This book presents a selection of essays by the Indian philosopher J.L. Mehta on the topics of hermeneutics and phenomenology containing many original ...

Consider two deeply appealing thoughts: first, that we experience external particulars, and second, that what it’s like to have an experience – the phenomenal character of an experience – is somehow independent of external particulars. The first thought is readily captured by phenomenal particularism, the view that external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. The second thought is readily captured by phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal character. -/- Here I (...) show that a novel version of phenomenal generalism can capture both thoughts in a satisfying fashion. Along the way, I reveal severe problems facing phenomenal particularism and also shed light on the mental kinds under which experiences fall. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented strain on hospitals and, in particular, critical care settings. Early in the pandemic, multiple plans were developed to ration ventilators in anticipatio...

_The Futures of School Reform_ represents the culminating work of a three-year discussion among national education leaders convened by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based on the recognition that current education reform efforts have reached their limits, the volume maps out a variety of bold visions that push the boundaries of our current thinking. Taken together, these visions identify the leverage points for generating dramatic change and highlight critical trade-offs among different courses of action. The goal of this book (...) is not to present a menu of options. Rather, it is to surface contrasting assumptions, tensions, constraints, and opportunities, so that together we can better understand—and act on—the choices that lie before us. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 209-231, January 2022.

Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

This paper is about Gandhi's critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards democracy was a part. I argue that for Gandhi the ground of moral action is fearlessness, while that of political reason is security and self-defense. Gandhi sees the context of moral action in the mundane fabric of everyday life, in places such as the family and the village. For that reason he does not believe that moral action requires being supplemented by the particular kind of unity which (...) politics and the state call for and necessitate. (shrink)

Using Canada as a case study, this article argues that regulating biotechnology and nanotechnology is made unnecessarily complex and inherently unstable because of a failure to consult the public early and of-ten enough. Furthermore, it is argued that future regulators (and promoters) of nanotechnology may learn valuable lessons from the mistakes made in regulating biotechnology.

Three lectures on Jaina philosophy and ancient civilization.

It can seem incoherent to fully characterize fundamentality in terms of grounding, given that the fundamental is precisely that which cannot be fully characterized independently. I argue that there is no such incoherence.

Most contemporary theories of perception, including leading forms of representationalism and naive realism, are monistic: they assume that to consciously perceive is to deploy only one kind of sensory awareness. Here I instead argue for rich pluralism, which says that to consciously perceive is to deploy two very different kinds of sensory awareness in concert: representational awareness of particulars, and non-representational, partly essence-revealing awareness of sensory qualities.

I assume that there exists a general phenomenon, the phenomenon of the explanatory gap, surrounding consciousness, normativity, intentionality, and more. Explanatory gaps are often thought to foreclose reductive possibilities wherever they appear. In response, reductivists who grant the existence of these gaps have offered countless local solutions. But typically such reductivist responses have had a serious shortcoming: because they appeal to essentially domain-specific features, they cannot be fully generalized, and in this sense these responses have been not just local but (...) parochial. Here I do better. Taking for granted that the explanatory gap is a genuine phenomenon, I offer a fully general diagnosis that unifies these previously fragmented reductivist responses. (shrink)

Genetic cancer predisposition testing in the paediatric population poses unique ethical dilemmas. Using the hypothetical example of a teenager with cancer with a high probability of having an underlying cancer predisposition syndrome, we discuss the ethical considerations that affect the decision-making process. Because legally these decisions are made by parents, genetic testing in paediatrics can remove a child’s autonomy to preserve his or her own ‘open future’. However, knowledge of results confirming a predisposition syndrome can potentially be beneficial in modifying (...) treatment and surveillance plans and enabling at-risk family members to obtain cascade testing for themselves. Considering virtue ethics to envision the best characters of the patient, parents and healthcare providers can guide them to the better choice to test or not to test, with the ultimate goal of achieving the best outcome for survival andeudaimonia, human flourishing reliably sought out. (shrink)

I highlight a neglected but striking phenomenological fact about our experiences: they have a pervasively spatial character. Specifically, all (or almost all) phenomenal qualities – roughly, the introspectible, philosophically puzzling properties that constitute ‘what it’s like’ to have an experience – introspectively seem instantiated in some kind of space. So, assuming a very weak charity principle about introspection, some phenomenal qualities are instantiated in space. But there is only one kind of space – the ordinary space occupied by familiar objects. (...) And the only objects appropriately located in ordinary space are outside the subject’s mind. This entails experiential externalism, the view that at least one phenomenal quality is instantiated outside the subject’s mind. Experiential externalism is incompatible with many leading theories of experience, including certain mental paint theories; some forms of representationalism; paradigmatic versions of sense-datum theory; and views on which no phenomenal qualities are instantiated. My argument is structurally similar to familiar arguments based on the ‘transparency of experience.’ However, I suggest, phenomenological intuitions about spatiality are considerably more stable than phenomenological intuitions about transparency. For many philosophers, transparency intuitions fade markedly with respect to non-standard experiences, including experiences associated with blurry or double vision. But spatiality intuitions remain robust even for these experiences. Thus, spatiality intuitions should be more dialectically effective than transparency intuitions for supporting experiential externalism. (shrink)

What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines it meets in me. Stanley Cavell.

According to the Epistemic Theory of Mind, knowledge is part of the best overall framework for explaining behavior at the psychological level. This theory, which has become increasingly popular in recent decades, has almost always been conjoined with an invariantist theory of “knows.” In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: the Epistemic Theory of Mind is far more explanatorily powerful when conjoined with contextualism. I conclude that if the Epistemic Theory of Mind is true, then there is (...) a powerful new reason to accept contextualism. (shrink)

A review of Michael Madary's book Visual Phenomenology.

Naïve realism is a theory of perception with great explanatory ambitions. It has been influentially argued that, in order to realize these explanatory ambitions, the naïve realist should say that any perception belongs to just one fundamental kind. I think, however, that adopting this commitment does not particularly help the naïve realist to realize her explanatory ambitions, and so is not warranted. This result is significant because once this commitment about fundamental kinds is relinquished, we see that it is possible (...) to develop some new and surprising forms of naïve realism—most notably, what I call pluralist naïve realism. (shrink)

The enduring appeal of liberalism lies in its commitment to the idea that human beings have a "natural" potential to live as free and equal individuals. The realization of this potential, however, is not a matter of nature, but requires that people be molded by a complex constellation of political and educational institutions. In this eloquent and provocative book, Uday Singh Mehta investigates in the major writings of John Locke the implications of this tension between individuals and the institutions (...) that mold them. The process of molding, he demonstrates, involves an external conformity and an internal self-restraint that severely limit the scope of individuality. Mehta explores the centrality of the human imagination in Locke's thought, focusing on his obsession with the potential dangers of the cognitive realm. Underlying Locke's fears regarding the excesses of the imagination is a political anxiety concerning how to limit their potential effects. In light of Locke's views on education, Mehta concludes that the promise of liberation at the heart of liberalism is vitiated by its constraints on cognitive and political freedom. (shrink)

This guide focuses on the content and form of excellent philosophical writing, with further comments on reading, thinking, writing processes, publication strategies, and self-cultivation.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 51, Issue 5, Page 53-55, September‐October 2021.

This article discusses different conceptions and translations of the devadasi system in transnational Dalit feminist activism. I focus specifically on activist participation at the 1994 Asia Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights in Tokyo, Japan and the construction of an analogy between the experiences and struggles of devadasis and that of ‘military comfort women’, i.e. women from Japan’s former colonies who were abducted and raped by the Japanese military during World War II. I argue that strategic claims of commonality are part (...) of the process of making specific, local practices legible to a global audience and that these sorts of claims also enable transnational feminist activism and solidarity. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 117 - 148 The paper examines the problem of self-knowledge from the perspectives of Plotinus and the Indian Advaita school. Analyzing the subject-object relation, I show that according to both Plotinus and Advaita thinkers, full self-knowledge demands complete absence of otherness. Plotinus argues that if self-consciousness is divided into subject-object relation then one will know oneself as contemplated but not as contemplating and no real self-knowledge obtains in this case. Śaṅkara, who constitutes an (...) important representative of Advaita thought, points out that the self cannot know itself as an object because what is called an object to be known becomes established when it is separated from the self, the subject. I argue that at the level of the One, similar to the state of _ātman_ consciousness in Advaita framework, the soul experiences itself in expansive non-dual consciousness. Lastly, I examine the role of non-duality as the foundation of knowledge. (shrink)

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on‐line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up‐votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their (...) curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up‐votes in reducing curiosity than of high up‐votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity. (shrink)

Derek Allan presented a paper at the 2016 OSSA Conference at the University of Windsor; I provided comments on that paper. These are brief notes on my comments.

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account, all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge-centered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental (...) epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge-centered accounts. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 1, Page 29-43, January 2022. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed a need for rethinking approaches to education and livelihoods. Education in its present dispensation does not provide equitable access to children from marginalized segments of the population. It also suffers from deficits in the areas of social and emotional skills, over-emphasis on the three Rs, language used as a medium of instruction, and excessive competition for scoring marks, among others. There is very low (...) uptake of vocational education. The National Education Policy 2020 tries to address some of these issues and plans on closer integration of vocational education with the school framework. High unemployment rates of educated youth, along with underemployment due to skill mismatch, show poor school-to-work transition and underscore the importance of TVET for youth in the future. Skill already exists in the economy in informal knowledge systems which are largely undocumented and thus not acknowledged in the formal system. These need to be combined with Western-centric knowledge systems so that the imbalance between formally educated/trained workers and informally trained workers is redressed. There is also a need to bring back the joy of learning, as Tagore’s experimentation with education has demonstrated. (shrink)

Criminal juries in the United States typically deliver their decisions through a “general verdict,” expressing only their ultimate conclusion of “guilty” or “not guilty,” rather than through a “special verdict” that identifies whether each element of the charged crime has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. American courts have broadly favored the use of general verdicts in criminal cases due to concerns that the special verdict will curtail the jury’s decision-making autonomy, including its power to nullify the law in favor (...) of the defense, potentially undermining the criminal defendant’s constitutional right to trial by jury. This Article confronts the legal status quo on verdict format and its underlying, untested assumptions. Drawing upon prior psychology findings and legal professionals’ anecdotal observations, it questions whether the general verdict poses its own under-acknowledged threats to the rights of criminal defendants and the decision-making agency of jurors. While the more guided special verdict format is presumed to threaten nullifying acquittals, the unguided general verdict format might be enabling convictions that violate constitutional norms of due process, impartial adjudication, and equal protection. Given the high-stakes values potentially implicated in the choice of verdict format in criminal cases, it is time to put the conventional wisdom in favor of general verdicts to an empirical test. This Article therefore proposes a methodological framework for investigating whether the legal status quo accurately reflects (1) current stakeholders’ preferences and predictions, and (2) experimentally testable legal and cognitive effects of general versus special verdicts in lay determinations of criminal liability. A data-informed understanding is needed to assess whether the general verdict is optimizing the integrity, fairness, and constitutionality of criminal jury decision making. (shrink)

From Kabir to Krishnamurti is a far cry. For, they are separated one from the other by over five centuries. But quantitative measurement of this distance has a qualitative aspect which cannot be measured in any time-scale. Two great seers lived in two completely different worlds-with no comparison between the two. And yet they expressed their thoughts and experience not only in a similar language but almost in identical terms. In these two streams of thought represented by Kabir and Krishnaji, (...) the authors note a fascinating parallelism. These streams run parallel to each other-and yet they meet from time to time-at the intersections between the two approaches to life. J. Krishnamurti and Sant Kabir focuses on these meeting points between the two approaches to life. The book also presents the intersections between the writings and sayings of Kabir and Krishnaji. (shrink)