The legal and moral validity of euthanasia has been questioned in different situations. In India, the status of euthanasia is no different. It was the Aruna Ramachandra Shanbaug case that got significant public attention and led the Supreme Court of India to initiate detailed deliberations on the long ignored issue of euthanasia. Realising the importance of this issue and considering the ongoing and pending litigation before the different courts in this regard, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of (...) India issued a public notice on May 2016 that invited opinions from the citizens and the concerned stakeholders on the proposed draft bill entitled The Medical Treatment of Terminally Ill Patients Bill. Globally, only a few countries have legislation with discreet and unambiguous guidelines on euthanasia. The ongoing developments have raised a hope of India getting a discreet law on euthanasia in the future. (shrink)

This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, Bui (...) Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

Scientific normativity, one of the contentious issues in the philosophy of science, warrants thorough exploration to situate the epistemic role of the norms governing methodological choices in science. This paper endeavors to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of it by using Lewis' account of convention. The attempt is to develop a social conventional framework for scientific normativity. It is an epistemological framework that recognizes scientific norms governing methodological choices as social conventions. These social conventions are arrived at by appealing to (...) the values, goals, desires, and assumptions that characterize the sociality of the situation in which they emerge. We argue for a pluralistic notion of scientific normativity without being dismissive of the universalists’ central concerns. (shrink)

This book presents a critical analysis of sense-making practices through an exploration of acoustic, creative, and artistic spaces. It studies how local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are impacted by global discourses and media, such as television, popular music, digital media, and literature. The authors look at sense-making practices and spatial discourses through an interconnected discussion on thought and experience that seeks to present a multidimensional cartography of the global, the local, and the glocal, to closely analyze (...) the phenomenon of globalization. The volume is an investigation of the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview that challenges the disparity of its fragments while speculating on their synesthetic conditionality. A unique contribution, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, media studies, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, globalization studies, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and social anthropology. (shrink)

Interleukin‐1 receptor‐associated kinase‐1 (IRAK1) is linked to the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis; however, its role in macrophage foam cell formation is not known. Therefore, the present study investigated the role of IRAK1 in lipid uptake, biosynthesis, and efflux in THP‐1 derived macrophages and human monocyte‐derived macrophages (HMDMs). Ox‐LDL (40 μg/mL, 15 minutes–48 hours) treatment induced time‐dependent increase in IRAK1, IRAK4, and Stat1 activation in THP‐1 derived macrophages. IRAK1/4 inhibitor (INH) or IRAK1 siRNA significantly attenuated cholesterol accumulation, DiI‐Ox‐LDL binding, and uptake while (...) cholesterol efflux to apoAI and HDL was enhanced in THP‐1 derived macrophages and HMDMs. Ox‐LDL treatment significantly increased the mRNA expression of CD36, LOX‐1, SR‐A, ABCA1, ABCG1, Caveolin‐1, CYP27A1 while that of SR‐BI was decreased. IRAK1/4 inhibition or IRAK1 knockdown, however, attenuated Ox‐LDL‐induced CD36 expression; augmented ABCA1 and ABCG1 expression while expression of others was unaffected in THP‐1 derived macrophages and HMDMs. Moreover, IRAK1/4 inhibition had no significant effect on genes involved in lipid biosynthesis. In IRAK1/4 INH pre‐treated THP‐1 derived macrophages Ox‐LDL‐induced Stat1 phosphorylation and its binding to CD36 promoter was significantly attenuated while LXRα expression and its binding to the ABCA1/ABCG1 locus, NFATc2 activation and its binding to ABCA1 locus was enhanced. The present study thus demonstrates that IRAK regulates lipid accumulation by modulating CD36‐mediated uptake and ABCA1‐, ABCG1‐dependent cholesterol efflux. Therefore, IRAK1 can be a potential target for preventing macrophage foam cell formation. (shrink)

The roots of scientific epistemology have generally been recognized in the Greeks, Aristotle and Euclid,—the former representing an empiricist trend whereas the latter representing a rationalist trend. Very little is known about classical Indian scientific epistemologies which are generally considered at least two centuries earlier than Aristotle. Inspired by the Aristotelian and Euclidean models of scientific rationality, various new models have flourished in contemporary Western thought, the prominent ones being the logical-empiricist-inductivist model (Reichenbach), the hypothet-ico-deductivist-falsificationist model (Popper), conventionalist-rationalist model (Pioncaré, (...) Duhem), dialectical-historicist model (Kuhn), and rationalist-historicist model (Lakatos, Feyerabend). While the researches in and debates about these models are still going on, it may be profitable to examine the models of scientific rationality that are presupposed in the most prominent classical Indian sciences such as Yoga, Vyākarana, Jyotisa Siddhānt, and Ayurvijñan. All these sciences have enjoyed an uninterrupted continuity ever since their origin although their evolution has suffered generally after 1200 A.D. (save Yoga) due to cultural-historical vicissitudes. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.

The way communicable diseases do spread from one person to another, depending upon the specific disease or causative infectious agent. Out of these diseases, some are incurable and the health care workers during their practice or otherwise acquire such infections and transmit them further to innocent patients who are unaware of about the health status of health care workers. The rights of an infected health care worker and patients are protected by many laws but in case of conflict of interests (...) between the individual right of the health care worker and life of a patient, then obviously by the principle of natural justice, saving the life of a person from such incurable infection gets the privilege. Therefore, there is a lot of ethical and professional dilemma, arising out, in such a type of scenario, irrespective of concealed or disclosed health status and the question mark is raised on whether clinical practice may be allowed in such cases. Some of the studies show the actual but very little risk of transmission from infected health care workers to patients. Therefore, in the current scenario, many western countries such as USA and UK are following different guidelines in this regard but the same is lacking in India. So, this article critically analyses the various issues arising out of it and thereby justifies the need to have a uniform infection control policy in this regard apart from legal and ethical binding on infected health care workers. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, who is the latest link in the chain of Western rationalist-empiricist debate, knowledge does not have any infallible base in either senses or reason. Taking modern science as the paradigm of human knowledge, he argues that the process of growth of scientic knowledge involves imaginative proposals of hypotheses or conjectures and their refutation on empirical grounds in a continuing series of steps. Thus, scientific knowledge continuously evolves in a series of revolutions whereby the accepted theoretic constructs (...) are falsified, therefore destroyed, and new ones accepted in their place. Experiment, as provoked and controlled stimulation of the senses, plays a critical role in this process of growth and so long as it fails to falsify the hypotheses these are provisionally accepted by the scientists. (shrink)

Matter is pictured as a primitive fluid substratum having the fundamental property of fluctuating at a constant frequency. From this are derived the discrete properties of space and time, and it follows that, at the microlevel, talk of pure space and pure time involves us in ambiguities. A new interpretation of Planck's constant emerges according to which it is a quantum of matter-time combination. Thus, a quantum of matter-space combination should exist. On pursuing further the hydrodynamic model, such a constant (...) is in fact discovered as the drag-quantum of the quantum fluid. A fourth-degree differential equation is considered which, with the help of this new constant, generates spectra of frequency, mass, and fine structure constants. The theory seems to answer some important fundamental questions. (shrink)

Some of the relatively significant contributions to epistemology, in recent times, have been made by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Hans Reichenbach. All these authors seem to make some radical departures from the inherited theories of knowledge. A common characteristic of their epistemologies is that they try to tackle the problem of growth of knowledge; that is to say, what is meant by saying that theories of science, as they get more and more refined, increasingly approach the truth (...) and what the nature of relationship is between the earlier theory and the more refined. later, and present theory. Philosophy in the past hardly grappled with these issues, and therefore it would be of interest to critically examine these new dimensions in Epistemology, which is the concern of this paper. (shrink)

This paper compares the findings of content analyses of the corporate codes of ethics of Canada's largest corporations in 1992 and 2003. For both years, a modified version of a technique used in several other studies was used to determine and categorize the contents of the codes. It was found, inter alia, that, in 2003, as in 1992, more of the codes were concerned with conduct against the firm than with conduct on behalf of the firm. Among the changes from (...) 1992 to 2003 were a significant increase in the frequency of mention of environmental affairs, legal responsibility as the basis of codes and enforcement/compliance procedures. (shrink)

The recent rise in ethical consumerism has seen increasing numbers of corporate brands project a socially responsible and ethical image. But does having a corporate brand that is perceived to be ethical have any influence on outcome variables of interest for its product brands? This study analyzes the relationship between perceived ethicality at a corporate level, and brand trust, brand affect and brand loyalty at a product level. A theoretical framework with hypothesized relationships is developed and tested in order to (...) answer the research question. Data have been collected for 45 product categories in the fast moving consumer goods sector using a panel of 4,027 Spanish consumers. The proposed relationships are tested using structural equations modeling. The results suggest there is a positive relationship between perceived ethicality of a brand and both brand trust and brand affect. Brand affect also positively influences brand trust. Further, brand trust and brand affect both show a positive relation with brand loyalty. The managerial and academic implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

Comprises articles on Sikh faith and philosophy.

Corporate scandals have assumed epidemic proportions. All around the globe, even renowned organizations have been felled from their high pedestals by the misdeeds of their leaders. This raises an intriguing question: How do such resourceful organizations end up with crass ‹impostors’ as leaders in the first place? The answer perhaps lies in the misplaced emphasis on certain qualities we associate with leadership. True leadership requires a balance among three elemental pre-requisites: Energy, Expertise and Integrity. When they are synchronized, they unleash (...) the latent potential in any organization. Out of these three interacting gears of leadership, it is Integrity that ensures that an organization is run in the right direction – with a view towards collective good rather than selfish motives. Therefore, it is the most non-negotiable of the three elements. Henceforth, leaders ought not to be selected on the basis of the superficial qualities that have blinded us in the past. They must first pass the acid test of Integrity. This article suggests a ‹decision tree’ and a ‹checklist’ to help in the selection process. (shrink)

The paper explores the relation between reason and action as it emerges from the texts of Āyurveda. Life or Ayus (commonly understood as life-span) is primary subject matter of Ayurveda. Life is a locus of experience, action and disposition. Experiences and actions are differentially determined by dispositions that characterize the organism; otherwise all living organisms will be identical. Ayus of each living being is uniquely individual and remains constant between birth and death. In this journey, upkeep of ayus is the (...) purpose of Āyurveda or science of life. Ayurveda is a science of experienced matter as well as of experienced body. The living body is critically dependent on the influx of matter for its upkeep. Āyurveda offers a conceptual system to reason about balance and imbalances of the system and the causal role of the material flux through the system. This sensate matter is causally open and makes room for definite causal role for the individual and the effective insertion of the felt-purpose of action. Some of the strengths of Ayurveda are brought forth in the paper such as (a) reasoning out the compatibility between the bodily processes and the selection of the natural products for diet and drug, (b) role for heuristics in medical diagnosis, which takes into cognizance the particularity of each living body and the teleology evident in the very act of diagnostic reasoning. The paper shows that Āyurvedic theory is built on experiential datum whereas scientific medical theory is built on experience-independent datum. Āyurveda explores causal efficacy of ‘secondary qualities’ whereas scientific medicine explores causal efficacy of ‘primary qualities’. The actionable experiential reasoning is at the foundations of Āyurveda whereas modern medical science is ab initio saddled with difficult ‘hiatus theoreticus’ between theory and practice. For Ayurveda it is experience of qualities that discloses behavior of matter. The types of qualities that appear in experience have a special significance for theorizing about the actions of matter with the help of qualities. The paper explores the relation between experience of qualities and the method of science. It shows how efficacy of medical practice is based on the foundational stance of experiential realism in theory. To bring the point home, the paper borrows Aristotalian concepts to show how the relation between phantasm and phronesis is honored in the very theory of Āyurveda. (shrink)

This book incorporates seven 'Introductions' that Hegel wrote for each of his major works: the Phenomenology, Logic, Philosophy of Right, History, Fine Art, Religion and History of Philosophy, and includes an Introduction and Epilogue by the Editors, serving to introduce Hegel to the reader and to situate him and his works into their wider context.

Articles on Sikh ethos, history, and philosophy.

This paper unravels the diverse strands in the manifestations of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA, 2002), focusing not only on law’s words, i.e. the rules, principles and procedures, and its interpretations in judgments, but also on its effects. Adopting the violence of jurisprudence approach, it eschews the dichotomy between law and violence, examining the ‘effects of legal force’, in particular, the ways in which law becomes an integral part of the organization of state violence. Through an examination of the (...) unfolding of POTA and laws dealing with ‘organized crime’ and ‘unlawful activities’ (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, 2005), the trajectory of specific cases and judgments by Trial Courts, the High Courts and the Supreme Court, this paper shows how through an interlocking of the ordinary and extraordinary, anti-terror laws erode both the procedural and substantive aspects of the rule of law, become the terrain where permutations in alliance politics and configuration of power are played out, and assume an antagonistic notion of politics which seeks resolution through the elimination and externalization of difference. Extraordinary laws, it argues, are manifestations of a politics of negation. Processes that prolong the lives of such laws, and procedural interlocking and intermeshing that seek to give them permanence, are symptomatic of a deepening of the politics of negation. (shrink)

Critical readers can reasonably judge Zhuangzi’s 莊子 notion of wuwei 無爲 to offer a persuasive reply to Xunzi’s objection to Zhuangzi’s emphasis on living naturally, in light of recent theories of action. For Zhuangzi, self-cultivation is possible only when individuals attune themselves to the processes inherent in nature . Daoist wuwei depends crucially on two descriptive claims that Zhuangzi endorses and Xunzi rejects. The first claim, backed by Dreyfus’ theory of skill acquisition, is that views of self-cultivation which rely on (...) formulas and concepts stand opposed to the Way. The second claim, supported by Elster and Csikszentmihalyi’s theories of action, is that conscious deliberation is unable to facilitate self-cultivation. Zhuangzi’s normative vision requires that individuals indirectly create conditions for spontaneity, rather than pursue spontaneity directly, since any deliberate attempt at being spontaneous is self-defeating. (shrink)

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