We examined whether the N400 Event-Related Potential component would be modulated by dispositional affect during sentence processing. In this study, 33 participants read sentences manipulated by direct object type and object determiner type. We were particularly interested in sentences of the form: The connoisseur tasted thewineon the tour vs. The connoisseur tasted the #roof… We expected that processing incongruent direct objects vs. congruent objects would elicit N400 effects. Previous ERP language experiments have shown that participants in positive and negative moods (...) were differentially sensitive to semantic anomaly, resulting in different N400 effects. Presently, we ask whether individual dispositional affect scores would modulate N400 effects as shown previously. Namely, previous results showed larger N400 effects associated with happy moods and attenuated amplitudes associated with sad moods. Results revealed significant N400 effects, driven by the #roof vs. the wine, where larger amplitude differences were found for individuals showing smaller negative affect scores, thus partially replicating previous findings. We discuss our results in terms of theories of local inhibition, such that low NA promotes stronger lexico-semantic links in sentences. Finally, our results support accounts of language processing that include social and biological characteristics of individuals during real-time sentence comprehension. (shrink)

Sentences such as "The author started the book" are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun "book" to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting (...) enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex or at the left inferior frontal gyrus. These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing fMRI, we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus, the right inferior frontal gyrus, and the anterior cingulate cortex, more so than control sentences ("The author wrote the book"). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences ("…drank the book") and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion. (shrink)

We examine the impact of employing a female, versus a male, leader on future (t + 1) donations and operating margin using a sample of 4387 unique nonprofit organizations (NPOs) between 2011 and 2014. Using two-stage and matched sample designs, we find that NPOs headed by female leaders report higher future operating margins but lower future donations. We interpret these findings to mean that female leaders are more focused on fiscal responsibility than fundraising. We also find that female leaders with (...) past fundraising experience attenuate lower future donations, and at commercial nonprofits, female leaders with prior for-profit experience contribute to even higher operating margins. Moreover, while female leaders identified as the founder of the organization increase future donations, they have no effect on future operating margins. Collectively, the results of our study should increase nonprofit boards’ confidence in hiring female leaders thereby narrowing the gender disparity in leadership in the nonprofit sector. This study expands the extant literature by providing initial evidence on the effects of female leaders in NPOs thereby contributing to research exploring gender, diversity, management, and nonprofit executives. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within (...) everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

Starting from the early decades of the twentieth century, evolutionary biology began to acquire mathematical overtones. This took place via the development of a set of models in which the Darwinian picture of evolution was shown to be consistent with the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel. The models, which came to be elaborated over the years, define a field of study known as population genetics. Population genetics is generally looked upon as an essential component of modern evolutionary theory. This (...) article deals with a famous dispute between J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of population genetics, and Ernst Mayr, a major contributor to the way we understand evolution. The philosophical undercurrents of the dispute remain relevant today. Mayr and Haldane agreed that genetics provided a broad explanatory framework for explaining how evolution took place but differed over the relevance of the mathematical models that sought to underpin that framework. The dispute began with a fundamental issue raised by Mayr in 1959: in terms of understanding evolution, did population genetics contribute anything beyond the obvious? Haldane's response came just before his death in 1964. It contained a spirited defense, not just of population genetics, but also of the motivations that lie behind mathematical modelling in biology. While the difference of opinion persisted and was not glossed over, the two continued to maintain cordial personal relations. (shrink)

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

The Public Sphere from Outside the West brings together established and emerging new voices from philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, migration studies and information technology to address the present reality of the public sphere. In the age where everyone is in the public and everything is visible, this volume creates a delay in which the internet of things, mass surveillance and social media are asked "What is/not the Public?†? The essays bring to attention the formation of geo-politically and historically distinct public (...) spheres from South Africa, India, America and Europe. Such formations are found not only in the postcolonial histories of print, photography, cinema and caricature but also those underway in the digital era, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movements and Anonymous. Through critical engagement with philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, Habermas and Arendt, the determining concepts of the Public Sphere-privacy, secrecy, reason, the people-are shown to be undergoing epistemological and practical ruptures. Demonstrating the necessity of these considerations to understand the world public that is rapidly transforming this concept in radical ways through technologies today, this is the first collection on the subject to feature an impressive range of international thinkers. Global and timely in outlook, it breaks new ground and changes our way of looking at politics in the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper establishes a dialogue between the later works of Wittgenstein, those of Cavell and the novels of J. M. Coetzee concerning the problem of violence, authority and the authoritative voice. By drawing on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year, the paper discusses lessons and insights on the nature of violence and the ways in which it can be accepted as “normal.” The term “normalization” is used in order to show how violence and (...) cruelty can become a “form of life” that develops according to its own actors, cultural practices and legitimacies. (shrink)

Conventional medical training offers little help to students to resolve the ethical dilemmas they face as healthcare professionals. Public awareness of the ethical behavior of medical practitioners has been growing. Aim of this study was to assess knowledge of, practice in and attitudes of healthcare ethics among medical, dental and physiotherapy postgraduate students. A cross-sectional analysis based on a questionnaire was performed at a hospital and dental institution of the medical college. The present study included 60 postgraduate students. The questionnaire (...) on health care ethics is a 44-point self-administered standardized questionnaire that poses ethical dilemmas in 5 vignettes with closed-ended questions to test awareness, attitude and experience in the area of healthcare ethics. In the first half of the questionnaire, knowledge and attitude were assessed using 5 case scenarios representing ethical dilemmas and the participants answered the questions using the 5 point likert scale. The second half assessed the practice of Ethics in research and clinical practice. The expected time to fill each questionnaire was about 10–15 min. 62 questionnaires were distributed. 60 completed questionnaires were returned. The response rate was 96%. The mean age of the postgraduates was 26.23 ± 2.33. Among the participants 28 were male and 32 female. 20 completed questionnaires from each, medical, dental and physiotherapy postgraduate students were collected. The multiple group comparison showed that the difference in the knowledge scores were statistically significant between dental and physiotherapy and between medical and physiotherapy but no significant difference between medical and dental. Study suggests that abstract knowledge cannot be converted into practical knowledge automatically. There is a major lack of knowledge of the ethics of health care among graduate students. The postgraduate curriculum must include a good mix of both theoretical concepts and practical application of multidisciplinary healthcare ethics ethical principles and guidelines. (shrink)

Critical study of categories (padārthas) described in Vaiśeṣikasūtra by Kaṇāda.

This paper interrogates the routine and unproblematic use of terms such as in biomedical and anthropological discourse. A typical depiction of the social factors that explain the practice of in India is to put together the supply side factors (such as protection offered by the government for the production of generic drugs, especially in the small scale sector, and expansion of the number of drug store outlets), with the increasing demand for allopathic drugs. The paper provides an ethnographic account of (...) the intricate connections between households and biomedical practitioners in urban neighbourhoods in Delhi. It breaks away from the conventional opposition drawn between the practices of physicians and the beliefs of their patients, and suggests that what constitutes the medical environments of these neighbourhoods is the product of medical practices, household economies and concepts of disease. Thus pharmaceutical use is determined as much by practices of dispensation and by how practitioners understand what constitutes therapy as by household understanding of the normal and the pathological. This paper uses both quantitative data and narrative interviews to provide an in-depth understanding of the circulation of pharmaceuticals within the life worlds of the urban poor. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary collection brings Gandhi's ideas into conversation with issues seldom discussed in Gandhi studies. The contributors engage with cross-cultural and cross-historical time periods, contributing in important ways to the ever-expanding field of Gandhi studies.

Ancient Indian philosophies consider self-realization as a fundamental concept and aim of human life, which appears theoretically similar to the self-actualization concept of the West. This article compares and contrasts the self-actualization concept with the views of ancient Indian wisdom to create a model. Both ideas strive for a more elevated Self, unleashing our potential or the realization/actualization of the true Self. From the Indian Vedanta philosophy emerged the Panchakosha theory of personality, which provides a structural framework for human states (...) of consciousness leading to higher development and transcendental identity. According to the scriptures, any form of stress is due to an underdeveloped state of consciousness at these levels or due to disconnection from the true Self; once an individual comes in contact with the ‘true Self’, the problems of life are eliminated. Yoga is a systematic process and way of human development, and applying the principles of Yoga philosophy in life will help in transcending one from the lower Self to the higher Self, awakening human potential, and becoming self-actualized. Yogis, who practice Yoga, could be responsible for a positive shift towards sustainable communities or transformative environments through enhanced mindfulness, self-actualization, and social capital demonstrated by enhanced moral values, trust, engagement, and acceptance. This theoretical model from classical Indian thought has the potential to provide the needed guidelines to create more self-actualized people. The dimension of well-being and prescriptions on how to reach this state of highest well-being is the essence of Indian philosophy. (shrink)

Adoption of technology, a research topic within the Information Systems area, is usually studied at two levels: organizational level and user level. This paper examines the range of methods used for studying technology adoption issues at both these levels. The approaches were selected after conducting a review of 48 articles on technology adoption and usage, published in peer reviewed journals between 1985 and 2003. The journals reviewed include the MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems (...) Journal, and other relevant journals in the IS area. The findings suggest that the survey method was used predominantly when investigating the topics of user adoption and the usage of technology. In contrast, the case study method is the most widely used when examining adoption issues at the organizational level. (shrink)

How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every element of language from one place to another whether within a word, a character, a (...) sentence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is internal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe’s understanding of itself. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

In the fight against racism, philosophy has to interrogate caste in its own histories and current decolonial consensus. Caste has been evading its interrogation as the oldest race theory and racist practice, which continue to oppress the lower-caste peoples who constitute the majority population of the Indian subcontinent. Caste and race are species of the hypophysics of man, which consecrates scaled intrinsic value in human nature through the notion of “being born as” by “being born to.” They are analogues in (...) having the same denigrate-dominate function of exploiting by including as born inferior. However, caste and race are also homologues since the hypophysics of caste has been at the origins of the hypophysics of race from at least the eighteenth century, culminating in the “Aryan doctrine” of the Nazis, now being revived. Caste was the empirical, conceptual, and textual resource for Europeans as it showed that large groups could be dominated as well as excluded through the self-designated superiority, supplied by the Brahminical texts, of the oppressing group. Rather than a colonial construct, caste is the oldest racism, which in colonial times devised new calypsologies—ways to mask itself against rising anticaste thought and politics. Postcolonial and subaltern theories disguise caste’s racism as “religion,” “culture,” and subaltern subjectivity, while some sociologists have denigrated Dalit scholarship as unacademic and emotional. The homologies of caste are still dangerously regnant today. (shrink)

Gandhi’s notion of passive-resistance is critical in two ways and defines swaraj and swadeshi, leading to his assertion that India alone is the land of redemption for the world afflicted with modern civilization, “the sheet-anchor of our hope”. “Sound at the foundation”, “India remains as it was before”, while the world speeds on, “usurp[ing] the function of Godhead” and indulg[ing] in novel experiments”. This paper aims at elaborating Gandhi’s definition of nature in terms of the scalar, speed, as found in (...) Hind Swaraj and other writings in order to demonstrate that India as hind swaraj is critical nation. (shrink)

COVID19 pandemic is pushing business organizations to cope in newer, more resilient ways. In this study, in-depth qualitative research was conducted using Weick's sensemaking framework (1995) to give organizational leaders a snapshot of how individuals grappled with sensemaking during this time. The enactment of sensemaking for individuals occurred based on four major COVIDian realities: life during the lockdown, work from home, moments of reflection, and struggles and emotions. The implications of the findings are two folds. First, the dynamic nature of (...) extracted cues coupled with greater technology use increased enactment frequency amongst individuals leading to a collapse in sensemaking. Secondly, we propose that this collapse has a significant impact on human cognition, which will further affect the nature of work as well as the meaning of work in life. (shrink)

Festschrift honoring Mandana Misra, b. 1929, Sanskrit philosopher; comprises articles chiefly on Mimamsa school in Hindu philosophy.

This paper aims to critically analyze one of the most impactful events reported from the Indian corporate scenario in recent years, from the premise of its aesthetic underpinnings. Our focus is on the ambitious 2008 all cash cross-border acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover businesses by Tata Motors Limited from Ford Motor Company, US. This move not only added stature to the already reputed brand but was also instrumental in positioning India in the global automotive arena. Using the Natyasastra, an (...) ancient Sanskrit scripture on Indian dramaturgy, as an aesthetic tool, we attempt to unravel the emotional performance depicted by various stakeholders partaking in the theatrics of the Jaguar Land Rover acquisition event. In the backdrop of theatrical performance, we examine the dialogical exchange between three distinct sets of actors, the firm, media, and equity market, to identify and elucidate the emotions they predominantly depict in the Jaguar Land Rover acquisition. This paper’s over-arching goal is to shift the preoccupation with metrics of organizational performance to focus instead on the emotional performance manifested through organizational activities, using an aesthetic and essentially Indian performative perspective. (shrink)