In contemporary philosophy, various attempts have been made in relation to placing our minds or mental states in the natural world or nature. In this context, there is a clear divide between naturalism and anti-naturalism, materialism and immaterialism, etc. Driven by the influence of naturalistic turn in philosophy and scientism, many philosophers have tried to put forth various naturalistic accounts of the relationship between mind and natural world. However, many of these accounts are naturalistic based on the modern scientific conception (...) of nature which has been hailed as the dominating conception of nature. John McDowell in his magnum opus Mind and World, while criticizing modern scientific account of the relationship between mind and world, has not resorted back to anti-naturalism. Instead, he has tried to give us certain clues to develop an account of an alternative form of naturalism which is at the same time radically different from both scientific naturalism and mysterious anti-naturalism. In this paper, I will try to search for an alternative naturalism following McDowell and examine to what extent this account is tenable. In this context, we shall discuss various approaches to understand the relation between reason/normativity (which is one of the significant constituting elements of our mind) and natural world. (shrink)

Bangladesh continues to experience stubbornly high levels of rural malnutrition amid steady economic growth and poverty reduction. The policy response to tackling malnutrition shows an overwhelmingly technocratic bias, which depoliticizes the broader question of how the agro-food regime is structured. Taking an agrarian and human rights-based approach, this paper argues that rural malnutrition must be analyzed as symptomatic of a deepening agrarian crisis in which the obsession with productivity increases and commercialization overrides people’s democratic right to culturally appropriate, good, nutritious (...) food. Using qualitative insights from a case study of three villages, this research illustrates how agricultural modernization and commercialization reproduce rural malnutrition by degrading local biodiversity and the rural poor’s access to nutrient-rich diets. In so doing, it undermines the official discourse’s simplistic and literal reading of malnutrition as a pathological health condition resulting from the mere absence of certain micronutrients in the human body, and thus questions the adequacy of the proposed solutions. Instead, this research suggests that solving malnutrition in large part involves facilitating the rural poor’s access to nutritious diets through democratizing and reorganizing the agriculture sector in a manner that is eco-friendly and unconstrained by market imperatives. It cautiously advances agroecology and food sovereignty as possible alternatives, while recognizing that overcoming the challenges agrarian class conflict, gender disparity and urban–rural divide pose would not be easy. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explore the idea of mind on the basis of René Descartes and Gilbert Ryle’s vision. Descartes, a 17thcentury philosopher, developed a dualistic theory that posits the mind and body as distinct entities. According to him, the mind is an immaterial, non- extended entity with consciousness and rational thought, while the body is a material substance subject to physical laws. In contrast, 20th-century philosopher Ryle rejected the idea of a separate mental realm and argued for the unity (...) of mind and body. He criticized Cartesian dualism, proposing that mental states and mental processes are not separate from bodily behavior but are intricately intertwined with it. This comparative analysis delves into Descartes’s arguments for dualism, including the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland and his ideas on the mind’s independence from the body. On the other hand, Ryle’s critique of dualism is examined, with a focus on his concept of “category mistake” and his advocacy for behaviorism, which prioritizes observable behavior over unobservable mental states. By exploring these two contrasting perspectives, this paper aims to comprehensively understand the historical development and implications of the notion of mind. It highlights the influence of Descartes’s dualistic framework on philosophical discourse and Ryle’s efforts to challenge it, emphasizing the importance of considering the relationship between mind, body, and behavior in understanding human cognition and experience. (shrink)

Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England...

This study aims to identify the ethical challenges in the process of product marketing. It conducted a bibliometric study to evaluate the major ethical concerns in the area of product marketing. The data for the current study was extracted using the Scopus database. The study uses VOSviewer and Biblioshiny-bibliometrix to analyze the data. The results revealed that in the twenty-first century, ethical concerns and research related to pharmaceutical marketing, consumption behavior, and sustainability have significantly grown and are emerging as important (...) issues. The study is novel in its approach and develops a theoretical model to know ethical issues related to product marketing with multidimensional process (i.e., identification, search strategy, and analysis) for a long-term sustainable business success. By this study, the academicians and researchers will focus greater attention on the rapidly developing human-techno-centric world to fulfill the organizations’ service promises. The study contributes to the marketing ethics literature, particularly to the literature related to ethical issues in product marketing. (shrink)

Post-modernism and its influence in Sri Lanka.

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)

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the time series of (...) prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 1, Page 7-10, January 2022.

The study is an attempt to understand the prevailing discourse in India on education as a right by closely reading the parliamentary debates on The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Educatio...

Avec plus de cent soixante mémorandums d’accords signés avec des constructeurs de barrages, l’Etat d’Arunashal Pradesh, situé dans l’Himalaya, dans une région nord-orientale de l’Inde faisant limite avec la Chine, le Boutant et le Myanmar, occupe une place de choix dans les plans d’aménagement hydroélectrique de l’Inde. Cet état est le foyer d’environ vingt-cinq communautés autochtones, chacune avec ses différentes traditions culturelles et institutionnelles pour l’administration des propriétés collectives, comme les terres agricoles et les forêts. À l’Arunachal Pradesh, à la (...) différence de nombreuses autres communautés de l’Inde, les droits de la communauté sur la terre et les forêts sont protégés par la loi. Malgré cela, avec le boom de l’énergie hydroélectrique, les contradictions entre les droits collectifs et les prérequis institutionnels du modèle de croissance néolibéral ont aiguisé les conflits dans cette région frontalière. (shrink)

This book by an internationally reputed Indian scientist traces the developments of Science, Religion and Philosophy in human civilization through the ages. The common underlying bond-more specifically, a linkage of philosophy with both science and religion-has been examined incisively. All the three sub-areas of human culture have been presented from a holistic point of view, and at the same time, stressing some of their irreconcilable basic differences in scope and outlook. Meant primarily for general readers, the book achieves a fine (...) balance between basic comcepts, historical evolution and a critical unbiased analysis of rituals, dogmas, unresolved queries and it leads to an enlightened view of 'humanism', 'Nature', 'Unity of man', need for a new paradigm of social and political order transcending globalization and control of resources of weaker nations by supremacy in global power equation. The book reviews the wisdom of the ancient Hindus, Buddhism, Jainism and of the three semitic religions-Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It presents a concise account of the Indian Vedas, Vedangan, Saddarsana, the two epics and the Bhagavadgita, of the philosophy and science of the Greeks, science and technology of ancient Egypt, Babylonia and China. A valuable special feature is a summary of the status of present-day science, starting with the classical phase, and ending with the developments in the last century comprising the Theory of Relativity, quantum physics, genetics, various aspects of human consciousness, modern astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Last but not least, the author critically reviews some of the presentday fashionable discourses on 'science as the best way to reach God' and leads the readers to an appraisal of the on-going researches on the unification of the four fundamental interactions of physical sciences. He ends with the inexorable conclusion that this unification, when fully achieved, would still not strictly identify the unique force as 'God as concieved in different religions. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the social consequences of biotechnological control of population for values and ethics of care within the family household in rural north India. Based on long-term ethnographic research, it illustrates the manner in which social practices intermingle with reproductive choices and new reproductive technologies, leading to a systematic elimination of female foetuses, and thus, imbalanced sex ratios. This technological fashioning of populations, the paper argues, has far-reaching consequences for the institutions of family, marriage and kinship in north (...) India particularly in relation to care circulation within the family-household leading to a shifting local ethics of care. (shrink)

We present an inventory of business ethics-related content to supplement and reinforce classroom education. The 23 films and documentaries introduced here allow the instructor to illustrate ethical issues in a manner which resonates with students. While sixteen of these selections involve fictitious plots, three selections (The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Inside Job) are documentaries, and four selections (Barbarians at the Gate, Rogue Trader, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Too Big to Fail) are based on a (...) dramatization of actual events. For each selection, we present a contextual synopsis and leading questions to help instructors demonstrate the existence of ethical issues so that students may gain a better understanding of the need for ethical behavior and practices in business. We also categorize various ethical breaches by functional business areas. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals such as nurses faced a tough time during the pandemic. Despite the personal and professional challenges, they contributed immensely during the pandemic. However, there were variations in nurses’ work engagement during the pandemic. One reason could be their personality, especially neuroticism. Neuroticism represents individuals’ proneness to distress in stressful situations, such as COVID-19. Hence, understanding how and in which conditions neuroticism influences work engagement is crucial. We used the Job Demand-Resource model to test the association between neuroticism and (...) work engagement. As neuroticism represents the stress-proneness of an individual, we further investigated if stress mediates the neuroticism-work engagement link. For the nurses, patient interaction is an integral part of their job. Based on the data collected from the nurses, we tested if contact with patients alleviates the adverse effect of neuroticism on work engagement. During COVID-19, there was an intense need for nursing support. Hence, avoiding duty when society is looking for support might induce a fear of stigmatization among the nurses. We examined if the perceived stigma of duty avoidance would affect the neuroticism-engagement relationship. Our results indicated that higher patient contact alleviated the adverse effect of neuroticism on work engagement. On the other hand, higher fear of stigma exacerbated the adverse effect of neuroticism on work engagement. We further checked the combined effect of beneficiary contact and fear of stigma on neuroticism-work engagement relationships. The findings highlighted the importance of societal factors and policymakers in enhancing nurses’ work engagement. (shrink)

In this modern world, a massive amount of data is processed and broadcasted daily. This includes the use of high energy, massive use of memory space, and increased power use. In a few applications, for example, image processing, signal processing, and possession of data signals, etc., the signals included can be viewed as light in a few spaces. The compressive sensing theory could be an appropriate contender to manage these limitations. “Compressive Sensing theory” preserves extremely helpful while signals are sparse (...) or compressible. It very well may be utilized to recoup light or compressive signals with less estimation than customary strategies. Two issues must be addressed by CS: plan of the estimation framework and advancement of a proficient sparse recovery calculation. The essential intention of this work expects to audit a few ideas and utilizations of compressive sensing and to give an overview of the most significant sparse recovery calculations from every class. The exhibition of acquisition and reconstruction strategies is examined regarding the Compression Ratio, Reconstruction Accuracy, Mean Square Error, and so on. (shrink)

Contribution of emotional valence and arousal to attentional processing over time is not fully understood. We employed a rapid serial visual paradigm in three experiments to investigate the...

Introduction: Decisions to withdraw or withhold curative or life-sustaining treatment can have a huge impact on the symptoms which the palliative-care team has to control. Palliative-care patients and their relatives may also turn to palliative-care physicians and nurses for advice regarding these treatments. We wanted to assess Indian palliative-care nurses and physicians’ attitudes towards withholding and withdrawal of curative or life-sustaining treatment. Method: From May to September 2008, we interviewed 14 physicians and 13 nurses working in different palliative-care programmes in (...) New Delhi, using a semi-structured questionnaire. For the interviews and analysis of the data we followed Grounded-Theory methodology. Results: Withholding a curative or life-sustaining treatment which may prolong a terminal cancer patient’s life with a few weeks but also has severe side-effects was generally considered acceptable by the interviewees. The majority of the interviewees agreed that life-sustaining treatments can be withdrawn in a patient who is in an irreversible coma. The palliative-care physicians and nurses were of the opinion that a patient has the right to refuse life-saving curative treatment. While reflecting upon the ethical acceptability of withholding or withdrawal of curative or life-sustaining treatment, the physicians and nurses were concerned about the whole patient and other people who may be affected by the decision. They were convinced they can play an important advisory role in the decision-making process. Conclusion: While deciding about the ethical issues, the physicians and nurses do not restrict their considerations to the physical aspects of the disease, but also reflect upon the complex wider consequences of the treatment decisions. (shrink)

Incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity are non‐Mendelian phenomena resulting in the lack of correlation between genotype and phenotype. Not withstanding the diversity in mechanisms, differential expression of homologous alleles within cells manifests as variations in penetrance and expressivity of mutations between individuals of the same genotype. These phenomena are seen most often in dominantly inherited diseases, implying that they are sensitive to concentration of the gene product. In this framework and the advances in understanding the role of microRNA (miRNA) in (...) fine‐tuning gene expression at translational level, we propose miRNA‐mediated regulation as a mechanism for incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. The presence of miRNA binding sites at 3′ UTR, co‐expression of target gene–miRNA pairs for genes showing incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity derived from available data lend support to our hypothesis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the miRNA target site facilitate the implied differential targeting of the transcripts from homologous alleles. (shrink)

The cognitive science of science studies the cognitive processes involved in carrying out science: How do scientists reason? How do scientists develop new theories? How do scientists deal with data that are inconsistent with their theories? How do scientists choose between competing theories? Research on these issues has been carried out by investigators in a number of cognitive science disciplines, particularly psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. More detailed accounts of work in this area can be found in two recent conference (...) volumes. (shrink)

For successful project outcomes to organizations and clients alike, project managers need to make ethical decisions and yet balance the interests of all stakeholders involved. Hence, honest communication among project stakeholders is essential as a countermeasure to this paradox. Honesty is one of the core ethical values propagated by the Project Management Institute, USA. Our study aimed to gain an endogenous perspective on honesty vis-à-vis its reification by PMI in its effect on software project performance. Empirical data were collected through (...) in-depth interviews from 83 Indian PMs in one of the prominent Indian software consulting organizations. Grounded theory was utilized to analyze the data obtained. Our results validate the importance of honesty on software project performance, the need for trust among stakeholders in maintaining honesty, importance of Indian culture in understanding honesty and ensuing ethical challenges faced by PMs. Our results bear implications to extant research on honesty in projects with specific reference to the Indian software context. They are important for PMI professionals as they provide a culture-specific perspective to honesty and the scope for ideation on how to inculcate and sustain honesty in project management in India. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds . From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider (...) Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds (like philosophy and education). From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, (...) I also consider Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

We propose a novel edge detector in the presence of Gaussian noise with the use of proximal support vector machine (PSVM). The edges of a noisy image are detected using a two-stage architecture: smoothing of image is first performed using regularized anisotropic diffusion, followed by the classification using PSVM, termed as regularized anisotropic diffusion-based PSVM (RAD-PSVM) method. In this process, a feature vector is formed for a pixel using the denoised coefficient’s class and the local orientations to detect edges in (...) all possible directions in images. From the experiments, conducted on both synthetic and benchmark images, it is observed that our RAD-PSVM approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art edge detection approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively. (shrink)

Durán et al argue in ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’1 that traditionally proposed solutions to make black box machine learning models in medicine less opaque and more transparent are, though necessary, ultimately not sufficient to establish their overall trustworthiness. This is because transparency procedures currently employed, such as the use of an interpretable predictor,2 cannot fully overcome the opacity of such models. Computational reliabilism, an alternate approach to (...) adjudicating trustworthiness that goes beyond transparency solutions, is argued to be a more promising approach. CR can bring the benefits of traditional process reliabilism in epistemology to bear on this problem of model trustworthiness. Durán et al ’s explicitly reliabilist epistemology to assess the trustworthiness of black box models is a timely addition to current transparency-focused approaches in the literature. Their delineation of the epistemic from the ethical also serves the debate by clarifying the nature of the different problems. However, their overall account underestimates the epistemic value of certain transparency-enabling approaches by conflating different types of opacity and also oversimplifies transparency-advocating arguments in the literature. First, it is unclear why Durán et al consider transparency approaches as insufficient to overcome epistemic opacity, if heiraccount of opacity is the traditional one from the machine learning literature: opacity stemming from the mismatch between mathematical optimisation in high dimensionality that is characteristic of machine learning and the demands of human-scale reasoning and styles of semantic interpretation.3 …. (shrink)

To submit a case that has been reviewed by an ethics committee or to submit papers on related topics in clinical ethics, readers are invited to contact Ruchika Mishra, editor of at: ruchika.mishra@gmail.com.