Scholarly papers by Gėlėgzhamt︠s︡yn Luvsant︠s︡ėrėn on Mādhyamika, Buddhist philosophy, Mongolian philosophy and Buddhist studies in Mongolia.

Articles on life and scholar works of academician Chimidiĭn Zhugder, famous Mongolian philosophy scholar.

The internet is widely used for health information and support, often by vulnerable people. Internet-based research raises both familiar and new ethical problems for researchers and ethics committees. While guidelines for internet-based research are available, it is unclear to what extent ethics committees use these. Experience of gaining research ethics approval for a UK study (SharpTalk), involving internet-based discussion groups with young people who self-harm and health professionals is described. During ethical review, unsurprisingly, concerns were raised about the vulnerability of (...) potential participants. These were dominated by the issue of anonymity, which also affected participant safety and consent. These ethical problems are discussed, and our solutions, which included: participant usernames specific to the study, a closed website, private messaging facilities, a direct contact email to researchers, information about forum rules displayed on the website, a ‘report’ button for participants, links to online support, and a discussion room for forum moderators. This experience with SharpTalk suggests that an approach to ethics, which recognises the relational aspects of research with vulnerable people, is particularly useful for internet-based health research. The solutions presented here can act as guidance for researchers developing proposals and for ethics committees reviewing them. (shrink)

Glastonbury Abbey was the wealthiest and most influential monastery in later Anglo-Saxon England. It was a noted centre of scholarship, and claimed ancient origins which were later extravagantly embellished to link the house with such luminaries as St Patrick, St David and King Arthur. The historiographical evidence for Glastonbury is particularly challenging, because the accounts of the monastery's early history were revised and interpolated over centuries, as the legends grew. There are also complications in the study of its archive: the (...) manuscripts are mostly late and corrupt, and the whole is overshadowed by the contents list of a lost cartulary, which included many more early charters than now survive. The present volume is the first critical edition of the sixty-one surviving charters from the abbey's pre-Conquest archive, which date from the later seventh century to the reign of Cnut. The texts are edited to a high standard, with comprehensive commentaries that include translation and elucidation of the Old English boundary clauses, and authoritative assessments of authenticity. There is a long introduction with analysis and synthesis of the documentary evidence for Glastonbury's history in the Anglo-Saxon period and for the accumulation of its endowment, including a section on William of Malmesbury's works on Glastonbury. The volume concludes with a series of appendixes which present all the evidence for the lost charters in the Liber Terrarum and in other sources. (shrink)

Personal information is key to informational privacy and the algorithmically generated profiles of individuals. However, the concept of personal information and its nature is rarely discussed. The concept of personal information thus seems to be based on an idea of information as objective and truthful—as natural information—that is depicted as digital footprints in the online and digital realm. I argue that the concept of personal information should exit the realm of natural information and enter the realm of nonnatural information—grounded in (...) meaning, intention, and convention—as this will provide us with a concept that can account for potential misleadingness, inaccuracies, and mistakes. (shrink)

In this paper I develop and present a unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation and their interconnections. The unified account is rooted in Paul Grice’s notions of natural and non-natural meaning (in: Grice (ed) Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 213–223, 1957) and a corresponding distinction between natural and non-natural information (Scarantino and Piccinini in Metaphilosophy 41(3):313–330, 2010). I argue that we can specify at least three specific kinds of non-natural information. Thus, as varieties (...) of non-natural information there is intentionally non-misleading information, unintentionally misleading information—i.e. misinformation—and intentionally misleading information—i.e. disinformation. By shifting the focus from the truth-values of content to the intention/intentionality and misleadingness/non-misleadingness of that content I obtain a unified account that makes room for the potential misleadingness of true content (true disinformation), the potential non-misleadingness of false content (irony), and everything in between. (shrink)

Contemporary privacy theories and European discussions about data protection employ the notion of ‘personal information’ to designate their areas of concern. The notion of personal information is demarcated from non-personal information—or just information—indicating that we are dealing with a specific kind of information. However, within privacy scholarship the notion of personal information appears undertheorized, rendering the concept somewhat unclear. We argue that in an age of datafication, protection of personal information and privacy is crucial, making the understanding of what is (...) meant by ‘personal information’ more important than ever. To contribute to this aim, we analyse the conception of personal information and its nature, including the distinction between personal and non-personal information from a philosophy of language perspective. Through analyses of aboutness and relative aboutness we point to challenges related to the demarcation between personal and non-personal information, which may in practice lead to all information being personal. (shrink)

Some have argued that a proper account of prostitution shows it to be a morally neutral, commercial service ‘like any other’. This paper explores further the implications of this ‘service’ model and argues that it depends upon a weak conception of the kind of sex involved in such a practice and involves the objectification of both prostitute and customer. I argue that there is a moral view of sex which is not merely ‘romantic’, from which it is still possible to (...) view prostitution as morally objectionable; but that, nevertheless, this perspective itself may provide for a development of the idea of a service which would justify a limited practice of prostitution. Such a practice would, however, be very different from that which supporters of the putatively morally neutral model of prostitution have in mind and would depend for its plausibility on a comparison with other forms of caring for which payment is given. (shrink)

A fiatal kutató a szociológiai értelemben vett segítés elméletével és gyakorlatával foglalkozik, s ezen belül is egyrészt azzal, hogy adott helyzetben miként jönnek létre az ún. jóról alkotott elképzelések, másrészt a kisebbségi magyarok segítésének elképzeléseiből miként erednek konkrét civil cselekvések, és ezek hogyan teremtik újra a résztvevők nemzet- és magyarságképét, harmadszor pedig górcső alá kerül a civil segítés hatalmi dimenziója. A bevezetőt követően olyan témákat érint a szerző, mint a jótékonyság modelljei, az "érdemesség" szerepe, a segítő-segített pozíciók aszimmetriája (hatalom újratermelésének (...) modelljei, elismerés és jótékonykodás, hatalom a jótékonyság elméleti modelljeiben), a kisebbségi magyarok támogatásának intézményes keretei, illetve a módszertan (programok kiválasztása, alkalmazott módszerek). ***A folytatásban olvashatunk négy konkrét programról, a segítés ideológiájáról és azok újratermeléséről (hiány és érdemesség toposzai, rítusok, "másság", érdemesség fenntartása és újraalkotása), az elismerés korlátairól és lehetőségeiről, valamint a gondoskodás és intimitás jótékonyságban játszott szerepéről. A szakkönyv a következtetések összegzésével, és a felhasznált irodalom felsorolásával zárul. A kötet az Ünnepi Könyvhét alkalmából jelenik meg. "www.kello.hu © minden jog fenntartva". (shrink)

Theories on World origin and Human Nature.

Study on the fundamentals of Mimamsa philosophy.

The Casimir force between two neutral metallic plates is often considered conclusive evidence for the reality of electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations in ‘empty space’. However, it is not well known that the Casimir force can be derived from many different points of view. The purpose of this note is to supply a conceptually oriented introduction to a representative set of these different interpretations. The different accounts suggest that the Casimir effect reveals nothing conclusive about the nature of the vacuum.

In this paper we consider the potential role of metarepresentation—the representation of another representation, or as commonly considered within cognitive science, the mental representation of another individual's knowledge and beliefs—in mediating definite reference and common ground in conversation. Using dialogues from a referential communication study in which speakers conversed in succession with two different addressees, we highlight ways in which interlocutors work together to successfully refer to objects, and achieve shared conceptualizations. We briefly review accounts of how such shared conceptualizations (...) could be represented in memory, from simple associations between label and referent, to “triple co-presence” representations that track interlocutors in an episode of referring, to more elaborate metarepresentations that invoke theory of mind, mutual knowledge, or a model of a conversational partner. We consider how some forms of metarepresentation, once created and activated, could account for definite reference in conversation by appealing to ordinary processes in memory. We conclude that any representations that capture information about others' perspectives are likely to be relatively simple and subject to the same kinds of constraints on attention and memory that influence other kinds of cognitive representations. (shrink)