BackgroundStudies on different methods to supplement the traditional informed consent process have generated conflicting results. This study was designed to evaluate whether participants who received group counseling prior to administration of informed consent understood the key components of the study and the consent better than those who received individual counseling, based on the hypothesis that group counseling would foster discussion among potential participants and enhance their understanding of the informed consent.MethodsParents of children participating in a trial of nutritional supplementation were (...) randomized to receive either group counseling or individual counseling prior to administration of the informed consent. To assess the participant's comprehension, a structured questionnaire was administered approximately 48-72 hours afterwards by interviewers who were blinded to the allocation group of the respondents.ResultsA total of 128 parents were recruited and follow up was established with 118 (90.2%) for the study. All respondents were aware of their child's participation in a research study and the details of sample collection. However, their understanding of study purpose, randomization and withdrawal was poor. There was no difference in comprehension of key elements of the informed consent between the intervention and control arm.ConclusionsThe results suggest that the group counseling might not influence the overall comprehension of the informed consent process. Further research is required to devise better ways of improving participants' understanding of randomization in clinical trials.Trial RegistrationClinical Trial Registry - India (CTRI): CTRI/2009/091/000612. (shrink)

Comprehension and recall of informed consent was assessed after the study closure in the parents/guardians of a birth cohort of children participating in an intensive three-year diarrhoeal surveillance. A structured questionnaire was administered by field workers who had not participated in the study's follow-up protocol. Of 368 respondents, 329 stated that the study was adequately explained during enrolment, but only 159 could recall that it was on diarrhoea. Nearly half of the respondents stated that they would not have participated if (...) free medical treatment was not provided, although the free medical clinic was not offered at enrolment. Spousal approval was the most important factor in the decision to participate. In the multivariate analysis, maternal education was associated with increased awareness about the disease under study: mothers without any formal education had the lowest awareness. Despite a high compliance with the study protocol, retention of understanding about the research study was low over a long period of time. Although the local government provides free healthcare in the study area, respondents cited free healthcare as an important reason for participation, highlighting the need for true health equity before meaningful informed consent can be obtained. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty states in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" as opposed to doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This statement seems counterintuitive for Merleau-Ponty, who has been called "the philosopher of the sensible." In this book, Kaushik investigates this question, arguing that Merleau-Ponty has raised the stakes of his ontology such that it is no longer a matter of finding a solution to the difference between "the real and the fictive" (...) but rather, of constellating and matrixing them. This ontological matrix amounts to a psychoanalysis of the philosophy of identity. Kaushik argues that philosophies of reflection, in which reflection seeks to coincide with its origins, are in fact uncritical because they miss the form of differentiation that limits them. His analyses of the matrices between space-imagination, light-dark, awake-asleep, repression-expression, etc., subvert these philosophies and reveal the symbolic form in terms of its lack of precise origin or destination. Drawing from recently published course materials of Merleau-Ponty's, and attentive to his reliance on literary phrases for phenomenological insights, Kaushik brings out the living force of Merleau-Ponty's thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's interest in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, is recognized among scholars worldwide though little has been written on his fascination with Tagore's poetry and symbolic plays. In Language, Limits, and Beyond, Priyambada Sarkar explores Tagore and Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments on the concept of 'threshold of language and meaning', highlighting the systematic connections between Tagore's canon and Wittgenstein's early works. Situatingher study in the early 1900s, when Tagore's poetry had just become available in Europe, Sarkar finds similarities (...) between Tagore's and Wittgenstein's exploration of the limits of language. She argues that Wittgenstein's early philosophy can be better understood when juxtaposed with Tagore.Drawing parallels between the worlds of philosophy and poetry, Sarkar identifies the point of convergence of their two philosophies in the realm of language, tracing how they reach surprisingly similar conclusions through entirely different paths of inquiry. Sarkar finally claims that such important points of contact will help one to arrange the pieces of the Tractarian jigsaw puzzle in a manner where all the pieces of logic, language, world, and the mystical will fall into place and form acoherent picture. (shrink)

Medical and public health professionals recommend wearing face masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease of 2019. While the majority of people in the United States support wearing face masks as an effective tool to combat COVID-19, a smaller percentage declared the recommendation by public health agencies as a government imposition and an infringement on personal liberty. Social media play a significant role in amplifying public health issues, whereby a minority against the imposition can speak loudly, perhaps using (...) tactics of verbal aggression taking the form of toxic language. We investigated the role that toxicity plays in the online discourse around wearing face masks. Overall, we found tweets including anti-mask hashtags were significantly more likely to use toxic language, while tweets with pro-mask hashtags were somewhat less toxic with the exception of #WearADamnMask. We conclude that the tensions between these two positions raise doubt and uncertainty around the issue, which make it difficult for health communicators to break through the clutter in order to combat the infodemic. Public health agencies and other governmental institutions should monitor toxicity trends on social media in order to better ascertain prevailing sentiment toward their recommendations and then apply these data-driven insights to refine and adapt their risk communication messaging toward mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and other interventions. (shrink)

This book offers a critical re-appraisal of what is perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s most widely read text, the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception. Although open and enigmatic text, the Preface is still often used to introduce phenomenology in general and Merleau-Ponty’s work specifically to students, scholars in disciplines other than philosophy, and art practitioners. Taking advantage of the fact that many of his course notes have been posthumously published in the last few decades, this book situates the Preface to the Phenomenology (...) of Perception in the context of Merleau-Ponty's later work and shows how it contains many of the threads on which Merleau-Ponty would later pull. In doing so, the book chapters elaborate key themes in the Preface: “Phenomenology and its Paradoxes,” “Phenomenology and its Method,” “Phenomenology and its Incompletion,” “Phenomenology and Non-Phenomenology." Readers will learn about the radicality of Merleau-Ponty’s early articulation of phenomenology, how much it already suggests the profound transformation of phenomenology usually associated with his more mature work. (shrink)

Pt. 1. Purva paksha (examination of my opponents' positions) -- pt. 2. Uttara paksha (my response).

Author's interviews with twenty contemporary philosophical masters of different spiritual backgrounds predominantly Indic to quest for seeking philosophical concepts and spiritual life.

Author's interviews with twenty-five contemporary philosophical masters of different spiritual backgrounds predominantly Indic to quest for seeking philosophical concepts and spiritual life.

Contributed research papers presented at state level workshop under programme of the Department of Philosophy, University of Calcutta in 2010.

Foreward by Pramod K. Nayar -- Prologue -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The dys-abled players of Samuel Beckett's Endgame -- The circumcised body of Franz Kafka's select letters -- 'Connoisseurship ... of disease' and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice -- 'Undiscovered countries' with Virginia Woolf's On being ill -- 'Connect nothing with nothing' in T.S. Eliot's The wasteland -- Epilogue -- Pathography -- Index.

We ask what type of neutralization techniques corporations apply to allegations of human rights abuses. We proceed by undertaking a Qualitative Content Analysis of 162 responses by ten extractives-sector firms over a period of 14 years. The firms were responding to accusations of human rights impacts documented by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. We use Garrett et al.’s :507–520, 1989) framework of neutralization techniques consisting of denial, justification, concession and excuse to examine the responses. During our QCA, we (...) observed emerging themes around self-promotion and evasive tactics. We contribute to existing literature by proposing ‘evasion’ as a novel neutralization technique, particularly in circumstances of corporate responses to accusations of wrongdoing. We argue that evasion occurs when firms refuse to engage in the debate brought forward in an accusation. In addition, we enrich our understanding of neutralization techniques by proposing subneutralization techniques in our analysis to diverge from that of other studies. We conclude by discussing the implications of the predominance of corporate narcissism and evasive neutralization techniques to the business and human rights movement and other international corporate responsibility standards. (shrink)

A hallmark of skilled motor performance is behavioral flexibility – i.e., experts can not only produce a movement pattern to reliably achieve a given task goal, but also possess the ability to change that movement pattern to fit a new context. In this perspective article, we briefly highlight the factors that are critical to understanding behavioral flexibility, and its connection to movement variability, stability, and learning. We then address how practice strategies should be developed from a motor learning standpoint to (...) enhance behavioral flexibility. Finally, we highlight some important future avenues of work that are needed to advance our understanding of behavioral flexibility. We use examples from sport as a context to highlight these issues, especially in regard to elite performance and development. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany academic authors, policy makers, NGOs, and corporations have focused on top-down human rights global norm-making, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. What is often missing are contextual and substantive analyses that interrogate rights mobilization and linkages between voluntary transnational rules and domestic governance. Deploying a socio-legal approach and using a combination of longitudinal field and archival data, this article investigates how a local, indigenous community in Northern Chile mobilized their rights over a period (...) of almost two decades. We found that rights mobilization was largely shaped by tensions between the different logics of legality and the business organization. In our case, the UNGP implementation process has been ineffective in giving rightsholders access to genuine remedy. On the contrary, it has led to weakened rights mobilization, dividing the local community. We conclude that greater attention to rights mobilization and domestic governance dynamics should be given in the business and human rights debate. (shrink)

This article analyses the ethics of how community engagement and dialogue as applied by a mining corporation in Chile led to erosion of the community’s psychological freedom despite being aligned with best practice. This article details how a mining company squeezed the psychological freedom of the community in order to obtain an agreement between the period of 2000 and 2016. The findings focus particularly on a 9-month period between 2015 and 2016 when the company undertook intense community engagement. The article (...) identifies six corporate action phases undertaken which curtailed the community’s psychological freedom as paying off local leaders; challenging via courts of law; co-opting community lawyers; prohibiting a key debate during dialogue; and remaining silent after failing to honour its own self-imposed rule. The findings label the company’s community engagement as contradictory; while it conducted transitional and transformational engagement in formal spaces, it also engaged in unethical strategies in the informal spaces of community engagement. The result was overall community consent and an even more fragmented community. This article finds that when it limits the psychological freedom of participants, who are already divided as a group, corporate–community engagement can be viewed as ethically problematic. Based on analysis of the literature and an empirical case analysis, this article contributes a test for assessing the ethics of CCE. (shrink)

Rumour has been part of collective human life for centuries. Communities deal with anxiety and make sense of the unknowable by mixing apprehensions with what is already known to them. With modernity, and in line with studies on a range of social phenomena, there have been efforts to develop a science on rumour. Most of these studies deal with rumour at the propositional level, such that the rumouring or rumour-rebutting subject invariably belongs to one of the two sides of the (...) ‘true–false’ divide. Similar categories are followed in the study of rumour in social media, where the nodes in a rumour chain are, however, less hierarchical, and where images are increasingly used for persuasion. This paper, following a value-oriented approach, argues that the science on rumour has objectivized the problem, and has suggested instrumental solutions like enhancing the digital literacy of social media users. Whereas a value position should ideally attempt to efface the dilemma of the rumouring/rumour-rebutting subject, and locate rumours within the larger socio-political and historical context of a society. (shrink)

Basic income and basic capital are two common ideas for redesigning distribution. Basic income provides people with a regular income from government. Basic capital provides people with a lump-sum grant. An important part of scholarly debate concentrates on the merits of basic income versus basic capital. This paper claims that these debates are too narrow. First, current debates overlook the way that a chief inspiration for both ideas, Thomas Paine, wanted basic capital and basic income to be complements not substitutes. (...) Second, it is more instructive to compare basic capital or basic income with a wider set of alternatives than with each other. Widening the debates would benefit the discussion of a basic capital or basic income. (shrink)

Using the political corporate social responsibility lens of parentalism, this paper investigates the more subtle and less-visible interactional dynamics and strategies of power, resistance and justification that manifest between a multi-stakeholder-governed foundation and victims of a mining corporation’s dam collapse. The Renova Foundation was established to provide remedy through a deliberative approach to hundreds of thousands of victims from Brazil’s worst socio-environmental disaster—the collapse of Samarco Mining Corporation’s Fundão tailings dam. Data were collected from a combination of fieldwork and archival (...) analysis to assess the perceptions of victims, their defenders and foundation executives. The findings reveal 12 dialectical tensions from Renova’s attempts to remedy the victim’s injustices. The case analysis contributes through proposing a dialectical process model of stakeholder resistance and subversion to parentalist PCSR. The case reveals the pivotal use of time via the act of stalling as a strategic resource to exhaust victims and reach settlements. Furthermore, organizations justify their parentalism by blaming delays on the bureaucracy and shared responsibility of multi-stakeholder deliberation. Ultimately, I contend that victims must have an equal voice in the outcome of their remediation and that businesses responsible for causing harm should not decide these matters. (shrink)

The first in-depth reference to the field that combines scientific knowledge with philosophical inquiry, this encyclopedia brings together a team of leading scholars to provide nearly 150 entries on the essential concepts in the philosophy of science. The areas covered include biology, chemistry, epistemology and metaphysics, physics, psychology and mind, the social sciences, and key figures in the combined studies of science and philosophy. (Midwest).

Covid-19 has sparked calls for a universal basic income as a way of coping with a demand shock caused by the pandemic. Temporary income payments have been part of the emergency response to the pandemic. This paper questions the effectiveness of temporary payments as a way to raise demand. Some observers claim that vouchers are better targeted at sectors hit hard by Covid-19 as people may have a tendency to save than spend from temporary payments. There may be a stronger (...) case for permanent rather than temporary payments if the aim is to boost demand in the economy. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Classical Molecular Biology Genomics and Post‐Genomics Proteomics Towards a Systems Biology? Philosophical Implications Conclusions: An Invitation References.

Papers presented in two seminars held in 2009.

Cancer is fast becoming an alarming cause of human death. However, it has been reported that if the disease is detected at an early stage, diagnosed, treated appropriately, the patient has better chances of survival long life. Machine learning technique with feature-selection contributes greatly to the detecting of cancer, because an efficient feature-selection method can remove redundant features. In this paper, a Fuzzy Preference-Based Rough Set (FPRS) blended with Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been applied in order to predict cancer (...) biomarkers for biological and gene expression datasets. Biomarkers are determined by deploying three models of FPRS, namely, Fuzzy Upward Consistency (FUC), Fuzzy Downward Consistency (FLC), and Fuzzy Global Consistency (FGC). The efficiency of the three models with SVM on five datasets is exhibited, and the biomarkers that have been identified from FUC models have been reported. (shrink)

By now it has become commonplace to note that the early Carnap was strongly influenced by Kant and the neo-Kantianism of his day.1 As early as 1977 Haack noted some striking similarities between the Aufbau and the first Critique; since then, Haack’s observation has been underscored by documenting the explicit role of the neo-Kantians in Carnap’s early education and intellectual development.2 Whether or not Carnap in the Aufbau was at all interested in traditional empiricism, or even strongly influenced by Russell, (...) remains debatable.3 However, a decisive early influence of Kant cannot be persuasively denied. Nevertheless, Kant and the neo-Kantians do not comprise the whole story. An equally important influence on Carnap in Der Raum, though perhaps slightly less so in the Aufbau, was Husserl.4 This paper begins the project of tracing the precise extent and nature of that influence.KeywordsPhysical SpaceFormal SpaceLogical EmpiricismVienna CircleLogical SyntaxThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary (...) thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest. (shrink)

Sumit Sarkar, one of the leading Indian historians of his generation, participated in the Indian-British Subaltern Studies Collective that established new standards in the historiography of colonialism in the 1980’s. In this Interview, Déborah Cohen and Urs Lindner ask him about the achievements and oversights of the Subaltern Studies project, the prospects of global history, Marx’s eurocentrism and the problem of religion.

This paper presents a challenge to Eurocentric world history on the grounds that it reifies and exaggerates the role of the West in the creation of modernity, while simultaneously ignoring India's seminal contributions. The groundwork is prepared in the first three sections, which refute the parochial biases of Eurocentrism by revealing India's impressive early developmental record and its place near the center of a nascent global economy. The paper culminates in an approach that places the "dialogue of civilizations" center-stage of (...) progressive world history, which is formulated as an antidote to parochial Eurocentric world history. This entails an extensive discussion of two key contributions that India made in enabling the rise of the modern West. These comprise the dissemination of Indian industrial methods that enabled the British industrial revolution on the one hand, and the transmission of Indian mathematical ideas that helped promote the European scientific revolution on the other hand. Moreover, this discussion is coupled with two speculative counterfactual historical scenarios. They are: first, that in the absence of British imperialism which sought to "contain" Indian development, India might have gone on to make the breakthrough to modernity, and second, that in the absence of Indian (as well as Chinese, African and Middle Eastern) help, the West might not have made the breakthrough to modernity. But whatever the veracity of such counterfactuals may or may not be, the ultimate upshot of the argument presented in this paper reveals that Eurocentrism's central claim - that the West made the breakthrough to modernity all by itself - can no longer hold true. (shrink)

In this paper, a HIV-TB co-infection model is explored which incorporates a non-linear treatment rate for TB. We begin with presenting a HIV-TB co-infection model and analyze both HIV and TB sub-models separately. The basic reproduction numbers corresponding to HIV-only, TB-only and the HIV-TB full model are computed. The disease-free equilibrium point of the HIV sub-model is shown to be locally as well as globally asymptotically stable when its corresponding reproduction number is less than unity. The HIV-only model exhibits a (...) transcritical bifurcation. On the other hand, for the TB sub-model, the disease-free equilibrium point is locally asymptotically stable but may not be globally asymptotically stable. We have also analyzed the full HIV-TB co-infection model. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the effect of treatment rate in the presence of resource limitation for TB infected individuals, which emphasize the fact that to reduce co-infection from the population programs to accelerate the treatment of TB should be implemented. (shrink)

Introduction -- Matisse in slow motion -- Art and natural being -- Proust and the significant event -- Reversibility between the arts -- Concluding remarks.