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

Recruiting nurses from other countries is a long-standing practice. In recent years many countries in the developed world have more frequently recruited nurses from the developing world, causing an imbalance in the health services in often already impoverished countries. Despite guidelines and promises by developed countries that the practice should cease, it has largely failed to do so. A consortium of authors from countries that have experienced significant nurse poaching consider the ethical aspects behind this continuing practice.

In his 2009 article “Self-Representationalism and Phenomenology,” Uriah Kriegel argues for self-representationalism about phenomenal consciousness primarily on phenomenological grounds. Kriegel’s argument can naturally be cast more broadly as an argument for higher-order representationalism. I examine this broadened version of Kriegel’s argument in detail and show that it is unsuccessful for two reasons. First, Kriegel’s argument (in its strongest form) relies on an inference to the best explanation from the claim that all experiences of normal adult human beings are accompanied by (...) peripheral awareness of those very experiences to the claim that all experiences are accompanied by peripheral awareness of those very experiences. This inference is inadequately defended, for the explanandum may also be given a straightforward evolutionary explanation. Second, contra Kriegel, I argue that phenomenological investigation does not support the thesis that we are always peripherally aware of our experiences. Instead, it delivers no verdict on this thesis. Kriegel’s phenomenological mistake may be explained via a highly diluted version of the famous transparency thesis about experience. (shrink)

Philosophical theory about the nature of human beings has far reaching consequences on our understanding of various issues faced by them. Once taken as self-evident, it becomes the foundation on which knowledge gets built. The cause of concern is that this theoretical framework rarely gets questioned despite its inherent limitations and self-defeating consequences, leading to crisis in the concerned field. The field, which is facing crisis today, is that of medicine, and the paradigmatic stance that is responsible for the crisis (...) is Cartesian dualism-a view that mind and body are essentially separate entities. This paper discusses Cartesian dualism in the context of the practice of medicine. Focusing more closely on how disease, health and treatment are defined through this position, the paper builds up its critique by throwing light on its accomplishments, limitations and self-defeating consequences. The paper also seeks to understand why this dualism is still alive despite its disavowal from philosophers, health practitioners and lay people. (shrink)

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on‐line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up‐votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their (...) curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up‐votes in reducing curiosity than of high up‐votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity. (shrink)

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

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

This paper is about Gandhi's critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards democracy was a part. I argue that for Gandhi the ground of moral action is fearlessness, while that of political reason is security and self-defense. Gandhi sees the context of moral action in the mundane fabric of everyday life, in places such as the family and the village. For that reason he does not believe that moral action requires being supplemented by the particular kind of unity which (...) politics and the state call for and necessitate. (shrink)

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

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

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

I construct a tempting anti-physicalist argument, which sharpens an explanatory gap argument suggested by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson. The argument relies crucially on the premise that there is a deep epistemic asymmetry (which may be identified with the explanatory gap) between phenomenal truths and ordinary macroscopic truths. Many physicalists reject the argument by rejecting this premise. I argue that even if this premise is true, the anti-physicalist conclusion should be rejected, and I provide a detailed, physicalist-friendly explanation of the (...) relevant premise. Along the way, I sketch an account of a priori conceptual knowledge that is compatible with naturalistic accounts of intentionality. I conclude by noting that the resulting view is a version of the popular phenomenal concept strategy that avoids a potentially worrying dilemma facing earlier incarnations of this strategy. (shrink)

Decolonization of the European empires in the twentieth century was spurred by the colonized based on two purposes: the desire for independence, and the desire to build a sovereign political identity. The most obvious feature of the first intention was the formation of anti-imperialist movements, organised under the banner ‘they must leave’. The latter was characterized by the establishment of constitutional government, which highlighted the identity of a novice country in a political and unified form and which featured a central (...) source of power. These two purposes share a complex relationship. For power to be sovereign, independence must be gained first. Power cannot be obligated to the wishes of another power or constrained by the laws of another regime. The struggle for independence of European empires did not readily create the conditions for the exercise of a sovereign power. It was elusive at the moment of independence. This chapter discusses some of the implications of these two purposes, with emphasis on the second purpose and the Indian experience. It addresses questions such as: what is the meaning of collective identity to those newly independent countries in the context of politics; what were the pressures on the claims to political identity and unity; how did these pressures encourage a revolutionary mindset in the conceptualization of constitutional provisions and political power; and how does the struggle for political identity relate to the history of nation and its struggle for independence? (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new argument for the perceptual rationality thesis: the claim that perceptual experiences themselves can be rational or irrational. In her book The Rationality of Perception, Susanna Siegel has offered several intertwined arguments for this same thesis, and, as you will see, one of Siegel’s arguments is what inspires my own. However, I will suggest that the new argument is significantly better-supported than Siegel’s original argument.

Terror and its cognates have come to signify the darkest excesses of contemporary and 20th-century political life. These include aggressive claims to purity; murderous manifestations of programmatic and religious self-certainty; paranoid and devastating responses to threats to national security; and more generally, an intensity of instrumental forms of thinking and acting that give to individuals, groups, and states a broad warrant for deploying violence as a means to their purposefulness. Hannah Arendt reflected deeply on the implications of such high-minded and (...) bellicose purposefulness. This chapter focuses on how Arendt also associated terror with something utterly commonplace, whose reach and provenance extended well beyond the 20th century—namely, in the political attempt to address ubiquitous social questions. (shrink)

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

The common law system is a legal system that values precedent, or previous court decisions, in the resolution of current cases. As the availability of legal documents in digital form has increased, it has become more difficult for legal professionals to manually identify relevant past cases due to the vast amount of data. Researchers have developed automated systems for determining the similarity between legal documents to address this issue. Our research explores various representations of a legal document and discusses a (...) novel paragraph filtering process to identify key paragraphs using legal citation information to remove unnecessary text paragraphs without disturbing the concept of the legal document. State-of-the-art techniques like TF-IDF, BERT, Legal Bert, Doc2Vec, and Legal-longformer are used for the performance analysis of the proposed approach with document comparison. It has been shown that a model trained on the proposed filtered paragraphs can achieve better results than a model trained on the complete text and can also shorten the document by over 40%. The proposed filtering strategy could be helpful for models like BERT, where the maximum token length is fixed. (shrink)

John Evans’s new book Morals Not Knowledge pushes scholars to rethink contemporary debates about religion and science by moving past the rhetoric of societal elites to examine the perspectives of everyday Americans, identifying the moral conflicts at the heart of debates. We review Evans’s key contributions while also extending and challenging his arguments, urging consideration of how renewed moral debates might be informed by a broader set of U.S. “publics.” Drawing on empirical research, we highlight four sets of voices that (...) are missing from Evans’s analysis. Specifically, we highlight the voices of racial and ethnic minorities, religious communities (as opposed to individuals), members of minority religious traditions, and everyday religious scientists. Through doing so we offer avenues for future research on these diverse publics that will help facilitate a broader set of better and more informed debates about moral conflict between religious and scientific communities. (shrink)

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

Nature contact has associations with emotional ill-being and well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We hypothesised that increased adaptive and decreased maladaptive emotion regulation strategies would be a pathway linking nature contact to ill-being and well-being. Using data from a survey of 600 U.S.-based adults administered online in 2022, we conducted structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. We found that (1) frequency of nature contact was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional (...) well-being, (2) effective emotion regulation was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional well-being, and (3) the associations of higher frequency of nature contact with these benefits were partly explained via emotion regulation. Moreover, we found a nonlinear relationship for the associations of duration of nature contact with some outcomes, with a rise in benefits up to certain amounts of time, and a levelling off after these points. These findings support and extend previous work that demonstrates that the associations of nature contact with emotional ill-being and well-being may be partly explained by changes in emotion regulation. (shrink)

Advances in biotechnology make possible the transition toward a carbohydrate-based economy. By modifying plants to sequester more carbon and survive on marginal lands, more cost-effective means for using biomass are explored. This article discusses how better use of biomass can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and poses questions about how this transition can occur.

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

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

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

Hastings Center Report, Volume 51, Issue 5, Page 53-55, September‐October 2021.

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

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

Action research has been extensively used world-wide for decision making related to policy due to its nature of involving the researcher and decision maker in the process. Following independence in India, one of the major revolutions was brought about in the dairy sector with regard to complete management systems. Most innovations and changes occurred in the line function while the staff function was more often neglected in the overall change. The authors undertook an action research study focusing on staff function (...) and relayed improvements that can influence policy related to decision making. The authors have also developed the MPS model for staff function which can help a company or industry in appraising their own staff and functions which can thereby aid in utilising their potential. (shrink)

I defend a subjective representationalist theory of phenomenal experience. On this view, phenomenal experiences are simply certain kinds of representations of subjective (i.e., suitably mind-dependent) physical properties of environmental objects or of one’s body. Chapter 1 focuses on the thoroughly spatial character of experience. Here I argue against views of experience according to which phenomenal properties – roughly, the properties which constitute “what it’s like” to have an experience – are internal to the subject’s mind. If my arguments succeed, then (...) phenomenal properties are outside the subject’s mind. Representationalists typically embrace this claim. Chapter 2 quickly recapitulates some well-known motivations for representationalism and then considers an important choice point for representationalists: are phenomenal properties objective (essentially mind-independent) or subjective (essentially mind-dependent)? I introduce a robust set of inversion intuitions and argue that subjective representationalism, which holds that some phenomenal properties are subjective, can better accommodate such intuitions than objective representationalism. Chapter 3 focuses on the familiar “explanatory gap” problem. I consider a recent version of this argument which concludes that phenomenal consciousness is not reducible to the physical. Since the version of subjective representationalism I hold is part of just such an attempt to reduce phenomenal consciousness to the physical, I spend this chapter developing the resources to respond to Chalmers’ argument. Chapter 4 considers the intuition that internal twins must have precisely the same kinds of phenomenal experiences. This intuition is widespread, powerful, and recalcitrant. But it is very likely that representationalism, especially of the highly externalist sort that I defend in Chapter 1, is incompatible with such intuitions. I argue that this intuition is unreliable and attempt to debunk it. Chapter 5 very tentatively fills in some details of the subjective representationalist account. Representationalists can be sorted into first-order and higher-order theorists. Roughly, first-order representationalists hold that a ground-level representation of a certain kind suffices for phenomenal experience, while higher-order representationalists insist that phenomenal experiences also require a higher-order representation of the ground-level representations. I am tempted by the first-order view on grounds of parsimony. In this chapter, I rebut just one recent, introspectively-based argument for higher-order representationalism. (shrink)