Professor Lewis and I have some important differences of opinion regarding the identity and distinctness of conscious persons, which it will be well to try to clarify on the present occasion, first of all by enumerating a number of points on which we are, I think, in agreement. Both of us believe in the existence of individual persons, each of whom can be said to live in a ‘world’ of his own intentional objectivity, a world ‘as it is for him’, (...) which differs in a considerable extent, both in content and emphasis, from the world as it is for anyone else. Both of us further believe that all these intentionally objective worlds for a large part coincide in content, and are in fact excerpted from a more comprehensive real world which is common to us all, and which, in addition to in some sense including all such intentionally objective worlds, also includes many real material objects which exist regardless of our intentionality, and which further includes our own material bodies, which appear in so central a manner in each of our intentionally objective worlds. Both of us believe in matter as a transcendent reality, as well as an intentional object, and are content to accept the dicta of science as to the most probable view of its structure. We are in fact quite Cartesian and Lockean in our belief in the primary and secondary qualities of matter. We believe further that our intentional subjectivity is geared causally into our material objectivity, and that the gearing takes place, in some inscrutable manner, in our nervous systems. We both also believe that our intentional subjectivity transcends bodily mechanisms and instrumentalities, and can be liberated from the latter, but that, when thus liberated, our subjectivity may still affect some sort of an intentionally objective material body such as we wear in dreams, a body in which it will manifest itself to itself and to others much as we do in our dreams and fantasies. (shrink)

All recent memory theories of hippocampal function have incorporated the idea that the hippocampus is required to process items only of some qualitatively specifiahle kind, and is not required to process items of some complementary set. In contrast, it is now proposed that the hippocampus is needed to process stimuli of all kinds, but only when there is a need to associate those stimuli with other events that are temporally discontiguous. In order to form or use temporally discontiguous associations, it (...) is essential to maintain some memory of the first component until the second component has occurred. When the temporal gap to he spanned is small, and the number of items to be temporarily retained is low, a limited-capacity, short-term store is sufficient to allow associations to be formed. Such a store is presumed to operate in parallel with the hippocampus in normal animals. Hippocampal damage disrupts a much higher-capacity store that has a slower decay rate, and so leaves animals with only a very limited ability to form temporally discontiguous associations. Hippocampal damage, however, is not held to affect the long-term storage of associations of any kind, if they can be formed. Analyses of both new and existing data are presented to show that by classifying tasks in terms of the need to use a temporary memory store to retain temporally discontiguous information one can cut right across existing classifications as well as achieve a better fit to the data. The hippocampus thus seems best described as a high-capacity, intermediate-term memory store. (shrink)

Renowned philosopher J. N. Mohanty examines the range of Indian philosophy from the Sutra period through the 17th century Navya Nyaya. Instead of concentrating on the different systems, he focuses on the major concepts and problems dealt with in Indian philosophy. The book includes discussions of Indian ethics and social philosophy, as well as of Indian law and aesthetics.

The aim of this paper is to give a characterisation of religion and the Religious Spirit, basing itself on the Platonic assumption that there are Forms, salient jewels of simplicity and affinity, to be dug out from the soil of vague experience and cut clear from the confusedly shifting patterns of usage, which will give us conceptual mastery over the changeable detail in a given sector. It will further be Platonic in that it will not seek to discount the deep (...) gulfs between the species into which religion qua genus divides itself, i.e. its theistic, polytheistic and atheistic subvarieties, taking it to be of the essence of a true genus to extend itself over mutually exclusive species, only being what it is by including in its sense the alternatives which are thus mutually exclusive. And my treatment will be Platonic, thirdly, in that it will endeavour to delimit the Religious Spirit by, on the one hand, setting it over against what it excludes, all purely this-world talk and life which is quite irreligious, and by, on the other hand, opposing it to forms of talk and life which fall short of it in various ways or which deviate from it variously, thereby likewise contributing to our understanding of what it is. The practice of Plato, which could study the deviations from his ideal city in order to confirm his notion of its structure and excellence, and which also paired every ideal pattern with its opposite— piety with impiety, justice with self-interested tyranny, etc.—is plainly one to be followed: Plato, as we know from a citation from his contemporary Hermodorus in one of the Aristotelian commentators, always set beside the ‘in itself’ of the pure Form the deviant and the wholly negative which were nonetheless part of its sense. Religion will therefore stand before us as a target that it is possible to fall short of or miss altogether as well as to hit squarely, and we shall try by a series of glancing darts to end by hitting it squarely. (shrink)

The background and purpose of this paper require some explanation. It is not the product of a New Testament scholar, able to weigh and balance theories as to date, origin and doctrinal background of the text attributed to St John, nor to assess the identification of its author with the beloved Disciple elsewhere mentioned or with the author of the Apocalypse, nor to consider his relationship to Gnostics or Stoics or Essenes or other influences in the contemporary Jewish or Christian (...) ambience. It is only the effort of one who recognizes in St John's Gospel, if read with an appropriate hermeneutic, a supreme mystico-religious document which can provide guidance at every turn of the spiritual life, but which, if read in another manner, becomes only the expression of a hard-line particularism, which is not less unacceptable in that it acclaims a particular standing in a special relation to another particular on which we all depend for our existence and for all our properties. Conceive of God, or the supreme object of worship, as a particular among particulars, and as much other than ourselves as other things and persons are other, and religious reverence becomes a repugnant form of heteronomous idolatry, wrought up, moreover, with the blind acceptance of a large number of historic and cosmic myths. But conceive of God as being something beyond category-differences, and which as much transcends particularity as it transcends any form of abstract universality, and which incorporates in strict identity all those values of Truth, Love, Beauty, Justice, etc. which are all simply universality in action, and which, moreover, as much transcends personality and personal relationships as it also may have in them its supreme expression, and religion and worship at once acquire a perfect sense and reference. (shrink)

In his award-winning book _The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development_, J. N. Mohanty charted Husserl's philosophical development from the young man's earliest studies—informed by his work as a mathematician—to the publication of his _Ideas_ in 1913. In this welcome new volume, the author takes up the final decades of Husserl's life, addressing the work of his Freiburg period, from 1916 until his death in 1938. As in his earlier work, Mohanty here offers close readings of Husserl's main texts (...) accompanied by accurate summaries, informative commentaries, and original analyses. This book, along with its companion volume, completes the most up-to-date, well-informed, and comprehensive account ever written on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy and its development. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of my essays on philosophy of logic from a phenomenological perspective. They deal with the four kinds of logic I have been concerned with: formal logic, transcendental logic, speculative logic and hermeneutic logic. Of these, only one, the essay on Hegel, touches upon 'speculative logic', and two, those on Heidegger and Konig, are concerned with hermeneutic logic. The rest have to do with Husser! and Kant. I have not tried to show that the four logics (...) are compatible. I believe, they are--once they are given a phenomenological underpinning. The original plan of writing an Introduction in which the issues would have to be formulated, developed and brought together, was abandoned in favor of writing an Introductory Essay on the 'origin'- in the phenomenological sense -of logic. J.N.M. Philadelphia INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGIN OF LOGIC The question of the origin of logic may pertain to historical origin (When did it all begin? Who founded the science of logic?), psychological origin (When, in the course of its mental development, does the child learn logical operations?), cultural origin (What cultural - theological, metaphysical and linguisti- conditions make such a discipline as logic possible?), or transcendental constitutive origin (What sorts of acts and/or practices make logic possible?). (shrink)

Workplace ostracism is a prevalent and painful experience. The majority of studies focus on negative outcomes of ostracism, with less work examining employees’ potential adaptive responses to it. Further, scholars have suggested that such responses depend on employee attributions, yet little research has taken an attributional perspective on workplace ostracism. Drawing on sociometer theory and attribution theory we develop and test a model that investigates why and under what circumstances ostracized employees engage in adaptive responses to ostracism. Specifically, we argue (...) that ostracized employees feel greater levels of shame and, in turn, are motivated to engage in greater ingratiation behavior toward their ostracizers. However, we predict that perceptions of ostracizers’ competence and warmth shape different attributional processes, which influence the degree to which the ostracized employee experience shame and, in turn, is motivated to engage in ingratiation behavior. Results of a three-wave, time-lagged survey support our prediction that shame mediates the relationship between coworker ostracism and ingratiation behavior. Moreover, results support our three-way interaction, such that coworkers who report higher levels of ostracism and who perceive their coworkers as more (vs. less) competent and more (vs. less) warm report higher shame, and, in turn, ingratiation behavior. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research, are discussed. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on conceptual, empirical and practical arguments why corporations need to focus on their social dimensions, in order to further enhance organizational performance. The paper starts with an introduction on the general trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness. It then elaborates on the phase-wise development of cultures and organizational structures. Managing corporate improvement by building cultures of trust is the central focus of this contribution. By showing the cultural dimensions of Great Places to Work and their workplace practices, worthwhile (...) experiences leading to organizational improvement and superior financial performance are demonstrated. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this revolutionary study of the philosophical problems of language, J.N. Hattiangadi offers a new approach which simultaneously solves several venerable conundrums in the origin and development of language and thought. His argument includes acute criticisms of the later Wittgenstein's theory of language use, Quine's approach to subjunctive conditionals, Kripke's analysis of proper names, and Chomsky's conjecture of an innate universal grammar.

The idea that deep brain stimulation (DBS) induces changes to personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy and self (PIAAAS) is so deeply entrenched within neuroethics discourses that it has become an unchallenged narrative. In this article, we critically assess evidence about putative effects of DBS on PIAAAS. We conducted a literature review of more than 1535 articles to investigate the prevalence of scientific evidence regarding these potential DBS-induced changes. While we observed an increase in the number of publications in theoretical neuroethics (...) that mention putative DBS-induced changes to patients’ postoperative PIAAAS, we found a critical lack of primary empirical studies corroborating these claims. Our findings strongly suggest that the theoretical neuroethics debate on putative effects of DBS relies on very limited empirical evidence and is, instead, reliant on unsubstantiated speculative assumptions probablyin lieuof robust evidence. As such, this may reflect the likelihood of a speculative neuroethics bubble that may need to be deflated. Nevertheless, despite the low number of first-hand primary studies and large number of marginal and single case reports, potential postoperative DBS changes experienced by patients remain a critical ethical concern. We recommend further empirical research in order to enhance theoretical neuroethics work in the area. In particular, we call for the development of better instruments capable of capturing potential postoperative variations of PIAAAS. (shrink)

One of the most serious pre-occupations of post-medieval philosophy has been to distinguish those kinds of assertion which are either true or false from those which are neither true nor false. A solution to this problem would be of the highest importance. It would indicate in what areas rational inquiry has some hope of success and in what areas it is doomed to frustration. It would tell us, for example, whether it is worth trying to think about the possible mistakenness (...) of our moral principles, or whether such thinking is bound to be ineffective since no truth or falsity attaches to them. (shrink)

If, as it is usually understood, incommensurable theories must be compatible then one need never choose between two such theories. But if theories were incompatible and incommensurable one would have to choose between them. What if they are incompatible only outside the domain of observation? The fact that Darwin's biology can clash with Kelvin's physics (each with their respective auxiliary assumptions) regarding the age of the earth shows how commensurable theories may yet be incompatible. But it also shows that they (...) need not be alternatives--i.e. that one may not be able to simply and satisfactorily replace the other in our world view. But standard examples of scientific revolutions consist of the replacement of one theory by another in one's world view. These alternative theories must therefore be more than merely incompatible--what do they share if not content? (I.e. they must be commensurable.). (shrink)