"This collection is the first book to focus on the emerging field of study called feminist philosophy of mind. Each of the twenty chapters of Feminist Philosophy of Mind employs theories and methodologies from feminist philosophy to offer fresh insights and perspectives into issues raised in the contemporary literature in philosophy of mind and/or uses those from the philosophy of mind to advance feminist theory. The book delineates the content and aims of the field and demonstrates the fecundity of its (...) approach, which is centered on the collective consideration of three questions: What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? To whom is mind attributed? Topics considered with this lens include mental content, artificial intelligence, the first-person perspective, personal identity, other minds, mental attribution, mental illness, perception, memory, attention, desire, trauma, agency, empathy, grief, love, gender, race, sexual orientation, materialism, panpsychism, and enactivism. In addition to engaging analytic and feminist philosophical traditions, essays draw from resources in phenomenology, philosophy of race, decolonial studies, disability studies, embodied cognition theory, comparative philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology"--. (shrink)

Moderate pragmatic invariantism (MPI) is a proposal to explain why our intuitions about the truth-value of knowledge claims vary with stakes and salient error-possibilities. The basic idea is that this variation is due to a variation not in the propositions expressed (as epistemic contextualists would have it) but in the propositions conversationally implicated. I will argue that MPI is mistaken: I will distinguish two kinds of implicature, namely, additive and substitutional implicatures. I will then argue, first, that the proponent of (...) MPI cannot appeal to additive implicatures because they don’t affect truth-value intuitions in the required way. Second, I will argue that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to substitutional implicatures either because, even though they may have the required effects on truth-value intuitions, they don’t feature in the relevant cases. It follows that MPI is mistaken because whether the proponent of MPI appeals to additive or substitutional implicatures, at least one of the claims that make up her view is false. Along the way, I will suggest principles about implicatures that should be relevant not only to MPI, but to pragmatic accounts of seemingly semantic intuitions in general. (shrink)

Chandra Mohanty, in introducing the phrase “feminism without borders,” acknowledges that she is influenced by the image of “doctors without borders” and wants to highlight the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints within the feminist coalition. So the question of agency assumes primary significance here. But answering the question of agency becomes harder once we try to accommodate this multiplicity. Take, for example, the practice of veiling among certain Muslim women. As many third-world feminists have pointed out, although veiling can't simply (...) be perceived as an expression of women's oppression, it can't be perceived as an expression of “free agency” either since what is required for true feminist agency is women's ability to “formulate choices” and not simply to make choices. In this paper I argue that this ability includes two related abilities: first, to develop a perspective of self that acknowledges and accepts its own grounding in its given intersectionalities; second, to realize that its interdependencies and interconnectivities enable a sense of continuity and solidarity that works collaboratively toward consensus without sacrificing or stifling all differences. My main argument is that feminist self-consciousness informed by Buddhist mindfulness gives us opportunities to articulate clearly and to cultivate both of these abilities. (shrink)

This article brings together two sets of data that are rarely discussed in concert; namely, disagreement and testimony data. I will argue that relativism yields a much more elegant account of these data than its major rival, contextualism. The basic idea will be that contextualists can account for disagreement data only by adopting principles that preclude a simple account of testimony data. I will conclude that, other things being equal, we should prefer relativism to contextualism. In making this comparative point, (...) I will also defend self-standing relativist accounts of disagreement and testimony data. (shrink)

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is (...) to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open‐mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice. (shrink)

The Ethics of Governance: Moral Limits of Policy Decisions offers a toolbox drawn from normative ethics which finds applications in public governance, primarily focusing on policy making and executive action. It includes ethical concepts and principles culled from different philosophical traditions, ranging from more familiar Western theories to non-Western ethical perspectives, thereby providing a truly global, decolonized and expanded normative lens on issues of governance. The book takes a unique and original approach; it demonstrates the use of the ethical toolbox (...) in the context of actual examples of governance challenges. Taking three major case studies each representing an aspect of human-human and/or human-nature and/or human-animal relationship, the book attempts to show the significance of public practical reasoning in policy decisions with the aim of arriving at reasonable responses. Acknowledging the challenges that policy makers often face, the book highlights the fact that policy making is hardly an exercise yielding a black-or-white solution; rather it involves finding the most reasonable normative outcome in a given situation, especially employing an expanded understanding of values including well-being, sustainability, interdependence and community. This effort that helps bridge the gap between ethical theorists and policy practitioners exemplifies the necessary role of ‘engaged philosophy’ in public governance. In the major case studies, Boxes offer facts and figures along with pertinent ethical questions that have been raised and discussed. Aiming to aid the engagement of a diverse audience including non-philosophy readers, each chapter also includes Boxes containing examples, shorter case studies, at-a-glance charts, and tables with comprehensive ethical tools for a quick recap. (shrink)

This paper examines the often-mentioned similarity in comparative moral philosophy between the Hindu Text Bhagavad-Gita’s notion of duty and Kant’s notion of duty. It is commonly argued that they are similar in their deontological nature where one is asked to perform one’s duty for the sake of duty only. I consider three related questions from Gita’s and Kant’s perspectives. First, What is the source of our duties: Self or Nature; second, How do we know that an act x is our (...) duty, and third, What would be an acceptable example of a duty. In all these three cases I show that their respective answers diverge quite clearly and conclude by arguing that the reason for this divergence lies in their respective contexts: while the ideal of Kantian morality is to become a member of the ‘kingdom of ends’, the aims of the Gita’s system of duties are the sustenance of the social order and the realization of one’s identity with the Supreme Self. (shrink)

Consciousness is a central topic in Hindu philosophy. This is because this philosophy understands reality in terms of brahman or atman (typically translated as the self), and consciousness is conceived as the essential marker of self. The prominent Hindu text Bhagavad Gita offers an exception. Self is conceived in the Gita not in terms of its essential identity with pure or transcendental consciousness. But the question remains, does the Gita still offer us a theory of consciousness? The goal of my (...) paper is to show that the Gita can be taken as offering an interesting empirical theory of consciousness. My paper focuses on determining the nature of attention in the Gita's understanding of yoga, and to articulate the role of such attention in the Gita's theory of consciousness. My working conclusion is that what differentiates an ordinary person's consciousness from a yogi's consciousness is the nature of their attention both in terms of its manner and its object. I argue, further, that exploring the Gita's theory of consciousness, especially in conjunction with the nature of attention, is immensely fruitful because it allows us to see the Gita's potential contribution to our contemporary philosophical discussion of consciousness and attention. This is because bringing the Gita into discussion allows us to appreciate a dimension of the metaphysics of attention–namely, the dimension of manner of attending and its cultivation, and the moral and social implications in the proposed redirection of one's attention--not often recognized in the contemporary Western discussion. (shrink)

Bhagavad-gītā: A Critical Introduction is a collection of ten original chapters authored by nine scholars of the Gītā. While no single theme runs through all the chapters, they all revolve around the hermeneutics of the Gītā, especially in the exegetical and commentarial traditions. The first three chapters focus on the questions of structure of the text, both in terms of its organizational form and the coherence of its content. Chapters 4 through 6 focus on the Gītā's commentarial and exegetical history (...) especially within the Vaiṣṇava tradition. Chapters 7 through 9 focus on the socio-religious and cultural impacts of the Gītā that expand the scope of its influences. Finally, chapter 10 brings the focus back to... (shrink)

A recent trend in curriculum reform argues that a successful liberal education curriculum must incorporate courses on multiculturalism. Though there is some agreement on what topics to cover in those courses, very little attention has so far been directed to the issue of how those courses must be designed. What is important in addressing this 'how' question is a clear understanding of the concepts involved. The question I explore in this paper is: what is the best way of understanding the (...) nature of the concept of 'Indian culture' that would in turn help us achieve the proposed goal of liberal education. I argue that neither essentialism nor postmodernism - the two popular ways of understanding a concept in mainstream philosophy - is going to be of much help. I also consider a historical alternative suggested by Uma Narayan. I then offer a naturalist way of understanding this concept and note its relative advantages over Narayan's historical account. (shrink)

A recent trend in curriculum reform argues that a successful liberal education curriculum must incorporate courses on multiculturalism. Though there is some agreement on what topics to cover in those courses, very little attention has so far been directed to the issue of how those courses must be designed. What is important in addressing this 'how' question is a clear understanding of the concepts involved. The question I explore in this paper is: what is the best way of understanding the (...) nature of the concept of 'Indian culture' that would in turn help us achieve the proposed goal of liberal education. I argue that neither essentialism nor postmodernism - the two popular ways of understanding a concept in mainstream philosophy - is going to be of much help. I also consider a historical alternative suggested by Uma Narayan. I then offer a naturalist way of understanding this concept and note its relative advantages over Narayan's historical account. (shrink)

The chapter offers a sustained comparison between American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist philosopher Dignaga and argues that while their views are prima facie inconsistent with one another, there are important areas of agreement worthy of exploration.

In the Discourse on Metaphysics Leibniz writes, 'Our perceptions are always true, it is our judgments that come from ourselves that deceive us' (section 14). Leroy Loemker in his 'Leibniz's Doctrine of Ideas' criticizes this account of error. His main worry can be presented in the form of the following syllogistic argument, which he derives from Leibniz's doctrine of ideas: (a) There cannot be a false perception; (b) All judgments are perceptions; and therefore (c) There cannot be a false judgment. (...) However, in this paper I argue that Leibniz can distinguish between a perception and a judgment in their semantic aspect. The sense in which a perception turns out to be false (or true) for Leibniz is different from the sense in which a judgment turns out to be false (or true). This is because, while a perception, understood in Leibniz's terms, lacks truth-conditions, a judgment, in being representational, has such conditions. Thus while a perception remains true always, a judgment can be false. Pointing to the equivocal use of 'false' in (a) and (c) above, I conclude that (c) does not follow from (a) and (b). (shrink)

The "incompatibility charge" argues that externalism fails to explain "self-knowledge" or the privileged knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves to enjoy in relation to at least some of our own mental states. This dissertation attempts to provide an externalist reply to this charge. First, I suggest that the "compatibility debate" needs to be reoriented. This is because the mere internality or externality of determining factors cannot by itself explain how one can know the content determined by those factors. Thus the (...) task of explaining self-knowledge is one of explaining how we come to make these claims and where do they derive their privileged status from. Further, a story about the underlying epistemology of these claims has to be told not only by the externalists but also by the internalists. ;Chapter One introduces a distinction between two ways of understanding the epistemic privilege, namely, between "privilege in access", that consists of the way in which these claims are made and validated, and "privilege in authority", that consists of their infallibility. I argue that the epistemology underlying the phenomenon of self-knowledge can be best understood in terms of the privilege in access. ;Chapter Two turns to the incompatibility charge. I argue that the exchanges of arguments that have been taken place between the incompatibilists and the compatibilists in the literature rely on the implicit presupposition that a concept must always have an univocal and unambiguous referent and this fact should be discoverable a priori. I argue that a thorough going externalist should reject this questionable presupposition. ;Chapter Three criticizes the internalist argument that the internalists' job in accounting for self-knowledge is different from the externlaists' job. I conclude by noting that the internalist accounts have as much, if not more, difficulty in accounting for self-knowledge. ;Chapter Four suggests an externalist account of self-knowledge from the perspective of Sellars. The uniqueness of the Sellarsian account lies in the fact that it offers an interesting way of understanding the privilege of self-knowledge claims according to which though these claims enjoy non-inferential privilege, they are nonetheless defeasible and also justifiable from an independent source. (shrink)

Philosophy of The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction presents a complete philosophical guide and new translation of the most celebrated text of Hinduism. While usually treated as mystical and religious poetry, this new translation focuses on the philosophy underpinning the story of a battle between two sets of cousins of the Aryan clan. Designed for use in the classroom, this lively and readable translation: - Situates the text in its philosophical and cultural contexts - Features summaries and chapter analyses and (...) questions at the opening and end of each of the eighteen chapters encouraging further study - Highlights points of comparison and overlap between Indian and Western philosophical concepts and themes such as just war, care ethics, integrity and authenticity - Includes a glossary allowing the reader to determine the meaning of central concepts Written with clarity and without presupposing any prior knowledge of Hinduism, Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction reveals the importance and value of reading the Gita philosophically. (shrink)

Vrinda Dalmiya's Caring to Know is an exciting, impressive, and above all important work on caring in ethics and epistemology. Its central focus is to articulate what Dalmiya calls "care-knowing"—which proposes care as a basic intellectual virtue. In developing its dual aspects—caring as a process and caring as a disposition—Dalmiya offers a systematic argument that defends the viability and efficacy of care-knowing. The early chapters set the stage by offering a "thumbnail" account of the main moves in the literature on (...) care ethics and virtue epistemology. All the building blocks are then assembled to develop the central concept of the book, namely the virtue of "relational humility," a... (shrink)

This paper connects the following four topics: a class of generalized graphs whose relations do not have fixed arities called hypergraphs, a family of non-normal modal logics rejecting the aggregative axiom, an epistemic framework fighting logical omniscience, and the classical group knowledge modality of ‘someone knows’. Through neighborhood frames as their meeting point, we show that, among many completeness results obtained in this paper, the limit of a family of weakly aggregative logics is both exactly the modal logic of hypergraphs (...) and also the epistemic logic of local reasoning with veracity and positive introspection, and upon adding a single combinatorial axiom, it is also the logic of ‘someone knows’ for a fixed finite number of positively introspective agents. At the core of all these completeness results is a new canonical neighborhood model construction for monotone modal logics that is capable of dealing with all these diverse cases. We also provide an axiomatization for the logic of all non-n-colorable hypergraphs based on a filtration argument that also shows the decidability of the logics of hypergraphs we study. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of Chinese firms on the formation of cross-border alliances with partners in developed countries. We use signaling theory and the co-evolutionary perspective as bases in proposing that the signaling effects of CSR performance on cross-border alliance formation are subject to the influences of subnational, national, and cross-national institutions. By using a longitudinal data set, we find that the signaling effects of CSR performance on cross-border alliance formation emerged only after (...) a national system of CSR-related institutions had been established. Once this framework was set up, the effectiveness of CSR as a signal was subject to subnational (intra-country) and cross-national (inter-countries) institutional differences. We conclude that combining signaling theory with the co-evolutionary perspective contributes to CSR research in emerging markets. (shrink)

Introduction. The enimatic case of the Zhongshuo -- Part One. Assessing textual authority -- The transmission history of the Zhongshuo, seventh through eleventh centuries -- Features, problems, and puzzles in the received Zhongshuo -- Part Two. Interpreting cultural authority -- Appropriations of the Master's legacy.

In this study, we built and tested a theoretical model to determine how ethical leadership affects team creativity among teams composed of different characteristics. Following social learning theory and an antecedent–benefit–cost framework, we conducted analyses of multisource data from 50 team supervisors and 186 employees, which revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity. The teams exhibited more creativity when there was a moderate level of ethical leadership than when there were very low or very high levels. (...) Moreover, from an interactional perspective, we found that team faultlines significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more significant among teams with weak team faultlines. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This book explores how one can bring about changes in the brain through meditation, both through attention-focus training and through compassion training. Recent findings in the natural sciences have confirmed that it is possible for humans to achieve these structural and functional changes through various life-style practices. It is argued that meditation enables us to influence some aspects of our biological make-up and, for example, could boost our cognitive flexibility as well as our ability to act compassionate. Such changes are (...) likely to facilitate the instilling of a number of epistemic virtues which have great bearing on our quality of life. This book offers the reader an accessible introduction to a set of neuro-enhancement methods, with a special focus on meditation techniques, and explores how such practices could contribute to make us better decision-makers and improve our moral virtues. The book is suitable for anyone looking for a text discussing the effects of neuro-enhancement from a secular ethics perspective. (shrink)

This book shows how pressing issues in bioethics – e.g. the ownership of biological material and human cognitive enhancement – successfully can be discussed with in a virtue ethics framework. This is not intended as a complete or exegetic account of virtue ethics. Rather, the aim here is to discuss how some key ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, when interpreted pragmatically, can be a productive way to approach some hot issues in bioethics. In spite of being a very promising theoretical (...) perspective virtue ethics has so far been underdeveloped both in bioethics and neuroethics and most discussions have been conducted in consequentialist and/or deontological terms. ​. (shrink)

Business moral values are defined as the personal moral values held by individuals who are engaged in business interactions. Direct supervisors may play an important role in shaping the business moral values of their subordinates. Using 264 supervisor— subordinate dyadic data from Taiwanese organizations, the study investigated the relationships among supervisor business moral values, subordinate business moral values, subordinate organizational commitment, job performance, and attendance. The results indicated that supervisor business moral values were positively associated with subordinate business moral values, (...) and that the latter mediated the relationship between the former and subordinate outcomes. Implications for business moral values research are discussed. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

As a pair of important categories in traditional Chinese culture, "ming 命 (destiny or decrees)" and "tian ming 天命 (heavenly ordinances)" mainly refer to the constraints placed on human beings. Both originated from "ling 令 (decrees)," which evolved from "wang ling 王令 (royal decrees)" into "tian ling 天令 (heavenly decrees)," and then became "ming" from a throne because of the decisive role of "heavenly decrees" over a throne. "Ming" and "tian ming" have different definitions: "Ming" represented the limits Heaven placed (...) on the natural lives of human beings and was an objective force that men could not direct, but was embodied in human beings as their "destiny"; "Tian ming" reflected the moral ideals of human beings in their self-identification; It originated in man but had to be verified by Heaven, and it was therefore the true ordinance that Heaven placed on human beings. "Ming" and "tian ming" are two perspectives on the traditional relationship between Heaven and human beings, and at the same time Confucians and Daoists placed different emphasis on them. /// 摘要 "命" 与 "天命" 是传统文化中的-对重要范畴，主要指人所受到的限制。 二者都起源 "令", 由 "王令" "而" 天令又因 "天令" 对王权的决定作用从 而成为王权之 "命" 。"命" 与 "天命" 有不同规定 "命" 体现着天对人之自然 生命的限制，表现的是人所无法驾驭的客观力量，但落实于人并表现为人之 "命" ; "天命" 体现的则是人之自我确认的道德理想，其虽然出于人却又必须证之于天， 所以是天之真正的命于人者。命与天命，既体现了传统天人关系的双重视角，同时 也是儒道两家不同探索侧重的一个基本分野。. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, was extremely prolific in various fields of philosophy, such as metaphysics, mathematical logic and mathematical philosophy, linguistic philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and social and political philosophy, but left little legacy in aesthetics. Some scholars regretted that “If the 20th-century had seen any polymath, Russell is the one. The only branch of philosophy he did not write on is aesthetics.” Although Russell did not write a book or article specifically on aesthetics, discussions on the subject can be (...) found in his various writings, for example, the most prominent proposal of “the beauty of mathematics.” In addition, he also talked about how agnostics explain the beauty and harmony of nature from the perspective of epistemology. Views on aesthetics are scattered in Russell's writings, and no consistent views have been formed; some fragmented ideas about aesthetics are scattered in different philosophical writings. Compared with his profound contribution to other fields of philosophy, Russell did not deal with aesthetic issues systematically, nor did he attempt to answer the basic questions of aesthetics. In addition to personal qualities, there were certain constraints of the greater social environment. One of the main reasons is that in the English world of the 20th century, the analytical philosophy of language occupied the central stage, so that the space reserved for ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy was quite limited. Furthermore, aesthetics was indeed not a popular philosophical topic culturally acceptable at the time. (shrink)

We investigate diagonal actions of Polish groups and the related intersection operator on closed subgroups of the acting group. The Borelness of the diagonal orbit equivalence relation is characterized and is shown to be connected with the Borelness of the intersection operator. We also consider relatively tame Polish groups and give a characterization of them in the class of countable products of countable abelian groups. Finally an example of a logic action is considered and its complexity in the Borel reducbility (...) hierarchy determined. (shrink)

EDITOR’S ABSTRACTThe popular Chinese portrayal of the victory of Confucianism, or in Chinese terms “dismiss the hundred schools of thought and revere only the Confucian arts,” has been challenged by some scholars in the past decades. Ding’s essay illustrates not only how it has been challenged but also how the catch phrase influences the scholarly discussion. As he indicates, recent Chinese studies that attempt to subvert the traditional theory share the same “flow.” They fail to note that the expression “dismiss (...) the hundred schools of thought and revere only the Confucian arts” has had very negative connotations since it was invoked by Yi Baisha 易白沙 to harshly denounce Confucianism for being responsible for the centuries-long Chinese autocracy. (shrink)

EDITOR’S ABSTRACTThis article argues that the early Laozi text underwent three stages: The first had section divisions on the basis of the meaning. The second stage was the formative period of the Laozi text influenced by cosmological numerology; the Silk Manuscript version A is its testimony. The third stage finalized the text through the canonization of the Classic by Emperor Jing; it is represented by the Peking University Han Bamboo Slips, Yan Zun, and Liu Xiang versions and became the received (...) edition. From the Han Bamboo Slips to the Liu Xiang version, the Laozi’s two parts and section numbering became increasingly balanced and symmetric. Ding urges scholars to pay attention to all these developments when studying the Laozi text. (shrink)