The COVID-19 vaccine has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed. The time from sequencing the virus to authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccine was so brisk even the optimists appear close-minded. Yet, simultaneously, United States’ COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies have contained missed opportunities, errors, run counter to evidence-based medicine, and revealed limitations in the judgment of public policymakers. Misplaced utilization, contradictory messaging, and poor deployment in those who would benefit (...) most—the elderly and high-risk—alongside unrealistic messaging, exaggeration, and coercion in those who benefit least—young, healthy Americans—is at the heart. It is important to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come. (shrink)

There is a fine line in business negotiations between being perceived as corrupt and having proper engagement with the natural tension and excitement of the business bargaining process. Combining literature review and experiential observation we provide a framework that will assist global business managers to more successfully negotiate cross-cultural business transactions. We identify some archetypal underpinnings of bargaining in a business context and question the established perceptions of corruption in intercultural business dealings. We conclude that different cultural systems produce variations (...) of negotiating behaviour that need to be judged with a deeper local knowledge to avoid simply transferring inappropriate labels.
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This article presents material from my ethnographic study in Śringēri, south India, the site of a powerful 1200yearold Advaitic monastery that has been historically an interpreter of ancient Hindu moral treatises. A vibrant diverse local culture that provides plural sources of moral authority makes Sringeri a rich site for studying moral discourse. Through a study of two conversational narratives, this essay illustrates how the moral self is not an ossified product of written texts and codes, but is dynamic, gen dered, (...) and emergent, endowed with historical and political agency and an aesthetic capacity that mediates many normative sources to articulate "appropriate" conduct. In so doing, the essay shows the value of including oral narrative in ethical inquiry, especially in narrative ethics, which, for most part, has focused on written sources. (shrink)

In the search for the ontic existence of man and curiosity about his ultimate destiny, the supreme wisdom(Prajñā) has been the origin and surge of the philosophical analysis of Vedāntic perspective. That is why Vedānta has been established as a spiritual religion in the cultural life and philosophical mind of India. Vedānta is the most dynamic philosophy of the Indian tradition and a philosophy of life with corresponding cultural scope. If India's spiritual-philosophical pride in world history and the possibility of (...) world-wide cultural emergence lies in any philosophy, then it could be visualised only in the monistic worldview of Vedānta. Vedāntic philosophy, which provides the supreme basis for religious tolerance, has always rescued this country from cultural crises and in every moment of crisis, it has accepted new forms by becoming the "Philosophy of India's Swaraj". In this book, Vedāntic philosophy was presented in an encyclopedic format by integrating dimensions like philosophical analysis of Nature of Consciousness, Vedāntic investigation regarding the ontological status of Absolute, God and world comes to the forefront, different shades of Advaitic philosophical tradition, different facets of religion, culture and values theme is brought under discussion. The book is published in the national language Hindi, is useful in many ways for philosophy students, researchers and teachers and is definitely a 'must collect' for the libraries of higher education institutions. (shrink)

Vedānta endeavours to base itself essentially on the facts of experience—in the fullest sense of the term. It recognizes the occurrence of everyday experience and the so-called fact of evil, but it refuses to view them as real. The real, it says, like Hegel, does not exist, and that which exists is not real. Evil is only an “existent"—as all this Samsara is—but not the ultimate Real. But it will be at once objected that if evil is an appearance, a (...) Maya, why should this appearance appear at all? If it has no foundation in reality, how and why does it occur at all? Further, how can anything be known as real unless it should appear ? Reality must appear. (shrink)

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.

Cognitive architectures, like programming languages, make commitments only at the implementation level and have limited explanatory power. Their universality implies that it is hard, if not impossible, to justify them in detail from finite quantities of data. It is more fruitful to focus on particular tasks such as language understanding and propose testable theories at the computational and algorithmic levels.

Thus one should define, in a double way, name and form in all phenomena of the three realms. …In this essay, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, "nāma-rūpa," literally, "name-and-form," by Buddhaghosa, the influential fifth-century Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors and their formulaic ordering;1 and an interpretation of phenomenology as a methodology. We argue that Buddhaghosa does not (...) use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but rather as the contemplative structuring of human phenomenology.... (shrink)

Recent years have featured the existence of a variety of structuralisms, with an important partition between methodological versus philosophical structuralism. Inside philosophical structuralism, many trends can be identified, corresponding to various ontological stances. We argue here that another main partition has contributed to organize structuralism in the twentieth century, rooted in different technical and theoretical interests. This partition is largely transversal to the ones classically identified. Concretely, the paper will focus on possible differences between an arithmetical and logical notion of (...) structure that can be traced back to the writings of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, and a mathematical notion of structure, exemplified in the works by Bourbaki. This coexistence gives rise to a fundamental ambiguity that affects contemporary structuralism. Philosophically, in one case the attention is rather centered on a foundational and reductionist perspective, as featured by the Whitehead-Russell Principia and the Carnapian project of the Aufbau: the scientific construction of the world around the idea of structure. In the other, the focus is on epistemological and dynamical issues, as exemplified by two key issues in Bourbaki’s treatise: understanding the architecture of mathematics, offering a tool-kit to mathematicians. These two distinct meanings still coexist inside contemporary scientific practices and lead to different theoretical interests, as we will show thanks to various recent examples. (shrink)

This research examines a series of case studies from the agricultural sector to illustrate how various models of innovation embrace value proposition. A conscious value contestation at the interface of science, policy and civil society requires transformations in the triple-helix model of university-government-industry collaboration, because reiterations in the triple-helix model of innovation, such as quadruple, quintuple and higher helices, do not necessarily address civil society concerns for human values and science ethics. This research develops and tests a matrix model of (...) university-government-industry-civil society collaboration, which involves the co-creation of inclusive and transformational spaces for value proposition. Findings suggest that the matrix model of innovation institutionalises citizen science as it serves as a moral heuristic to make seemingly apolitical science responsive to essentially contested societal values. (shrink)

A country report describing the teaching of philosophy in Singapore's primary and secondary schools.

Reviewed by F. PATRAS, Laboratoire J.-A. Dieudonné, Université Côte d'Azur and CNRS, Nice, France. [email protected] those who are interested in Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics and its links w...

What we understand by nationalism is the idea of supporting one’s country, people, culture and sovereignty of the nation. It believes in self-rule, with an objective to maintain the national unity and solidarity. It also encourages pride in national achievements and is closely linked with patriotism. One who dedicates his life to promoting the above objectives for the glory of his nation is considered as a nationalist. Swami Vivekananda who has dedicated his short, but meaningful life for the upliftment of (...) his fellow country-men and worked hard for the freedom of his motherland from political, religious, economic and cultural bondage, for which he can rightly be called an epitome of nationalism or a true nationalist. In this article, I shall focus on his dedications and contributions for his nation and human race at large and justify him to be called a true nationalist. (shrink)

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking.

Deux courants de pensée jouent un rôle important dans la philosophie des mathématiques contemporaine. Le structuralisme, s’il n’est pas une idée nouvelle, continue de se déployer en des directions multiples – de la pratique mathématique jusqu’à ses dimensions ontologiques –, et de faire l’objet d’études, par exemple en direction des modalités de sa genèse. L’épistémologie historique, dont la conception classique a été largement enrichie récemment, est également au cœur de débats qui renouvellent la philosophie des sciences bien au-delà de ses (...) problématiques classiques. Son usage en mathématiques requiert toutefois des analyses spécifiques du fait de leurs idiosyncrasies, des notions comme celle de rigueur, d’expérience ou d’ontologie y ayant un sens et une charge historique différentes de celles qu’elles ont dans les sciences de la nature. Le propos de cet article sera de mettre en situation certains de ces débats en se concentrant sur un des phénomènes les plus significatifs du xxe siècle mathématique: le structuralisme de Bourbaki. Il s’intéressera en particulier aux potentialités de l’épistémologie historique, en cherchant à montrer que ses outils permettent de mieux comprendre certains enjeux du structuralisme. L’accent sera mis en particulier sur deux notions clés dans les travaux de Rheinberger, Daston et Hacking, celles d’objets et de concepts épistémiques. (shrink)

Classical Indian schools of philosophy seek to attain a supreme end to existence--liberation from the cycle of lives. This book looks at four conceptions of liberation and the roles of analytic inquiry and philosophical knowledge in its attainment. The central motivation of Indian philosophy--the quest for the Highest Good--is situated in the analytic philosophical activity of key thinkers.

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, (...) to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist (allowing for corruption charges). Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector. (shrink)

We study the different solution strategy for solving epidemic model in different imprecise environment, that is, a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model in imprecise environment. The imprecise parameter is also taken as fuzzy and interval environment. Three different solution procedures for solving governing fuzzy differential equation, that is, fuzzy differential inclusion method, extension principle method, and fuzzy derivative approaches, are considered. The interval differential equation is also solved. The numerical results are discussed for all approaches in different imprecise environment.

Collection of lectures on Hindu philosophy, religion, and culture of India.

The paper investigates the relationship between political oratory and literature in Romania during the second part of the 19th century. Extending the theories of Jacques Rancière, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižec, and Leonidas Donskis, I analyze the relationship between politics and literature by comparing a set of illustrative speeches delivered by Take Ionescu and P. P. Carp, who distinguished themselves as brilliant political orators and also as personalities who gave up literature in order to assume a political career. My main goal (...) is to determine how much of one’s appetite for aesthetic autonomy turns into mere appetite for political autonomy, and thus for dissent and dissidence. Both examples chosen for illustration brought me to the conclusion that prior literary habits and practices into a politician’s public career can determine his/her ways of legitimizing party-switches or volatile doctrinarian attitudes. (shrink)

This book proposes a new phenomenological analysis of the questions of perception and cognition which are of paramount importance for a better understanding of those processes which underlies the formation of knowledge and consciousness. It presents many clear arguments showing how a phenomenological perspective helps to deeply interpret most fundamental findings of current research in neurosciences and also in mathematical and physical sciences.

The present paper explores diffident and dissident practices reflected by the political talk at the end of the 19th-century in Romania. Relying on Jacques Rancière’s theories on the ‘aesthetic regime of politics,’ the introduction sketches a historical frame and proposes a focus change: the relation between ‘politics’ and ‘aesthetics’ does not stand on a set of literary cases, but on political scripts as such. Thus, the hypotheses investigated by the next three parts can be formulated as follows: 1. though determined (...) by an ideological direction (Conservative or Liberal), the political speech still preserves his tendency towards aesthetic autonomy. 2. oratorical merits (hinting at aesthetic autonomy) can turn into practices of political autonomy, diffidence and, then, dissidence. Methodologically, two types of aesthetic practices organize the chosen materials; both the diffident script and the theatre of dissidence help us to perceive how the philosophical and moral meaning of these practices could change into an ideology of dissidence. The formalization of diffident practices, their conversion to outspoken dissidence, also corresponds to the symmetrical symptom of unlimited authority; when old-time politicians warned on ‘Caesarism,’ ‘Vizierate,’ ‘Despotism,’ ‘Omnipotence’ or ‘Tyranny,’ the Romanian society had already been training for a long experience of ‘dictatorship.’. (shrink)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's drug advisory committees provide expert assessments of the safety and efficacy of new therapies considered for approval. A committee hears from a variety of speakers, from six groups, including voting members of the committee, FDA staff members, employees of the pharmaceutical company seeking approval of a therapy, patient and consumer representatives, expert speakers invited by the company, and public participants. The committees convene at the request of the FDA when the risks and harms of (...) novel products are not immediately clear, and their final decisions carry significant weight, as most therapies that receive advisory committee approval are subsequently approved by the FDA. In recent years, across a series of diverse publications, the financial conflicts of interest of each category of participants in the meetings have been investigated. Here, we summarize these findings and their ethical implications, focusing on the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, and we suggest ways to move toward more transparent and impartial advisory committee meetings. (shrink)

This article aims to correlate Vaastu Shastra, an ancient Indian theory of architecture, with Heidegger's 'Building, Dwelling and Thinking' as they explain architecture in relation to the world where we live and build. Design as an evolutionary learning process is fundamentally a hermeneutic. Interestingly, some of the basic principles of Vaastu Shastra are coincidently similar to the points made by later Heidegger. As such, the main concern is to explain how man is related to the building and the universe, i.e. (...) it establishes a relationship between man and nature. In this context, a dwelling place should be a place where environment is always suitable for human beings to live comfortably. In this article, first Vaastu Shastra is discussed, and then attention is drawn to the prominent parallels between Vaastu and Heidegger. (shrink)

Study of philosophy of perception in Nirvikalpakavāda, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gaṅgeśa, 13th cent.

We perform conceptual acts throughout our daily lives; we are always judging others, guessing their intentions, agreeing or opposing their views and so on. These conceptual acts have phenomenological as well as formal richness. This paper attempts to correct the imbalance between the phenomenal and formal approaches to conceptualization by claiming that we need to shift from the usual dichotomies of cognitive science and epistemology such as the formal/empirical and the rationalist/empiricist divides—to a view of conceptualization grounded in the Indian (...) philosophical notion of “valid cognition”. Methodologically, our paper is an attempt at cross-cultural philosophy and cognitive science; ontologically, it is an attempt at marrying the phenomenal and the formal. (shrink)

Classical Indian debates about ātman—self—concern a minimal or core entity rather than richer notions of personal identity. These debates recognise that there is phenomenal unity across time; but is a core self required to explain it? Contemporary phenomenologists foreground the importance of a phenomenally unitary self, and Udayana's position is interpreted in this context as a classical Indian approach to this issue. Udayana seems to dismiss the body as the candidate for phenomenal identity in a way similar to some Western (...) philosophers. He also provides some inkling of how alternative ways of defending phenomenal unity without self fail. A criticism of some Western phenomenological theories of self is that they do not explain how unity is provided by the ‘mineness’ of cognition. Udayana's suggestion that a sort of agency provides such an explanation can be developed as an original argument for a phenomenally unitary self. (shrink)

The paper presents a critical evaluation of the existing anthologies of Romanian oratory and analyzes the pertinence of a new research line: how to trace back the foundations of Romanian versatile political memory, both from a lexical and from an ideological point of view. As I argue in the first part of the paper, collecting and editing the great speeches of Romanian orators seems crucial for today’s understanding of politics (politicians’ speaking/ actions as well as voters’ behavior/ electoral habits). In (...) the second part, I focus on the particularities generated by a dramatic change of media support (in the context of Romania’s high rates of illiteracy at the end of the 19th century): from “writing” information on the slippery surface of memory (declaimed political texts such as “proclamations,” “petitions,” and “appeals”) to “writing” as such (transcribed political speeches). The last part of the paper problematizes the making of a new canon of Romanian eloquence as well as the opportunity of a new assemblage of oratorical texts, illustrative for the 19th century politics, and endeavors to settle a series of virtual editing principles. (shrink)