This paper explores the level of corporate social responsibility contributions disclosed by central public sector enterprises in India. This paper analyses the nature and quality of CSR disclosures made by CPSEs listed in India following the issue of CSR guidelines by the Department of Public Enterprises for CPSEs in March 2010. The purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of CSR guidelines on the reporting practices of the CPSEs. A content analysis of annual reports across seven themes shows (...) that Human Resources and Community Development are the prime focus areas of CSR disclosures, whereas Carbon and Greenhouse Gas emissions are the least reported activity. The disclosures across all CSR themes are primarily narrative rather than quantitative or in monetary terms. The findings of the study may help policy makers in India to assess practices and devise detailed and specific CSRD requirements, rather than the current general mandatory requirements, to enhance the performance and quality of CSRDs by the CPSEs. (shrink)

In responding to this debate, Ananth both surveys the existing literature, with special focus on the work of Christopher Boorse, and argues that a naturalistic ...

Kireet Joshi, b. 1931, Indian philosopher and educationist; contributed articles.

The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable (...) with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims. (shrink)

Political protests, debates on college campuses, and social media tirades make it seem like everyone is speaking their minds today. Surveys, however, reveal that many people increasingly feel like they're walking on eggshells when communicating in public. Speaking your mind can risk relationships and professional opportunities. It can alienate friends and anger colleagues. Isn't it smarter to just put your head down and keep quiet about controversial topics? In this book, Hrishikesh Joshi offers a novel defense of speaking your (...) mind. He explains that because we are social creatures, we never truly think alone. What we know depends on what our community knows. And by bringing our unique perspectives to bear upon public discourse, we enhance our collective ability to reach the truth on a variety of important matters. Speaking your mind is also important for your own sake. It is essential for developing your own thinking. And it's a core aspect of being intellectually courageous and independent. Joshi argues that such independence is a crucial part of a well-lived life. The book draws from Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and a range of contemporary thinkers to argue that it's OK to speak your mind. Key Features Shows that we have not just a right but a moral duty to publicly share what we know. Argues that discussing your unique ideas with others is essential for developing as a critical thinker. Explores the value of intellectual honesty and independence in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche and connects their thinking to contemporary problems. Argues that avoiding cultural blind spots today is important for the fate of future generations. (shrink)

U.G. Krishnamurti famously described enlightenment as a neurobiological state of being with no religious, psychological or mystical implications. He did not lecture, did not set up organizations, held no gatherings and professed to have no message for mankind. Known as the 'anti-guru', the 'raging sage' and the 'thinker who shuns thought', U.G. spent his life destroying accepted beliefs in science, god, mind, soul, religion, love and relationships-all the props man uses to live life. Having taken away all support systems from (...) those who came to him, he refused to replace them with those of his own, always insisting that each must find his own truth. And when U.G. knew that it was time for him to go, he refused all attempts to prolong life with medical help. He let nature, and his body, take its course. On the afternoon of 22 March 2007, U.G. Krishnamurti passed away in Vallecrosia, Italy. A bare, intensely personal account of a bedside vigil with the dying, A Taste of Life records the final days that well-known film-maker Mahesh Bhatt spent with U.G. Krishnamurti. It narrates how, in death, U.G. shows the author and us a way to live life. Book jacket. (shrink)

The primary question this article deals with is one of ontology. In a dystopian world populated with genetically engineered windups and hybrids, what constitutes ‘the human’? This article looks at how the posthuman body in a dystopian novel like The Windup Girl, set in a world where geographical, political, social, economic and religious norms and boundaries are erased and reconfigured, can in no way simply remain a mere body, but transmutes into a highly complex political and social site from whence (...) multiple relations of power originate, travel and culminate in. The titular character in the novel, Emiko, is a genetically engineered windup created in a laboratory, with obedience and the need to please etched right into her DNA. This makes her a prized possession for a brothel owner in Bangkok, once her Japanese master abandons her. She is both desirable and revolting to her customers at the same time – her perfect body is too perfect, her genetic urge to please at any cost draws them in, but her involuntary shaking and robot-like jerking disgusts them. The windup can thus be seen as both the Lacanian object cause of desire and Kristeva’s abject body. (shrink)

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

A pervasive feature of democracy is disagreement. And in general, when we encounter disagreement from someone who is at least more reliable than chance, this puts some pressure on us to moderate our beliefs. But this raises the specter of asymmetric compliance—it’s not obvious what to do when we moderate our beliefs but the other party refuses to do so. Whereas an elegant solution is available when it comes to how we can to respond to our higher-order evidence while still (...) preserving democratic fairness, I argue that no such solution is forthcoming when we consider zetetic intransigence—that is, asymmetric compliance with regards to how we inquire, or gather evidence. The upshot is that democratic participation can involve messy tradeoffs with no entirely satisfactory resolution. (shrink)

Superman’s legendary powers include super‐strength, super‐speed, flight, invulnerability, x‐ray vision, heat vision, and super‐hearing. One would think those powers would be enough, but occasionally writers add new ones. This chapter considers one of his less common powers‐the ability to read minds‐and use some basic philosophical thinking about minds to ask why it never caught on as one of Supes's main powers. The chapter explains why, despite mind‐reading’s occasional usefulness, it would be philosophically prudent to eliminate it from Superman’s set of (...) powers. Given that Superman was born on Krypton and raised on Earth, there is no reason to think that he should be confident in guessing the mental states of other beings. (shrink)

A new construct, termed music receptivity, is introduced and discussed in this work. Music receptivity can be defined as a measure of the extent of internalization that an individual has, to a given piece of music, as measured at the point of listening. Through three studies, we demonstrate the psychometric properties of the construct—the Music Receptivity Scale. Exploratory factor analysis on a sample of 313 revealed good psychometric validity, with a four-factor solution, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89, and a (...) two-factor solution, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.87. The tool also had a good test–retest reliability. Overall, the tool had 20 items in the long form and 12 items in the short version. The MRS could distinguish musicians and non-musicians supporting its discriminant validity. We have also discussed the implication of the MRS in the field of music psychology. (shrink)

Fifty-five documents in a western-Himalayan language dealing with land, pilgrimage, legality and temple-economy are presented. They explicate how ‘lesser states’ patronized numerous shrines and the role of Nath-Siddha-ascetics in creating consent-to-rule, and constructing hybridity between the Hindu and Tibetan-Buddhist traditions.

Jonathan Lear argues that the established purgation, purification, and cognitive stimulation interpretations of Aristotle’s concepts of catharsis and tragic pleasure are off the mark. In response, Lear defends an anti-cognitivist account, arguing that it is the pleasure associated with imaginatively “living life to the full” and yet hazarding nothing of importance that captures Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis and tragic pleasure. This analysis reveals that Aristotle’s account of imagination in conjunction with his understanding of both specific intellectual virtues and rational emotions (...) of an educated citizen not only tells against Lear’s anti-cognitivist construal, but also divulges an alternative cognitive stimulation reading. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies would make the (...) world a much better place, particularly by improving average well-being. This essay contends that both of these argumentative strategies fail. Some immigration restrictions are not only morally justified, but morally required. (shrink)

This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one’s belief that P—the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P because it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill’s On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is (...) that on morally and politically laden issues in particular, a high degree of doxastic openness might be appropriate. (shrink)

In philosophical work on the ethics of conversational exchange, much has been written regarding the speaker side—i.e., on the rights and duties we have as speakers. This paper explores the relatively neglected topic of the duties pertaining to listeners’ side of the exchange. Following W.K. Clifford, we argue that it’s fruitful to think of our epistemic resources as common property. Furthermore, listeners have a key role in maintaining and improving these resources, perhaps a more important role than speakers. We develop (...) this idea by drawing from Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s “interactionist” picture of reason, which suggests that reasoning is essentially dialogical and relies on the epistemic vigilance of listeners. The paper defends an imperfect, prima facie duty to listen, one that is sufficiently strong to place substantial demands on individuals, but not so overly demanding as to be implausible. (shrink)

_Bringing Biology to Life _is a guided tour of the philosophy of biology, canvassing three broad areas: the early history of biology, from Aristotle to Darwin; traditional debates regarding species, function, and units of selection; and recent efforts to better understand the human condition in light of evolutionary biology. Topics are addressed using no more technical jargon than necessary, and without presupposing any advanced knowledge of biology or the philosophy of science on the part of the reader. Discussion questions are (...) also provided to encourage reader reflection. (shrink)

Censorship involves, inter alia, adopting a certain type of epistemic policy. While much has been written on the harms and benefits of free expression, and the associated rights thereof, the epistemic preconditions of justified censorship are relatively underexplored. In this paper, I argue that examining intrapersonal norms of how we ought to treat evidence that might come to us over time can shed light on interpersonal norms of evidence generation and sharing that are relevant in the context of censorship. The (...) upshot is that justified censorship requires the censor to meet a very high epistemic burden regarding the target proposition(s)—importantly, one that exceeds knowledge. (shrink)

Both before and after the publication of Isaac Newton’s particulate theory of light, numerous wave theories of light were advanced by both philosophers and scientists (e.g., René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Francesco Grimaldi, and Christiaan Huygens). What is peculiar about this list, as frequently found in the scholarly literature on light, is that it refers to individuals who do not extend much further back than the seventeenth century. A close examination of Aristotle’s account of color and light in comparison (...) to Christiann Huygens’ theory of color and light, however, reveals that Aristotle deserves to be recognized as one who antedates and foreshadows these modern wave theorists. Indeed, we shall argue that Aristotle offered the first wave theory of color and light. On Aristotle’s theory, light is the actualization of a transparent medium such as air or water that makes possible the dissemination of color through the medium in a manner analogous to the dissemination of sound through air or water. (shrink)

The present paper takes a critical posthumanist lens to study the consequences of rapid urbanisation of the Chinese landscape as presented in the short story ‘Good Hunting’, by Ken Liu. One of the main characters in the story is Yan, a huli jing (fox-spirit), whose ability to switch between her fox and human forms is severely impaired by the loss of remnant nature in China, and the subsequent erosion of the qi from the soil. It is not just the natural (...) landscape that undergoes a transformation during urbanisation – the remnants of nature do not remain untouched by this process. Beings like Yan, who continue to inhabit the place that used to be their home, do not remain the same that they were pre-urbanisation. The city changes them, moulds them in ways hitherto inconceivable, and they undergo this transmogrification of their bodies and their self in order to survive. The article draws out the historical relationship between urban spaces and (post)human bodies, with a specific focus on the Chinese body, drawing parallels between the ideals associated with the city and juxtaposing them with what it means to be posthuman. The paper also interrogates Yan’s status as a liminal entity before and after Hong Kong’s transformation, and her use of liminality as a survival strategy. (shrink)

Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Freiman and Hidalgo have argued that immigration restrictions conflict with the core commitments of liberalism. A society with immigration restrictions in place may well be optimal in some desired respects, but it is not liberal, they argue. So if you care about liberalism more deeply than you care about immigration restrictions, you should give up on restrictionism. You can’t hold on to both. I argue here that many restrictions on contractual, economic, and associational (...) liberties seem to be justified by considerations other than liberty – thus the task for Freiman and Hidalgo is to tell us why such restrictions are justified but immigration restrictions are not. Moreover, even if this worry can be addressed, I argue, liberalism is not committed to its own demise in scenarios where there exist large enough numbers of would-be immigrants who accept and endorse illiberal norms in a way that is sufficiently resistant to change. Such a commitment requires thinking of border coercion as violating an absolute deontological constraint. This, I contend, is implausible. (shrink)

Biography of U.G. Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher.

Defenders of evolutionary medicine claim that medical professionals and public health officials would do well to consider the role of evolutionary biology with respect to the teaching, research, and judgments pertaining to medical theory and practice. An integral part of their argument is that the human body should be understood as a bundle of evolutionary compromises. Such an appreciation, which includes a proper understanding of biological function and physiological homeostasis, would provide a crucial perspective regarding the understanding and securing of (...) human health needs currently lacking in the medical arena. (shrink)

All activities which are taking place in the Cosmos also exist in a human body in subtle micro-scale. Plexuses centers in a human body are the most mysterious kinds of energies. The six-center plexus system is the path of the Kundalini shakti, the primordial cosmic energy of a person. Each plexus has its own propensities (vibrating words/dimensions/vritti) and an acoustic root. These plexuses control some cluster of words of sounds and corresponding physical organs in human body. The 50 main propensities (...) of the human’s unit mind are expressed through the vibration-expression of these plexuses. These vibrations cause hormones to secrete from the corresponding glands of the human’s body. These plexuses can play very important roles in curing the diseases. According to the Theory of Nikola Tesla’s 369, there are all together 1 to 9 digital root numbers exist. All other higher or lower numbers are the combination of those digital root numbers. This statement seems quite true when we compare it with Theory of Absolutivity. If 3, 6, 9 numbers are arranged together it makes a letter Ohm (AUM) which represents actually a Sagun Bramh/Nikola Tesla’s 369 triangle which is a part of NirgunBramh having higher dimensions. Number zero is the NirgunBramh (having all the qualities but in dormant form) which does not possess any quality in action. Number 3, 6, 9 forming as an equilateral triangle of static, mutative and sentient forces representing the Black-hole which is a part of Sagun Bramh projecting Himself as a Visible World through Big-bang along with forming five basic elements such as Ethereal, Areal, Fire, Liquid and Solid. According to the biological science, life emerged in this planet from matter about four billion years ago in the form of DNA that carried the software for the development of billion of species on the way to its final destination in humans. These facts also fully support the above hypothesis of universe formations. (shrink)

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: (i) the costs to the (...) individual of being wrong are negligible, (ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and (iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way. (shrink)

This paper defends the position that the supposed gap between biological altruism and psychological altruism is not nearly as wide as some scholars (e.g., Elliott Sober) insist. Crucial to this defense is the use of James Mark Baldwin's concepts of “organic selection”and “social heredity” to assist in revealing that the gap between biological and psychological altruism is more of a small lacuna. Specifically, this paper argues that ontogenetic behavioral adjustments, which are crucial to individual survival and reproduction, are also crucial (...) to species survival. In particular, it is argued that human psychological altruism is produced and maintained by various sorts of mimicry and self-reflection in the aid of both individual and species survival. The upshot of this analysis is that it is possible to offer an account of psychological altruism that is closelytethered to biological altruism without reducing entirely the former to thelatter. (shrink)

Within the immigration debate, libertarians have typically come down in favor of open borders by defending two main ideas: i) individuals have a right to free movement; and ii) immigration restrictions are economically inefficient, so that lifting them can make everyone better off. This entry describes the rationale for open borders from a libertarian perspective (in part by analogy to the debate around minimum wage laws). Three main objections within the immigration literature are then discussed: i) the view that states (...) may restrict immigration to protect the interests (e.g. jobs) of their domestic needy; ii) the claim that restrictions are justified as a means of preserving culture; and iii) the influential argument that the right to freedom of association entails a right to exclude. These arguments are well-known, and I describe some of the compelling responses to be found in the recent literature. The essay then turns to more neglected critiques. The first concerns how liberal regimes should think about immigration from countries where the dominant norms are illiberal. The second examines the idea that political and economic institutions are sensitive to immigration policy, especially in the long run. Both of these critiques approach the topic from a non-ideal theory perspective, emphasizing the “public choice” dimensions of immigration policy. The entry closes by suggesting that this form of critique is especially important for open-borders libertarians to respond to given their general commitments to non-ideal, non-romantic theorizing in the context of government institutions and policy. (shrink)

The word “privilege” has become a part of our everyday conversations. However, it is not evident whether the various interlocutors in discussions on privilege are using it in the same sense. While different instances of privilege like white, male, or caste privilege have been discussed in contemporary academic discourses, we believe there is a lack of clarity regarding the notion of privilege. We critically analyse existing accounts of privilege to show that they leave some room for improvement. We offer an (...) alternative account of privilege as “entitlements that fail to track deserts” that circumvents prevalent definitional ambiguities and emphasises the inherent undeserving nature of privilege. The hitherto underexplored links between privileges, deserts, entitlements, and rights can help us formulate a more accurate grasp of privilege. (shrink)

The contemporary debate on the concept of health is a tug-of-war between naturalists and normativists. Although health can be valued or disvalued, naturalists argue that the concept of health is value-free. In contrast, normativists argue that the concept of health is value-laden. This dissertation examines this controversy focusing on the naturalistic concept of health defended by Christopher Boorse. Boorse claims that health and disease are value-free concepts in the sense that diseased and healthy states can be gleaned from the facts (...) of nature without an appeal to value judgments. ;The dissertation first examines Boorse's critical assessment of both the naturalist and normativist concepts of health that he rejects. Then there is a critical examination of the concept of function, which is crucial to his concept of health. Subsequently, an exegesis of Boorse's concept of health is provided. This is followed by an evaluation of the many replies by his critics and Boorse's rejoinder to them. Finally, a modified version of Boorse's concept of health is proposed taking into account some of the intractable difficulties with his theory. ;There are six main findings regarding Boorse's theory: First, Boorse successfully rejects the main normative concepts of health. Second, he is partially successful against specific naturalistic concepts of health. Third, Boorse's contextualist concept of function is not entirely persuasive. Fourth, Boorse's concept of health is persuasive because he qualifies it to accommodate differences in age, gender, and species type. Fifth, with respect to his critics, Boorse is inconsistent in his reliance on evolution and does not give a proper place to the environment in his account. Sixth, a modified version of Boorse's concept of health, which includes an evolutionary sense of function, homeostasis, and acknowledges environmental factors , is a more appropriate way to understand health. ;This dissertation arrives at three major conclusions: First, Boorse's concept of health is mainly successful in response to the normativists, but he should concede that epistemic norms are part of his concept of health. Second, an evolutionary concept of function is superior to Boorse's part-functionalist account. Third, a prominent place should be given to both homeostasis and environmental factors, along with the factors of age, sex, and species mentioned by Boorse. A modification of Boorse's account reflecting these conclusions will be a more defensible naturalistic concept of health. (shrink)