In a revealing TEDxKC talk entitled "How My Mind Came Back to Life—And No One Knew", Martin Pistorius, author of Ghost Boy, shares his harrowing experience of living in a vegetative state with a locked-in syndrome for two long years. When his consciousness returned, Pistorius reflects on how he was unable to communicate the news of his recovery. Using his augmented and alternative communication device, Pistorius observes, "Your personality appears to vanish into a heavy fog and all of your emotions (...) and desires are constricted, stifled and muted within you. … It's a very dark place to find yourself because in a sense, you have vanished."Pistorius's speech is a commentary on voice and identity, and... (shrink)

The Nuclear Threat Initiative focuses on preventing catastrophes related to weapons of mass destruction, with a wide range of attacks including nuclear, biologic, radiologic, chemical and cyb...

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 92-94.

An intellectual biography of Max Weber which uses his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as its starting point, with wider reference to the social, political, and religious thought of the time.

Philip Pettit's narrative of the eclipse of republican by liberal liberty in late eighteenth-century Britain adds colour and plausibility to his analytical contrast between republican and liberal liberty. The narrative supports his argument that republicanism and liberalism can be helpfully contrasted in terms of non-domination and non- interference conceptions of liberty. While the narrative has not been scrutinized in the literature, it is in fact flawed. The flaws raise new questions about how stringent a value liberty as non-domination is and (...) what motivated the value. The flaws also raise new questions about the significance of liberty as non-interference within the very strand of liberalism that Pettit focuses upon. Finally, the article casts doubt on some aspects of Quentin Skinner's interpretation of republican liberty. (shrink)

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations and superiority of the white race in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his anti-emancipationist perspective in “The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” followed by John Stuart Mill’s divergent response to him in 1850 titled, “The Negro Question.” In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman’s perspective, (...) “The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question” by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. Although Mill’s essay was a direct attack on Carlyle’s explosive article and is overtly against Carlyle and Bodington’s ideas, this paper argues that an imperialist agenda underlies Mill’s views and in fact poses the same theories of Carlyle and Bodington. The paper first proceeds to interrogate Mill’s hegemonic subtext through a comparison of these three essays by situating them within the scientific discourse of the era, arguing that science, especially phrenology and evolution theories, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but was used to perpetrate the normative racial ideologies of the period. The paper also uses Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering the Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism to show that while Mill seemingly diverges from Carlyle’s stance, this ‘othering’ is in fact present in all three writers’ works. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between personal stock donation by top executives and board of directors (insiders) of publicly traded corporations and their personal tax, shareholders' returns, and social responsibility. The study finds evidence that the timing of stock donations is driven by personal tax gain. The study further shows, comparing stock gift corporations relative to their non-stock gift cohorts, that personal stock gifts are associated with lower short-term and long-term stock returns to shareholders. This implies that stock donation driven (...) by insiders' personal gain adversely affects shareholder wealth. However, the likelihood and intensity of insiders to make personal stock donation is reduced when firms have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR). Agency theory explains insiders' opportunistic behavior, stakeholder theory is also supported by evidence that stock donation is negatively related to CSR, and stewardship theory offers a different view to explain the rationale behind insiders' stock donation and shareholders' reactions to stock gifts. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a resurgent interest in the philosophical dimension of cultural products—cinema, in particular. Rather than analyzing the production, dissemination and reception of particular films through literary, cultural, sociological or psychological theories, one considers film as “doing the work” of theory/philosophy. This essay argues that cinema's possibility of being/becoming philosophy will emerge only if one remains open to the inconsistencies of the cinematic text, rather than seek to posit a mythical point of origin that reduces representation (...) to its effective functionality, thereby announcing the death of thinking. Following the ways in which Adorno and Horkheimer indicate the deep ontological significance of the myth of origin involved in the logic of Enlightenment, this essay attempts to offer responsibility, vigilance and hesitation as alternative ways of engaging with thought. Cinema, this essay finally claims, can offer a model with which thinking, as philosophy proper, can be recovered from its mythical origin. (shrink)

This paper presents an attempt to bridge the gap between logical and cognitive treatments of strategic reasoning in games. There have been extensive formal debates about the merits of the principle of backward induction among game theorists and logicians. Experimental economists and psychologists have shown that human subjects, perhaps due to their bounded resources, do not always follow the backward induction strategy, leading to unexpected outcomes. Recently, based on an eye-tracking study, it has turned out that even human subjects who (...) produce the outwardly correct ‘backward induction answer’ use a different internal reasoning strategy to achieve it. The paper presents a formal language to represent different strategies on a finer-grained level than was possible before. The language and its semantics help to precisely distinguish different cognitive reasoning strategies, that can then be tested on the basis of computational cognitive models and experiments with human subjects. The syntactic framework of the formal system provides a generic way of constructing computational cognitive models of the participants of the Marble Drop game. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 74-77.

The literature on the democratic legitimacy of judicial review and also on institutionalizing deliberative democracy neglects the possibility of employing juries rather than judges to determine bill-of-rights matters. This neglect is unfortunate, for there are findings emerging especially from deliberative polling that support the feasibility of such juries. Such feasibility would raise a new countermajoritarian concern with judicial review. The argument supporting this new concern also casts fresh light on the traditional countermajoritarian concern.

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today.Qualifying the "non-historian" as an "able" interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between ...

This paper is about the uses of language which the Oxford philosopher of language, J.L. Austin excluded from theoretical consideration in his William James Lectures delivered in 1955 and posthumously published as How to Do Things with Words. Uses of language, such as dramatic, poetic or comedic, are said by Austin to be non-serious, deviant and parasitic upon the everyday normal ordinary language. This leaves literature out of consideration as an etiolation. Derrida, who is not merely a trained philosopher but (...) also one of the finest literary critics of our day, fails to agree with Austin. In his “Signature, Event, Context”, and Limited Inc, he criticizes Austin of “totalization” and “idealization” of the norm or the standard; his inability to see that the parasitic is necessarily inbuilt in the standard. This paper is an attempt at seeing how far Derrida is justified in his critique as there is much that is common between his and Austin’s approaches towards language. (shrink)

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one-upmanship, we encounter a presumptuousness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one’s own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one’s own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, (...) neuter the possibilities of knowledge-sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the Chinese know as history. Accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense-generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse. (shrink)

Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches Description: Very little is known about the author of this book apart from the facts that he is a retired Government of India officer, now in his late nineties, apparently hoary, but healthy. When requested for more bio-data, he wrote back…The Real author of the Original Yoga is the Lord Siva. In the mundane world, Patanjali is the prime propagator of yoga. Any other claim to authorship, therefore, cannot but be spurious. …It (...) is Truth that matters, not the utterer of the Truth. No Truth ever becomes a bit truer even when repeated by the most distinguished person. …Hence all genuine aspirants of yoga should be content to remain unknown and unnoticed by others. His other published work is Hindu Concept of Life and Death. (shrink)

Since the conceptualization of unethical pro-organizational behavior ten years ago, scholarly interest in exploring this phenomenon has multiplied. Given a burgeoning body of empirical research, a review of unethical pro-organizational behavior literature is warranted. This study, therefore, systematically reviews the extant literature on unethical pro-organizational behavior and presents a comprehensive theory-based review of the past developments in this field. We classify previous studies based on their underlying theoretical perspectives and discuss the antecedents and consequences of unethical pro-organizational behavior in work (...) context. We also explicate the boundary conditions under which the influence of these antecedents gets accentuated or alleviated. Overall, this study synthesizes past knowledge to elucidate why, how, and when unethical pro-organizational behavior unfolds in the workplace. Finally, the gaps in the extant theorization are identified and an agenda for future research is proposed. (shrink)

In the domain of legal information retrieval, an important challenge is to compute similarity between two legal documents. Precedents play an important role in The Common Law system, where lawyers need to frequently refer to relevant prior cases. Measuring document similarity is one of the most crucial aspects of any document retrieval system which decides the speed, scalability and accuracy of the system. Text-based and network-based methods for computing similarity among case reports have already been proposed in prior works but (...) not without a few pitfalls. Since legal citation networks are generally highly disconnected, network based metrics are not suited for them. Till date, only a few text-based and predominant embedding based methods have been employed, for instance, TF-IDF based approaches, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec based approaches. We investigate the performance of 56 different methodologies for computing textual similarity across court case statements when applied on a dataset of Indian Supreme Court Cases. Among the 56 different methods, thirty are adaptations of existing methods and twenty-six are our proposed methods. The methods studied include models such as BERT and Law2Vec. It is observed that the more traditional methods that rely on a bag-of-words representation performs better than the more advanced context-aware methods for computing document-level similarity. Finally we nominate, via empirical validation, five of our best performing methods as appropriate for measuring similarity between case reports. Among these five, two are adaptations of existing methods and the other three are our proposed methods. (shrink)

Comatose survivors of cardiac arrest may die following withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy (WLST) due to poor neurologic prognosis. Family members, acting as surrogate decision makers, are frequently asked to decide whether the patient should continue to receive ongoing life-sustaining therapy such as mechanical ventilation in this context of risk of death following removal. Sometimes, physicians and family members disagree about what is in the patient's best interest, and this conflict causes distress for both families and medical personnel. This article examines (...) themes recorded in the medical records of 24 cardiac arrest patients at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) whose families chose to pursue continued life support despite physician recommendations for withdrawal. In documented conversations between patients' families and their providers, the most prominent themes included faith in miracles, the inappropriateness of "playing God," the value of more time with the patient, and differences in how providers and family members perceived the patient's status. (shrink)

Contributed research papers; published under the auspices of the Special Assistance Programme in Philosophy (UGC), Dept. of Philosophy, University of North Bengal.

I dedicate this essay to the memory of the late Wolfgang Mommsen—the subject would have been congenial to him. It is one of a series of offshoots from a central project: a scholarly edition of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with commentary. When I first told Prof. Mommsen of my plan in 1994 he looked me full in the face and gave a characteristic growl: “All that work!” Here was a man who knew what he was about. My thanks to Ross (...) McKibbin and Keith Tribe for reading this paper in draft. The article begins by examining Max Weber's relations with Lujo Brentano, much the most important “precursor” to Weber in the field of economics. In particular, Brentano conducted a form of parallel inquiry into the rise of ‘the spirit of capital’ in England 35 years before Weber looked for the origins of “spirit” of capitalism there, and the contrast between these two ideas casts much light both on Brentano and on Weber's Protestant Ethic. This personal history leads into a broader history of the transition in German economic thought between the 1860s – the formative decade for Brentano but also the era of Marx's Capital – and that of Weber's generation coming to maturity c.1890. Marx and Weber remain the two great canonical thinkers and original minds; but any authentic historical comparison between Marx and Weber must take in Brentano. The essence of the contrast between the generations is that between Weber's novel conception of an ethical ‘capitalism’, and the materialism and naturalism underpinning Brentano's and Marx's ‘capital’, although Weber and Brentano are alike as liberals, democrats and bourgeois. ☆ Some abbreviations for Weber: AfSS for Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik; GARS for Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1920) vol. i; WL for Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1968); Grundriss for Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie [1898], repr. Tübingen, 1990; MWG for Max Weber Gesamtausgabe ed. Horst Baier et al. (Tübingen, 1984); Briefe for letters by Weber in this edition; ‘Nachlaß Max Weber’ for unpublished letters from the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Berlin-Dahlem, VI. HA Nachlaß Max Weber. Lebensbild for Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen, 1926); Zohn for idem, Max Weber. A Biography (New Brunswick, 1988) tr. Harry Zohn. For Brentano: Der wirtschaftende Mensch for Der wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1923); Konkrete Grundbedingungen for Konkrete Grundbedingungen der Volkswirtschaft (Leipzig, 1924); Der tätige Mensch for Der tätige Mensch und die Wissenschaft von der Wirtschaft (Marburg, 2006) ed. R. Bräu, H.G. Nutzinger. ‘Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre’ for ‘Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-philologische und historische Klassen. Jahrgang 1908, 3. Abhandlung (15 Feb. 1908), 1–84; ‘Theorie der Bedürfnisse’ for ‘Versuch einer Theorie der Bedürfmisse’, ibid., 10. Abhandlung (5 Dec. 1908), 1–79; ‘Die Malthussche Lehre’ for ‘Die Malthussche Lehre und die Bevölkerungsbewegung der letzten Decennien’ [1909], Abhandlungen der historischen Klasse der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften XXIV (1906–1909), 565–625, 1*–39*. (shrink)