Consider two deeply appealing thoughts: first, that we experience external particulars, and second, that what it’s like to have an experience – the phenomenal character of an experience – is somehow independent of external particulars. The first thought is readily captured by phenomenal particularism, the view that external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. The second thought is readily captured by phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal character. -/- Here I (...) show that a novel version of phenomenal generalism can capture both thoughts in a satisfying fashion. Along the way, I reveal severe problems facing phenomenal particularism and also shed light on the mental kinds under which experiences fall. (shrink)

This book presents a selection of essays by the Indian philosopher J.L. Mehta on the topics of hermeneutics and phenomenology containing many original ...

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account, all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge-centered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental (...) epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge-centered accounts. (shrink)

According to phenomenal particularism, external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. Mehta criticizes this view, and French and Gomes :451–460, 2016) have attempted to show that phenomenal particularists have the resources to respond to Mehta’s criticisms. We argue that French and Gomes have failed to appreciate the force of Mehta’s original arguments. When properly interpreted, Mehta’s arguments provide a strong case in favor of phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never (...) part of phenomenal character. (shrink)

This paper argues that Weber ought to be read as a comparative ethicist who brings his German intellectual inheritance, especially Schopenauer and Nietzsche, to a dialogue with ethical traditions in India and China. It shows that Weber not only had a supple understanding of the tensions within Hindu ethics, his own account of value often closely corresponds to Hindu axiology and was enriched by an encounter with it.

It can seem incoherent to fully characterize fundamentality in terms of grounding, given that the fundamental is precisely that which cannot be fully characterized independently. I argue that there is no such incoherence.

This guide focuses on the content and form of excellent philosophical writing, with further comments on reading, thinking, writing processes, publication strategies, and self-cultivation.

I highlight a neglected but striking phenomenological fact about our experiences: they have a pervasively spatial character. Specifically, all (or almost all) phenomenal qualities – roughly, the introspectible, philosophically puzzling properties that constitute ‘what it’s like’ to have an experience – introspectively seem instantiated in some kind of space. So, assuming a very weak charity principle about introspection, some phenomenal qualities are instantiated in space. But there is only one kind of space – the ordinary space occupied by familiar objects. (...) And the only objects appropriately located in ordinary space are outside the subject’s mind. This entails experiential externalism, the view that at least one phenomenal quality is instantiated outside the subject’s mind. Experiential externalism is incompatible with many leading theories of experience, including certain mental paint theories; some forms of representationalism; paradigmatic versions of sense-datum theory; and views on which no phenomenal qualities are instantiated. My argument is structurally similar to familiar arguments based on the ‘transparency of experience.’ However, I suggest, phenomenological intuitions about spatiality are considerably more stable than phenomenological intuitions about transparency. For many philosophers, transparency intuitions fade markedly with respect to non-standard experiences, including experiences associated with blurry or double vision. But spatiality intuitions remain robust even for these experiences. Thus, spatiality intuitions should be more dialectically effective than transparency intuitions for supporting experiential externalism. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 209-231, January 2022.

I assume that there exists a general phenomenon, the phenomenon of the explanatory gap, surrounding consciousness, normativity, intentionality, and more. Explanatory gaps are often thought to foreclose reductive possibilities wherever they appear. In response, reductivists who grant the existence of these gaps have offered countless local solutions. But typically such reductivist responses have had a serious shortcoming: because they appeal to essentially domain-specific features, they cannot be fully generalized, and in this sense these responses have been not just local but (...) parochial. Here I do better. Taking for granted that the explanatory gap is a genuine phenomenon, I offer a fully general diagnosis that unifies these previously fragmented reductivist responses. (shrink)

Most contemporary theories of perception, including leading forms of representationalism and naive realism, are monistic: they assume that to consciously perceive is to deploy only one kind of sensory awareness. Here I instead argue for rich pluralism, which says that to consciously perceive is to deploy two very different kinds of sensory awareness in concert: representational awareness of particulars, and non-representational, partly essence-revealing awareness of sensory qualities.

Derek Allan presented a paper at the 2016 OSSA Conference at the University of Windsor; I provided comments on that paper. These are brief notes on my comments.

What grounds facts of the form? One promising answer is: facts of the form. A different promising answer is: x itself. Isaac Wilhelm has recently argued that the second answer is superior to the first. In this paper, I rebut his argument.

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant (...) reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled. (shrink)

What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines it meets in me. Stanley Cavell.

Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

In this paper, I advance a new hypothesis about what the ordinary concept of perceptual experience might be. To a first approximation, my hypothesis is that it is the concept of something that seems to present mind-independent objects. Along the way, I reveal two important errors in Michael Martin’s argument for the very different view that the ordinary concept of perceptual experience is the concept of something that is impersonally introspectively indiscriminable from a veridical perception. This conceptual work is significant (...) because it provides three pieces of good news for the common kind theorist. (shrink)

Using Canada as a case study, this article argues that regulating biotechnology and nanotechnology is made unnecessarily complex and inherently unstable because of a failure to consult the public early and of-ten enough. Furthermore, it is argued that future regulators (and promoters) of nanotechnology may learn valuable lessons from the mistakes made in regulating biotechnology.

Pure insight, however is in the first instance without any content; it is the sheer disappearance of content; but by its negative attitude towards what it excludes it will make itself real and give itself a content.—Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind.

Sociologists of science and others have long been interested in how advances in science come about, and their potential social and economic impacts. Developments in nanoscience and nanotechnology will provide social scientists with a unique opportunity to explore how scientific activities form de novo. Additionally, scientists will have the opportunity to examine the factors that drive science and technology in certain directions by considering how different models of innovation may explain how the topography of the knowledge-based economy is being shaped (...) by radically new approaches to science. (shrink)

Mehta examines, briefly, whether America is vulnerable to the "corruptions" of empire and the weight we should place on this moral consideration.

Gujarat has been identified as an enterpreneurial hub of India, primarily due to the innovative behaviour of Gujarati entrepreneurs. This has led Gujarat to become known as a model of enterpreneurial innovations. This model of enterpreneurial innovations has been developed from a study of entrepreneurs in a variety of industries from the region and several industrial clusters of enterprises in Gujarat. The study points to the transformation of many communities, particularly the Patel community, which was traditionally an agricultural community, into (...) a manufacturing class and a new emergent in Gujarat’s industrial scenario. (shrink)

Minichromosome maintenance (Mcm) proteins are well‐known for their functions in DNA replication. However, their roles in chromosome segregation are yet to be reviewed in detail. Following the discovery in 1984, a group of Mcm proteins, known as the ARS‐nonspecific group consisting of Mcm13, Mcm16‐19, and Mcm21‐22, were characterized as bonafide kinetochore proteins and were shown to play significant roles in the kinetochore assembly and high‐fidelity chromosome segregation. This review focuses on the structure, function, and evolution of this group of Mcm (...) proteins. Our in silico analysis of the physical interactors of these proteins reveals that they share non‐overlapping functions despite being copurified in biochemically stable complexes. We have discussed the contrasting results reported in the literature and experimental strategies to address them. Taken together, this review focuses on the structure‐function of the ARS‐nonspecific Mcm proteins and their evolutionary flexibility to maintain genome stability in various organisms. (shrink)