Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.

This book addresses two central questions: What does it mean to shift the epistemic centre of human rights thinking and to decolonise global human rights? And, how to study the 'active' conceptual, empirical, epistemic and political life of rights in 'most of the world'? To address these questions, this book introduces and develops the framework of vernacular rights cultures. The study of vernacular rights cultures is an interdisciplinary, conceptual, epistemic, methodological and empirical project. It intervenes in the current impasse of (...) human rights debates to offer a framework through which the complexity and dynamism of rights-based mobilisations might be analytically captured, not simply as those which are mimetic, and engaged in the translation, enactment and localization of 'global human rights', but rather as those which have their specific languages of rights and entitlements grounded in specific political imaginaries, justificatory premises and subjectivities. Through a conceptual and ethnographic tracking of the Urdu/Arabic word haq across subaltern citizen mobilizations in India and Pakistan, the book analyses the deployment of rights in the vernacular in South Asia including the political, epistemic and ethical agency released by this rights politics. By focusing on the claims for rights/haq by marginalised and very poor women including dalit and indigenous women within grassroots mobilisations demanding rights to food, employment, public information/accountability and land rights in rural movements in India and Pakistan, the book documents the specific gendered political imaginaries that inform rights struggles in the subcontinent. (shrink)

日本思想史の真髄に迫る論考と座談。天皇制・丸山眞男・日本仏教・慈円の考察から日本文化に潜む外来と固有の対立・融合を読み解く。.

Madhyamaka and Yogācāra are two Mahāyāna schools which have distinct systems. In the seventh century East Asia, the doctrinal distinction between the two schools was received as doctrinal contrast in the polemic circumstance of Emptiness-Existence controversy. In this context, Ji 基, the putative founder of East Asian Yogācāra school, has been normally considered by scholars to have advocated ‘Existence’ in opposition to ‘Emptiness’. It is problematic, however, to brand Ji’s Yogācāra position simply as anti-Madhyamaka. Although Ji evidently expresses evident criticism (...) on such a Madhyamaka exegete as Bhāvaviveka in some of his works, he also describes Bhāvaviveka in an amicable or even respective way in other works. By analyzing Ji’s extant works, this article argues that Ji’s scholastic attitude toward Madhyamaka changed from criticism to approval. (shrink)

The ‘mind-made body’ is seen as a subtle body attained by a Buddhist adept during meditative practice. Previous research has elucidated this concept as having important doctrinal significance in the Buddhist cosmological system. The P?li canonical evidence shows that the manomaya-k?ya is not merely a spiritual byproduct of meditative training, but also a specific existential mode of being in the system of the three realms. Studies of the manomaya-k?ya to date, however, have focused mostly on early P?li materials, and thus (...) do not encompass theoretical development and soteriological significance of this notion in later tradition. As a beginning step to fill this gap, this article explores the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya represented in the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra and the two treatises of the Ratnagotravibh?ga??stra and the Foxing lun, which are doctrinally based on the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra in their discussion of the manomaya-k?ya. Through the observation of the manomaya-k?ya in these Mah?y?na texts, this article seeks to demonstrate how the concept is used in the broader cosmological and soteriological system of Mah?y?na tradition. For this purpose, I first review the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya in early Buddhist texts and then observe the cosmological and soteriological meaning of the notion by analyzing the theoretical connection between the three Mah?y?na texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Legal CommentarySumy Menon, Senior Associate in ResearchThis case involves the balancing of a young person’s right to autonomy and the desire to protect her from harm. No Singapore court decision has determined whether the doctor owes a duty to the parents of the doctor’s 16-year-old patient, to warn them that their child is engaging in sexual activities, and who subsequently has had an abortion. Similarly, the issue of whether (...) the doctor has a duty to protect the minor in such circumstances has also not been tested in the Singapore courts. Nonetheless, it is very unlikely that either duty will be found in this case.The general rule is that doctors owe a duty of confidentiality to their patients. This duty extends to children, and although no Singapore court has ruled on the matter, the law in England is clear.1 It is enshrined in section 4.2.3.1 of the Ethical Code & Ethical Guidelines of the Singapore Medical Council. It is not absolute and a number of exceptions have been carved out. The confidentiality duty can be overridden by legislation, court order, the public interest, or other justifiable circumstances that the doctor believes warrants disclosure.The age of consent for non-commercial consensual sexual activities in Singapore is 16.2 Therefore, there is no statutory responsibility on Dr. C under the criminal law to report the patients’ sexual activities to the authorities or anyone else. There is no other legislation or court order that compels disclosure. It is highly unlikely that the public interest would be served by disclosure. The consequences of such disclosure to the public interest were aptly put in a recent English case, when J. Silber held that if a confidentiality duty was not imposed, it “would probably or might well deter young people [End Page 262] from seeking advice and treatment on contraception, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, and this would have undesirable and troubled consequences”.3 The last exception offers the greatest latitude for doctors to disclose if they believe there are other justifiable circumstances that would shift the balance in favour of disclosure. There are strong reasons to maintain confidentiality in Miss M’s case and although an argument can be made for disclosure, that argument is relatively weak.Miss M’s parents are understandably worried about her but Dr. C should not breach the duty of confidentiality owed to the patient even though she is only 16 years old. It is irrelevant that Miss M’s parents are paying for their daughter’s treatment. The doctor-patient relationship is between Dr. C and Miss M, and her parents have never been involved in the consultations or treatment decision-making process. They have not insisted on attending the consultations with their daughter, nor did they appear to object to Miss M consenting to treatment. Prior to their complaint, they had not sought any update or information about their daughter’s condition from Dr. C. Miss M specifically asked Dr. C not to reveal the contents of their conversations to her parents at the first consultation and the doctor agreed after attempting to convince her that it would be preferable to include her parents in the consultations. Miss M was obviously concerned about confidentiality and sought clarification from Dr. C. It appears as though Dr. C determined that Miss M had the capacity to exclude her parents from the consultations, and later to make her own treatment decisions, as a mature minor, and their doctor-patient relationship proceeded on that basis.It may be in the public interest for Dr. C to disclose confidential information about Miss M, even if she refuses to consent to it, if the doctor believes it is necessary to protect her from serious harm. Any such decision must be made with the patient’s best interests in mind. Examples of such harm include situations where the patient is at risk of serious physical abuse or has voiced a desire to commit suicide. Engaging in sexual activity with an older boy is unlikely to result in such serious harm, although harm may result. In this case, that harm manifested itself in an unwanted pregnancy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Legal CommentarySumy Menon, Senior Associate in ResearchThe principle of autonomy must be balanced against the need to protect the person from harm. The question is how to strike that balance and what tips it over to either side. In this case, the right for Mdm. W to make her own decision whether to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) must be balanced against the concern of the doctors and her relatives (...) regarding the possible consequences of not receiving the treatment. However, this question does not even arise if Mdm. W has capacity to make that decision. Mdm. W is the decision-maker for ECT treatment if she has capacity to make that decision.1The statutory regime that underpins decision-making for persons who may lack capacity is the Singapore Mental Capacity Act (SMCA).2 It is grounded in five Statutory Principles.3 The first three are the presumption the person has capacity, has the right to make an unwise decision, and the requirement that all practicable steps be taken to help the person make a decision. The fourth principle requires decisions made on behalf of the person lacking capacity to be taken in his or her best interests, and the final one states that the less restrictive option must be selected when making decisions for persons lacking capacity.The best practice is for the doctor to conduct a formal mental capacity assessment to determine whether Mdm. W can refuse consent for ECT. A formal assessment is appropriate in these circumstances because the decision is an important one concerning serious medical treatment.4 A trained specialist should conduct this assessment. The two-stage test for mental capacity is laid out in the SMCA.5 The first stage appears to be met because it requires the person to be suffering from an impairment or disturbance that affects the function of [End Page 227] the mind or brain, and Mdm. W has bipolar disorder. The second stage requires the bipolar disorder to render Mdm. W unable to make a decision at the time the decision needs to be made. The SMCA states that a person is unable to make a decision if he or she cannot understand the information, weigh up the information, remember the information or communicate the decision.6If the formal assessment concludes that Mdm. W lacks capacity to refuse ECT treatment, then the decision should be taken in her best interests.7 Mdm. W ’s relatives have no legal right to make decisions on her behalf unless she has appointed one or more of her relatives to be her healthcare proxy under a valid Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA).8 If she made such an LPA, then the appointed proxy is the final decision-maker unless the treatment is life-sustaining or the doctor reasonably believes the treatment is necessary to prevent a serious deterioration in Mdm. W’s health.9 It is arguable that a clear and present danger of suicide may be reasonably classified by the doctor as a serious deterioration in Mdm. W’s health, although this issue has not been tested in the Singapore courts, which would mean that the appointed proxy would have to yield to the doctor as the final decision-maker. If Mdm. W did not make such an LPA, then the decision must be taken in her best interests, and is likely to be taken jointly between the healthcare team and the relatives.The best interests test involves a holistic appraisal of factors,10 balancing the benefits and burdens of the proposed ECT. The relevant factors that should be considered here include whether, when or if Mdm. W is likely to regain capacity, her beliefs and values, her past and present wishes, and the views of her relatives.11 We do not have any information about the first two factors but we do know Mdm. W rejected ECT and her relatives think she should have ECT. Another relevant factor is that Mdm. W is unlikely to cooperate with the pre-treatment fasting requirements or agree to undergo general anaesthesia. Therefore, Mdm. W will need to be restrained for eight hours before each treatment. There will be a total of six... (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series (...) of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within (...) the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations. (shrink)

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into whether persons in subordinate social contexts possess agency and if they do, how do we recognise and recover their agency given the oppressive conditions of their lives. It aims to achieve this through forging closer links between the philosophical arguments and the ethnographic evidence of women's agency. Through such an exercise, this paper hopes to bridge the existing gap between feminist theoretical interventions and feminist politics as well as to increase 'sociological (...) awareness' within feminist philosophical arguments. In order to think about women's agency in oppressive social contexts, the paper evaluates the suitability of existing theoretical frameworks for examining, describing and capturing the autonomy of persons and concludes that a new and a more complex thinking is required to facilitate thinking about human agency within oppressive transcultural contexts. The social context of subordination, the exhibition of agency within and oppressive context and the application of the new theoretical framework is illustrated in an extensive empirical study of the contact with modernity and its accompanying ideas of autonomy and individual rights of rural women belonging to two districts in Rajasthan, North western India. (shrink)

Summary As part of the events marking Nero’s assumption of the toga virilis in 51 CE, he along with Britannicus led the circus procession (pompa circensis) in advance of games in the Circus Maximus. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this pompa circensis, both in its processional elements and route through the city. The presence of potential successors along with images of the deified and honored dead of the imperial family shows how this ceremony evolved and expanded in (...) the Principate to become a dynastic ceremony. The route of the newly modified pompa circensis, marked by monuments built by or dedicated to members of the imperial family, also had become increasingly dynastic. An essential element of the pompa circensis was the participation of the senate and equestrian order as well as the urban plebs, an act of performed consensus fully realized when the procession ended in the Circus Maximus. This circus procession, as reconstructed here, has further implications for the larger question of the imperial succession under Claudius. (shrink)

Occupational therapy often uses craft activities as therapeutic tools, but their therapeutic effectiveness has not yet been adequately demonstrated. The aim of this study was to examine changes in frontal midline theta rhythm and autonomic nervous responses during craft activities, and to explore the physiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effectiveness of occupational therapy. To achieve this, we employed a simple craft activity as a task to induce Fmθ and performed simultaneous EEG and ECG recordings. For participants in which Fmθ activities (...) were provoked, parasympathetic and sympathetic activities were evaluated during the appearance of Fmθ and rest periods using the Lorenz plot analysis. Both parasympathetic and sympathetic indices increased with the appearance of Fmθ compared to during resting periods. This suggests that a relaxed-concentration state is achieved by concentrating on craft activities. Furthermore, the appearance of Fmθ positively correlated with parasympathetic activity, and theta band activity in the frontal area were associated with sympathetic activity. This suggests that there is a close relationship between cardiac autonomic function and Fmθ activity. (shrink)

Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their (...) method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life. (shrink)

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. Nora Hämäläinen explores the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal and human nature. While modern moral philosophy has focused its energies on normative and metaethical theory, the task of describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and moral practices has mainly been left to social (...) scientists and historians. Nora Hämäläinen argues that this division of labour has detrimental consequences for moral philosophy and that a reorientation toward descriptive work is needed in moral philosophy. She traces resources for a descriptive philosophical ethics in the work of four prominent philosophers of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, while also calling on thinkers inspired by them. (shrink)

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms' interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, (...) and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.. (shrink)

The main aim of this essay is to show that, for Stevens, the concept of reality is very fluctuating. The essay begins with addressing the relationship between poetry and philosophy. I argue, contra Critchley, that Stevens’ poetic work can elucidate, or at least help us to understand better, the ideas of philosophers that are usually considered obscure. The main “obscure” philosophical work introduced in and discussed throughout the essay is Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. Both a (shellingian) philosopher and a (...) (stevensian) poet search for reality. In order to understand Stevens’ poetry better, I distingush several concepts of reality: initial reality (the external world of the common sense), imagined reality (a fiction, a product of one’s mind), final reality (the object of a philosopher’s and a poet’s search) and total reality (the sum of all realities, Being). These determinations are fixed by reason (in the present essay), whereas in Stevens’ poetic works, they are made fluid by the imagination. This fluidity leads the concept of reality from its initial stage through the imagined stage to its final stage. Throughout this process, imagined reality must be distinguished from both a mere fancy and its products. Final reality is, however, nothing transcendent. It is rather a general transpersonal order of reality created by poetry/the imagination. The main peculiarity of final reality is that it is a dynamic order. It is provisional at each moment. Stevens (and Schelling too) characterizes this order as that of a work of art which is a finite object, but has an infinite meaning. Stevens calls this order “the central poem” or the “endlessly elaborating poem”. If ultimate reality is a poem created by the imagination, one may ask who is the imagining subject. I argue that this agent is best to be thought as total reality, that is, as Being. Stevens, however, maintains that if there were such an agency, it would be an inhuman agency, “an inhuman meditation”. The essay concludes, in a Derridian manner, with the claim that this agency cannot have any name; it is the “unnamed creator of an unknown sphere, / Unknown as yet, unknowable, / Uncertain certainty” (OP: 127). It is best thought as an X, as an unknown variable. Being has no name. (shrink)

Research investigating the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions under which leader humility influences employee voice remains underdeveloped. Drawing from approach–inhibition theory of power and leader humility literature, we developed a moderated-mediation model in which personal sense of power (i.e., employees’ ability to influence other individuals such as their leader) was theorized as a unique mechanism underlining why employees feel motivated to speak up under the supervision of humble leaders. Additionally, the cultural value of power distance was proposed to be a (...) relevant boundary condition to influence such relationship. We tested the model using time-lagged supervisor–subordinate matched data. Results of mixed models analyses provided support for our hypotheses confirming that employees’ personal sense of power mediates the relationship between leader humility and employee voice, and such relationship was found to be stronger when employees’ power distance was lower rather than higher. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress and profundity. Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they work to (...) shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conductive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat different argumentative strategies. Part 1 consists of an overview and reassessment of popular self-help literature and its sociological and journalistic critics, written from a moral philosophical perspective. Part 2 opens with discussion of the current attraction, among a range of philosophers, to self-transformative themes. The chapters assess the strand of self-transformative philosophy found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell and Iris Murdoch. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the theme of social change and moral renegotiation in contemporary societies, which is a central but underestimated undercurrent in discussions on contemporary self-transformative practices. The book's dual perspective-on both popular self-help and self-transformative currents in philosophy-enables a cultural and moral philosophical analysis of contemporary ethical ideals of personhood, as well as reflection on the literatures available for its development. The Making of the Good Person will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral philosophy, history of philosophy, psychology, sociology and literary studies. (shrink)