Though Indian courts at present are riddled with issues concerning music on the copyright front, significance of another aspect of music based on its essence is largely lost and unexplored. Though courts refer to popular songs in judgments, they are few and far in between. The understanding is that law today is neither poetic nor musical. Music, however, expresses mankind’s faith, hope and aspiration. The use of popular music by Indian courts to write creatively, though not necessarily improve the judgment (...) is restricted and largely unexplored. This paper proposes to explore the dimensions of labour movement through music and the role of law in the making of India as a nation. The association of political dissent through music and the determination of the nation state to procure a stake in the management of the popular music that is sought to belong to itself will be the key theme for understanding the songs that make a nation. Beginning from the struggle for India’s independence to modern day labour movements using music for critique and promoting the vernacular culture are the essence of the paper. Historically, the role of music is central for workers in any labour movement worldwide and is now explored in the Indian context, beginning from the early years of struggle in the nineteenth century to the year of independence in 1947. Recent movements including the protests against profiteering and displacement of persons will also form part of the discussions in this paper. The roles of music and the law have periodically been addressed in the scholarly legal arena but the topic has seldom been explored in-depth from a labour perspective, as paper ventures to do. (shrink)

Should artificial agents (such as robots) be granted moral status? This seems like an important question to resolve, given that we will encounter a growing number of increasingly sophisticated artificial agents in the not too distant future. However, many will think that before we can even start to tackle questions about the moral status of artificial agents, we first need to solve tricky issues in the philosophy of mind. After all, most orthodox views about moral status imply that only entities (...) with a mental life are eligible for moral status. But, whether an unfamiliar entity like an artificial agent has a mental life raises controversial questions in the philosophy of mind. Given this, one might hope that we can resolve questions about the moral status of robots via “minimalist” views that give sufficient conditions for granting moral status to an entity that we can know to be satisfied without knowing whether the entity in question has a mind. This paper argues that we should be pessimistic about the prospects of minimalist views avoiding controversial questions in the philosophy of mind, by arguing that minimalist sufficient conditions are only plausible if combined with assumptions in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Laudan’s argument against the possibility of a demarcation criterion for scientific theories rests on establishing that any criterion must be a necessary and sufficient condition. But Laudan’s argument at most establishes that any criterion must provide a necessary condition and a possibly different sufficient condition. His own claims suggest that such a criterion is possible.

In this reply to our commentators, we respond to ethical concerns raised about the potential use (or misuse) of personalized LLMs for academic idea and prose generation, including questions about c...

This paper critically discusses the argument from objectification – as recently presented by Elizabeth Shaw – against mandatory direct brain interventions targeting criminal offenders’ values as part of rehabilitative or reformative schemes. Shaw contends that such DBIs would objectify offenders because a DBI “excludes offenders by portraying them as a group to whom we need not listen” and “implies that offenders are radically defective with regard to one of the most fundamental aspects of their agency”. To ensure that offenders are (...) not objectified, Shaw first maintains that we should restrict rehabilitative/reformative schemes to attempts at rational dialogue because such an approach respects the offender’s personhood. Second, Shaw claims that we should not portray offenders as radically defective because such treatment would only negatively impact offenders’ already tenuous relationship with society. Third, Shaw contends that we should not confer the state the power to change an offender’s values because the state lacks insight into what constitutes the right values. I contend that none of these arguments should prevent the use of value-targeting DBIs. First, I show that the dialogue requirement for rehabilitative schemes is insufficient ground from which to oppose the use of these DBIs. Second, I show that it is doubtful that the use of DBIs as proposed would damage the relationship between offenders and society. Finally, although the state may often lack insight into what constitutes the correct values, this lack of insight should not by itself prevent value-targeting DBIs from being employed on certain groups of offenders. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.

Vitalism is understood as impacting the history of the life sciences, medicine and philosophy, representing an epistemological challenge to the dominance of mechanism over the last 200 years, and partly revived with organicism in early theoretical biology. The contributions in this volume portray the history of vitalism from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, suggesting some reassessment of what it means both historically and conceptually. As such it includes a wide range of material, employing both historical and (...) philosophical methodologies, and it is divided fairly evenly between 19th and 20th century historical treatments and more contemporary analysis. This volume presents a significant contribution to the current literature in the history and philosophy of science and the history of medicine. (shrink)

Marian Przełęcki’s semantics for the Received View is a good explication of Carnap’s position on the subject, anticipates many discussions and results from both proponents and opponents of the Received View, and can be the basis for a thriving research program.

All forms of cognition, whether natural or artificial, are subject to constraints of their computing architecture. This assumption forms the tenet of virtually all general theories of cognition, including those deriving from bounded optimality and bounded rationality. In this letter, we highlight an unresolved puzzle related to this premise: what are these constraints, and why are cognitive architectures subject to cognitive constraints in the first place? First, we lay out some pieces along the puzzle edge, such as computational tradeoffs inherent (...) to neural architectures that give rise to rational bounds of cognition. We then outline critical next steps for characterizing cognitive bounds, proposing that some of these bounds can be subject to modification by cognition and, as such, are part of what is being optimized when cognitive agents decide how to allocate cognitive resources. We conclude that these emerging views may contribute to a more holistic perspective on the nature of cognitive bounds, as well as their alteration subject to cognition. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher COVID-19 infection rates among South Asians in general, and Punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. Two counter-narratives are discussed. The first substitutes the negative image of the Sikh Punjabi Canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of Sikh humanitarianism and community service. The second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious jobs, (...) poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. We argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of South Asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. The second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 295-310, April 2022.

Assisted dying and human dignity are two extremely contested topics in Bioethics. This volume offers the first book-length attempt to bring both together. Its authors develop detailed philosophical analyses of dignity, and how it relates to assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Este artículo tiene como objetivo fundamental presentar, esquemáticamente, las perspectivas teóricas, las estrategias metodológicas y los resultados de la investigación titulada “Genealogía de las prácticas confesionales en la Reforma Protestante: un análisis histórico de las relaciones de poder”. En la primera parte, se muestra el marco teórico general mediante el cual nos aproximamos a la relación entre el lenguaje y la política. Esto tiene como fin caracterizar el problema con el que la investigación se comprometió y la forma en la (...) que se trató de resolver. De igual modo, en la segunda parte se indica la confesión protestante. Allí se hace énfasis en la problematización de las prácticas sociales asociadas al ascetismo puritano en términos que involucran los conceptos de ejercicio de sí, subjetividad y pliegue. Finalmente, trae a colación el tema de las diferenciaciones políticas en la Colonia para mostrar cómo se puede proceder en el intento de aplicar las formulaciones teóricas venidas de los análisis previos de la investigación a un problema específico de la historia colombiana. Al final, se compilan las conclusiones de cada uno de los estudios. (shrink)

Baldwin, T. (ed.) Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870 -1945.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The essay develops a disjunctive account of perception, showing that it needs to be renamed 'self-conscious power account'. For it is by reference to a self-conscious power of sensory knowledge that, on the one hand, the unity of perception and illusion and, on the other hand, the priority of perception over illusion, specifically, its priority in knowledge, is understood. The concept of a self-conscious power thus transpires as lying at the basis of a sound epistemology and response to sceptical arguments (...) such as the argument from illusion. (shrink)

It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, (...) in Russell’s later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all. (shrink)

En el presente artículo proponemos abordar el problema de la pobreza desde dos perspectivas ético-filosóficas: En primer lugar, la pobreza como problema que debe solucionarse desde la caridad; En segundo lugar, la pobreza como problema de justicia. En definitiva queremos hacer una apología de los pobres, marginados y excluidos en el mundo y, en particular, en las democracias occidentales que se abrogan y llevan a gala el título de democracias incluyentes, que ayude a estas personas a tener una nueva oportunidad (...) que les saque de la pobreza. (shrink)

En el presente texto proponemos una reflexión sobre uso de tecnologías genéticas que aumentan el rendimiento deportivo como futuro campo de investigación de una Neuroética social. Este problema, que se ha dado en llamar “dopaje genético”, congrega a su alrededor un debate entre los partidarios del Bioconservadurismo y del Transhumanismo. Expondremos la concepción de dos importantes representantes del Transhumanismo y de dos conocidos partidarios del Bioconservadurismo, a fin de subrayar la importancia de este debate y las futuras implicaciones en la (...) mejora del rendimiento físico, cognitivo y educacional a las que se deberá hacer frente desde el nivel socio-cultural de la Neuroética. (shrink)

_Resumen:_ Al interior de la tradición clásica del derecho natural, los teólogos escolásticos de los siglos xvi-xvii describen ese derecho como simplemente necesario, así como inmutable y universal. Lo describen, además, como un orden objetivo, independiente de la voluntad de Dios. Sin embargo, no todos los teólogos escolásticos entienden la inmutabilidad del derecho natural de la misma forma, ni llaman “derecho natural” exactamente a lo mismo: para unos este es el “derecho de la naturaleza”, mientras que para otros es el (...) “derecho de la razón natural”. El artículo, así, aborda las principales diferencias que existen en las teorías de estos escolásticos sobre el derecho natural. (shrink)

This essay defines Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical language criticism as materialistic. It takes up Max Beck’s discussion of Adorno’s critique of German metaphysical jargon in his paper “Jargon, Bullshit, sinnlos”. However, this essay argues for a twofold critique as being constitutive for Adorno’s approach: It is directed not only at Martin Heidegger’s ontological understanding of language but also at Logical Empiricism’s formalistic understanding of it. Beck’s claim of an affinity between the methods of Adorno and the Vienna Circle is therefore (...) questionable. The first part illuminates the philosophical significance of Adorno’s encounters with the Vienna protagonists. The second part discusses the differences between a formalistic and a materialistic approach: instead of excluding metaphysical expressions as meaningless, Adorno contextualizes them historically and socially. Thus Adorno criticizes early analytic philosophy’s reductive treatment of language and its rigorist understanding of enlightenment. The third part connects the critiques of formalism and of jargon by pointing to their own socio-historical embeddedness. Finally, it argues for the contemporary relevance of such twofold critique. (shrink)

The surplus of impulses is a key category in Gehlen’s anthropobiology to understand the process of hominisation and humanisation. From the dedifferentiation of human instincts and the primitivisation of man’s anatomy, to the role of experience, institutions, and speech, the surplus of impulses is a source that flows between the inner and the outer, by feeding the action circle that whether translates in activity or is redirected inwards in order to become a movement of volitional constitution. The ambivalence in which (...) Gehlen deals with this function of freedom gives rise to a pessimistic and sacrificial idea of man. However, he posits certain basic elements of a hedonistic theory of speech from which we can better understand the stabilizing task of language as cornerstone of institutions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 2 Seiten: 367-380.

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Frage, ob der aktuelle Schutz des geistigen Eigentums bei Arzneimitteln in Deutschland moralisch zu rechtfertigen ist. Die Untersuchung orientiert sich dabei am aktuellen Diskurs und ordnet die bestehenden Positionen entsprechend ihrer Abstraktheit. Dabei bilden Argumente gegen einen Schutz geistigen Eigentums die allgemeinste Ebene, und Argumente, die sich spezifisch gegen deutsche Arzneimittelpatente richten, die konkreteste Ebene. Ich werde zeigen, dass starke deontologische und konsequentialistische Positionen existieren, welche die realpolitischen Auswirkungen von Arzneimittelpatenten kritisieren. Die konsequentialistische Position argumentiert in (...) erster Linie mit den jüngsten Wirtschaftsdaten, während die deontologische Position die bürgerlichen Autonomieansprüche betont. (shrink)