BackgroundAlthough the peer review process is believed to ensure scientific rigor, enhance research quality, and improve manuscript clarity, many investigators are concerned that the process is too slow, too expensive, too unreliable, and too static. In this feasibility study, we sought to survey corresponding authors of recently published clinical research studies on the speed and efficiency of the publication process.MethodsWeb-based survey of corresponding authors of a 20% random sample of clinical research studies in MEDLINE-indexed journals with Ovid MEDLINE entry dates (...) between December 1 and 15, 2016. Survey addressed perceived manuscript importance before first submission, approximate first submission and final acceptance dates, and total number of journal submissions, external peer reviews, external peer reviewers, and revisions requested, as well as whether authors would have considered publicly sharing their manuscript on an online platform instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal.ResultsOf 1780 surveys distributed, 27 corresponding authors opted out or requested that we stop emailing them and 149 emails failed (e.g., emails that bounced n = 64, returned with an away from office message n = 70, or were changed/incorrect n = 15), leaving 1604 respondents, of which 337 completed the survey (21.0%). Respondents and non-respondents were similar with respect to study type and publication journals’ impact factor, although non-respondent authors had more publications (p = 0.03). Among respondents, the median impact factor of the publications’ journal was 2.7 (interquartile range (IQR), 2.0–3.6) and corresponding authors’ median h-index and number of publications was 9 (IQR, 3–20) and 27 (IQR, 10–77), respectively. The median time from first submission to journal acceptance and publication was 5 months (IQR, 3–8) and 7 months (IQR, 5–12), respectively. Most respondents (62.0%, n = 209) rated the importance of their research as a 4 or 5 (5-point scale) prior to submission. Median number of journal submissions was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviews was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviewers was 3 (IQR, 2–4), and revisions requested was 1 (IQR, 1–1). Sharing manuscripts to a public online platform, instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, would have been considered by 55.2% (n = 186) of respondents.ConclusionCorresponding authors have high perceptions of their research and reported requiring few manuscript submissions prior to journal acceptance, most commonly by lower impact factor journals. (shrink)

This article reexamines Sri Aurobindo’s multifaceted response to the problem of evil in The Life Divine. According to my reconstruction, his response has three key dimensions: first, a skeptical theist refutation of arguments from evil against God’s existence; second, a theodicy of “spiritual evolution,” according to which the experience of suffering is necessary for the soul’s spiritual growth; and third, a panentheistic conception of the Divine Saccidānanda as the sole reality which playfully manifests as everything and everyone in the universe. (...) While a number of scholars have already discussed Aurobindo’s theodicy, I highlight the significance of three aspects of his theodicy that have been largely neglected. First, I emphasize the crucial theodical role of the “psychic entity,” Aurobindo’s term for the evolving, reincarnating soul within each of us. Second, I elucidate the skeptical theist dimension of his theodicy, which previous scholars have overlooked. Third, I argue that Aurobindo’s approach to the problem of evil may have been shaped, in part, by the teachings of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa. Along the way, I also reconstruct the subtle chain of reasoning underlying Aurobindo’s various theodical arguments. In the concluding section, I suggest that there are conceptual resources within Aurobindo’s thought for responding to some of the most serious objections scholars have leveled against his theodicy. (shrink)

"Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedåanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India's most influential philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of âSaçnkara's Advaita Vedåanta or as a "Neo-Vedåantin" influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda's Vedåantic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects both of these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation (...) of Vivekananda's philosophy, highlighting its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, the book argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedåantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers. Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedåanta as a nonsectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with a galaxy of contemporary philosophers, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda's views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness"--. (shrink)

I examine social capital’s impact on financial reports. Based on the social capital literature, I predict that the quality of the financial reports is higher when a firm is headquartered in a region with high social capital. Consistent with this prediction, I find that the firms that are headquartered in this type of region in the USA have a lower probability of committing fraud by misrepresenting financial information. Further, I find that the firms in regions with high social capital have (...) lower levels of discretionary accruals and much more readable annual reports. (shrink)

This article argues that the Indian philosopher-mystic Sri Aurobindo espoused a sophisticated form of cosmopsychism that has great contemporary relevance. After first discussing Aurobindo’s prescient reflections on the “central problem of consciousness” and his arguments against materialist reductionism, I explain how he developed a panentheistic philosophy of “realistic Adwaita” on the basis of his own spiritual experiences and his intensive study of the Vedāntic scriptures. He derived from this realistic Advaita philosophy a highly original doctrine of evolutionary cosmopsychism, according to (...) which the Divine Saccidānanda is “involved” in everything in the universe and gradually manifests itself at each stage of the evolutionary process from matter to life to mind, and ultimately, to Supermind—the final stage that is yet to come, upon the attainment of which we will attain knowledge of our true divine nature as Saccidānanda. I then reconstruct Aurobindo’s novel solution to the individuation problem, according to which the Divine Saccidānanda individuates into various distinct consciousnesses by playfully limiting itself through a process of “exclusive concentration.” Finally, I highlight the continued relevance of Aurobindo’s evolutionary cosmopsychism by bringing him into conversation with Itay Shani, a contemporary proponent of cosmopsychism. (shrink)

Sen’s capabilities approach offers a radical generalisation of the conventional approach to welfare economics. It has been highly influential in development and many researchers are now beginning to explore its implications for health care. This paper contributes to the emerging debate by discussing two examples of such applications: first, at the individual decision making level, namely the right to die, and second, at the social choice level. For the first application, which draws on Nussbaum’s list of capabilities, it is argued (...) that many capabilities are ambiguously or indirectly related to the right to die, but the ability to form a concept of the good life and plan one’s own life provides a direct justification for such a right. In the second application, the focus is specifically on healthcare rationing and it is argued that, although not committed to age based rationing, the capabilities approach provides a more natural justification of age related access to health care than the fair innings argument, which is often used to justify the alleged ageism inherent in quality adjusted life years maximisation. (shrink)

When weighing up which inhaler to prescribe, a doctor may prioritise a patient’s preferences over the expected harms from the associated carbon emissions. Parker argues that this is wrong.1 Doctors have a pro-tanto duty to switch from a high-carbon metered-dose inhaler (MDI) to a low-carbon dry-powdered inhaler (DPI)—even though this provides no direct patient benefit—unless switching would undermine trust or significantly worsen a patient’s health. He goes on to state that even if DPIs are more expensive for the National Health (...) Service (NHS) then this is justified so long as it does not ‘significantly threaten’ the NHS’ ability to protect and promote health. This may appear to be a radical proposal, challenging the ethical principles of autonomy, health entitlements and justly distributed resources. However, we will claim that it is only radical in so far as one perceives (A) patient autonomy and healthcare entitlements as existing within a vacuum, unrelated to other foundational ethics concerns and (B) the health consequences of a given healthcare budget are limited solely to the designated recipients rather than all affected parties. Here, we test the claim that our responsibility for promoting patient autonomy …. (shrink)

Autumn Fiester's “Neglected Ends: Clinical Ethics Consultation and the Prospects for Closure” (2015) demonstrates how a focus on recommendations in clinical ethics consultations (CECs) can fail to...

This volume provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare, but also to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

This study sought to identify content on the federal budget, national debt, and budget deficit in the 12 most commonly used high school and college-leveleconomics textbooks. Our systematic review of these sources leads to two key findings: (1) Textbooks are similar in how they represent fiscal policy yet treatthe federal budget, deficit, and debt differently across the sample, and (2) Textbooks treat the federal budget, budget deficit, and national debt as theoretical, without an examination of values and systemic electoral and (...) budgetary politics. These findings lead us to argue that curriculum is needed that will permit a careful examination of how everyday citizens can gain knowledge, acknowledge values, and work towards a reasoned and realitybased view of what is at stake with regard to these issues in the 21st Century. (shrink)

In the past several decades, numerous scholars have contended that Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu supremacist in the guise of a liberal preacher of the harmony of all religions. Jyotirmaya Sharma follows their lead in his provocative book, A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism (2013). According to Sharma, Vivekananda was “the father and preceptor of Hindutva,” a Hindu chauvinist who favored the existing caste system, denigrated non-Hindu religions, and deviated from his guru (...) Sri Ramakrishna’s more liberal and egalitarian teachings. This article has two main aims. First, I critically examine the central arguments of Sharma’s book and identify serious weaknesses in his methodology and his specific interpretations of Vivekananda’s work. Second, I try to shed new light on Vivekananda’s views on Hinduism, religious diversity, the caste system, and Ramakrishna by building on the existing scholarship, taking into account various facets of his complex thought, and examining the ways that his views evolved in certain respects. I argue that Vivekananda was not a Hindu supremacist but a cosmopolitan patriot who strove to prepare the spiritual foundations for the Indian freedom movement, scathingly criticized the hereditary caste system, and followed Ramakrishna in championing the pluralist doctrine that various religions are equally capable of leading to salvation. (shrink)

Lectures delivered by the author during Sadhana Week held at Divine Life Society in 1973.

Since January 2004, violent conflicts in the deep South of Thailand have caused 4,453 deaths and 7,239 injuries in 10,386 violent incidents. The numbers are increasing every day. Myriads of studies, strategies and proposals have been put forth to address and redress this deep-rooted problem. This paper is a modest attempt to find analysis and inspiration from the rich cultural resources of Buddhism to address the question of conflict and conflict transformation in Thai society. The Buddhist ‘Genesis’ or The Aggañña-sutta (...) has been analyzed by Thai and Western Buddhist scholars as offering an allegorical tale which details a long, inter-dependent process of human beings’ moral degradation on the one hand, and socio-political evolution on the other. This is considered to be the Buddhist equivalent of the Genesis without God. This paper offers a re-reading of this important sutta as a narrative of conflict and conflict transformation. It argues that the personal conflict of the two young Brahmins aspiring to be fully ordained is transcended and transformed by the Buddha’s allegorical tale of human socio-political evolution. This paper offers an analysis of the narration and demonstrates that in the narrating process, the Buddha was ‘substituting’ the Hindu creation myth with the Discourse on What is Primary (Aggañña-sutta). This narrative replacement subverts the deep-rooted cultural force of the Hindu creation myth which serves as a cosmological justification for a hierarchy of classes/castes in the social world. Once the Hindu creation myth is de-mythologized, the structure of meaning for the personal conflict of the two Brahmins evaporates. In this way, the Buddha’s approach to conflict transformation addresses three dimensions simultaneously, namely, the personal, the socio-political and the cosmological. This re-reading is one paradigmatic example of how to revitalize Buddhism to function as an agent of social transformation by offering a Buddhist creative approach to conflict transformation. (shrink)

There are three theories in the epistemology of modality that have received sustained attention over the past 20 years: conceivability-theory, counterfactual-theory, and deduction-theory. In this paper we argue that all three face what we call the problem of modal epistemic friction. One consequence of the problem is that for any of the three accounts to yield modal knowledge, the account must provide an epistemology of essence. We discuss an attempt to fend off the problem within the context of the internalism (...) versus externalism debate about epistemic justification. We then investigate the effects that the PMEF has on reductive and non-reductive theories of the relation between essence and modality. (shrink)

The Book Begins By Re-Examining The Imagery Of The Vedas And The Upanisads, Highlighting Some Aspects Of Early Speculative Thought Which Influenced The Enunciation Of Aesthetic Theories, Particularly Of Bharata In The Natyasastra.

The hard problem of consciousness arises in most incarnations of present day physicalism. Why should certain physical processes necessarily be accompanied by experience? One possible response is that physicalism itself should be modified in order to accommodate experience: But, modified how? In the present work, we investigate whether an ontology derived from quantum field theory can help resolve the hard problem. We begin with the assumption that experience cannot exist without being accompanied by a subject of experience (SoE). While people (...) well versed in Indian philosophy will not find that statement problematic, it is still controversial in the analytic tradition. Luckily for us, Strawson has elaborately defended the notion of a thin subject—an SoE which exhibits a phenomenal unity with different types of content (sensations, thoughts etc.) occurring during its temporal existence. Next, following Stoljar, we invoke our ignorance of the true physical as the reason for the explanatory gap between present day physical processes (events, properties) and experience. We are therefore permitted to conceive of thin subjects as related to the physical via a new, yet to be elaborated relation. While this is difficult to conceive under most varieties of classical physics, we argue that this may not be the case under certain quantum field theory ontologies. We suggest that the relation binding an SoE to the physical is akin to the relation between a particle and (quantum) field. In quantum field theory, a particle is conceived as a coherent excitation of a field. Under the right set of circumstances, a particle coalesces out of a field and dissipates. We suggest that an SoE can be conceived as akin to a particle—a SelfOn—which coalesces out of physical fields, persists for a brief period of time and then dissipates in a manner similar to the phenomenology of a thin subject. Experiences are physical properties of selfons with the constraint (specified by a similarity metric) that selfons belonging to the same natural kind will have similar experiences. While it is odd at first glance to conceive of subjects of experience as akin to particles, the spatial and temporal unity exhibited by particles as opposed to fields and the expectation that selfons are new kinds of particles, paves the way for cementing this notion. Next, we detail the various no-go theorems in most versions of quantum field theory and discuss their impact on the existence of selfons. Finally, we argue that the time is ripe for a rejuvenated Indian philosophy to begin tackling the three-way relationship between SoEs (which may become equivalent to jivas in certain Indian frameworks), phenomenal content and the physical world. With analytic philosophy still struggling to come to terms with the complex worlds of quantum field theory and with the relative inexperience of the western world in arguing the jiva-world relation, there is a clear and present opportunity for Indian philosophy to make a worldcentric contribution to the hard problem of experience. (shrink)

Analytic Panpsychism has been brought into contact with Indian philosophy primarily through an examination of the Advaita Vedānta tradition and the Yogācāra tradition. In this work I explore the relation between Rāmānuja, the 12th century father of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta tradition, and analytic panpsychism. I argue that Rāmānuja’s philosophy inspires a more world affirming form of cosmopsychism where there are different kinds of reality, rather than one fundamental reality of pure consciousness and an ordinary wrold that is illusory from the (...) perspective of fundamental reality. (shrink)

The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology are among the most widely used terminology resources in the biomedical domain. However, when we evaluate them in the light of simple principles for wellconstructed ontologies we find a number of characteristic inadequacies. Employing the theory of granular partitions, a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and of the relationships ontologies bear to instances in reality, we provide an application of this theory in relation to an example drawn from the (...) context of the pathophysiology of hypertension. This exercise is designed to demonstrate how, by taking ontological principles into account we can create more realistic biomedical ontologies which will also bring advantages in terms of efficiency and robustness of associated software applications. (shrink)

Many medicines currently available on the market are simply too expensive for millions around the world to afford. Many medicines available in the developing world are only available to a small percentage of the population due to economic inequities. The profit-seeking behavior of pharmaceutical companies exacerbates this problem. In most cases, the price reductions required to make drugs affordable to a broader class of people in the developing world are not offset by the resultant increase in sales volume. Simply stated, (...) in most of the developing world, it is more profitable to sell drugs to the very wealthy at high prices than it is to sell cheaper drugs to a greater number of people. As a result, medicines remain unaffordable for the vast majority of people in many parts of the world. While this might be an acceptable outcome for certain commodities, such as luxury goods, it is completely unacceptable for life-saving medicines. Therefore, in order to effectively address the global lack of access to medicines, the role pharmaceutical companies play in the international intellectual property regime must be critically examined. (shrink)

Approximately two billion people lack access to medicines globally. People living with HIV, cancer patients, those suffering from tuberculosis or malaria, and other populations in desperate need of life-saving medicines are increasingly unable to access existing preventative, curative, and life-prolonging treatments. In many cases, treatment may be unavailable or inaccessible for even some of the most common and readily treatable health concerns, such as hypertension. In the developing world, many of the factors that contribute to making the world’s most vulnerable (...) and marginalized populations particularly susceptible to illness also operate to restrict their access to medicines. As a result of dramatic economic inequities and widespread poverty, it is not profitable for most originator pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines for sale in developing markets or to lower the cost of existing drugs so that they are affordable for the majority of these populations. (shrink)

English translation and commentary on the selected, highly philosophical verses from the Yogavasishtha, a famous scripture of Hinduism. It deals with the monistic concept of God. In Hindu tradition Monism is called Advaita. Advaita is one of the principal Vedantic schools. It asserts that Brahman alone exists, and because of illusion resulting from ignorance, Brahman appears as this world.Along with the English translation and commentary, the Sanskrit text is included in Devanagary script.

The Norwegian Oil Fund (‘Government Pension Fund – Global’) is worth over NOK 10.6 trillion (USD 1.15 USD trillion)1 making it the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (Norges Bank Investment...

"A rough spade for a rugged landscape" : on savage selves and more civil places -- "What remains of the harvest when the fence grazes the crop?" : on the proper violence of agrarian citizenship -- "The life of the thief leaves the belly always boiling" : on the nature and restraint of the criminal animal -- "Millets sown yield millets, evil sown yields evil" : on the moral returns of agrarian toil -- "Let the water for the paddy also (...) irrigate the grass" : on the sympathies of an aqueous self. (shrink)

We characterize the non-modular models of a unidimensional first-order theory of modules as the elementary submodels of its prime pure-injective model. We show that in case the maximal non-modular submodel of a given model splits off this is true for every such submodel, and we thus obtain a cancellation result for this situation. Although the theories in question always have models whose maximal non-modular submodel do split off, they may as well have others where they don't. We present a corresponding (...) example. (shrink)

We initiate an account of Shelah’s notion of “strong dependence” in terms of generically stable measures, proving a measure analogue of the fact that a stable theory $T$ is “strongly dependent” if and only if all types have almost finite weight.