewise, including her mother." Another says, "I was emotionally exhausted. Her daughter was manipulative. She was good at splitting the team and playing us against each other." Respecting the patient's .. (shrink)

What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In _Sing the Rage_, Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak—to cry, scream, and wail—about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public (...) emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities. Chakravarti takes up the issue from Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, who famously understood both the dangers of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. Building on their perspectives, she argues that the expression and reception of anger reveal truths otherwise unavailable to us about the emerging political order, the obstacles to full civic participation, and indeed the limits—the frontiers—of political life altogether. Most important, anger and the development of skills needed to truly listen to it foster trust among citizens and recognition of shared dignity and worth. An urgent work of political philosophy in an era of continued revolution, _Sing the Rage_ offers a clear understanding of one of our most volatile—and important—political responses. (shrink)

On some metaphysical problems in the context of occidental philosophy.

Machiavelli's ideas are as important in our time as in his own. His insights and prescriptions help us make sense of today's political upheavals and natural calamities and reduce them to a working order. The chapters in Machiavelli Then and Now explore Machiavelli's central concerns: statecraft and order, liberty and citizenship, diplomacy and leadership, modes of strategization, the quest for empire - all set against the basic contention between autarchy, oligarchy and democracy. They also address the ethical and behaviourial factors (...) behind political practice, such as force, suasion, ambition, corruption and vigilance in public discourse. The contributors consider the role of language, text and the imagination in Machiavelli, and they also bring the Machiavellian discourse closer to our own times, in relation to Gandhi, Gramsci and Althusser. The book will interest historians, political scientists and students of public policy; philosophers, rhetoricians and literary critics; and no less institution builders, diplomats and, administrators. (shrink)