Rather paradoxically, the personal and intellectual roots of Sir Isaiah Berlin, an influential contributor to liberal political theory and Western political thought, stem from East-European autocra...

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining ‎knowledge, and a strong (...) orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition ‎and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of ‎knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-‎mediated knowledge. ‎. (shrink)

Courier poetry is perhaps the richest and most vital literary genre of premodern South Asia, with hundreds of poems in a great variety of languages. But other than dubbing these poems “imitations” of Kālidāsa’s classical model, existing scholarship offers very little explanation of why this should be the case: why poets repeatedly turned to this literary form, exactly how they engaged with existing precedents, and what, if anything, was new in these many poems. In hopes of raising and beginning to (...) answer such questions, this essay closely examines one such work, the Haṃsasandeśa of Vāmana Bhaṭṭa Bāṇa, and its close correspondence with two important intertexts: Kālidāsa’s Meghasandeśa and Vedānta Deśika’s Haṃsasandeśa. I argue that Vāmana Bhaṭṭa Bāṇa’s work is an intricate mosaic that is put together from pieces—both absences and presences—that are taken from both these poems and that make sense only if we are familiar with their sources, and that this mosaic is nonetheless a surprisingly new and independent statement. On the basis of this analysis, I go on to suggest that novelty in the genre is partly made possible precisely through dense engagement with the vocabulary, figures of speech, situations, and other building blocks of the intertexts, a practice that often results in a heightened mode of density. (shrink)

This essay is a first attempt to trace the evolution of biographical accounts of Appayya Dīkṣita from the sixteenth century onward, with special attention to their continuities and changes. It explores what these rich materials teach us about Appayya Dīkṣita and his times, and what lessons they offer about the changing historical sensibilities in South India during the transition to the colonial and postcolonial eras. I tentatively identify two important junctures in the development of these materials: one that took place (...) in the first generation to be born after his death, when the idea of him as an avatar of Śiva was introduced, and another at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when many new stories about his encounters with his colleagues and students surfaced. The essay follows a set of themes and tensions that pertain to Appayya Dīkṣita’s social and political affiliations, his sectarian agendas, and the geographic sphere of his activities. These themes and tensions are closely related and prove to be surprisingly resilient, despite the many changes that occurred during the five centuries of recollection that this essay sketches. This overall coherence, I argue, is integral to Appayya Dīkṣita’s sociopolitical context and self-chosen identity. (shrink)

This paper revisits the longstanding tradition concerning the dual authorship of the Light on Literature (Kāvyaprakāśa), the dominant treatise on Sanskrit poetics in the second millennium CE. The discussion focuses on one case study, a brief comment dismissing the ornament “cause” (hetu), found in the latter part of chapter 10 in the portion traditionally attributed to Mammaṭa’s successor Allaṭa (aka Alaka). This passage is analyzed in the broader context of the Light’s discussion of semantic capacities (chapter 2), suggestion (chapter 4), (...) and other ornaments (chapter 10). The essay also looks at the way generations of commentators have dealt with this topic and the potential inconsistencies in its treatment in the Light. The paper thus throws light on the question of the work’s overall integration, seamless or not so seamless, both in its genetic and receptive histories. (shrink)

First Words, Last Words charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vedānta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this dispute lies (...) the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vyāsatīrtha and his grand-pupil Vijayīndratīrtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Vedānta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of Mīmāṃsā interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dikshita ostensibly defended this tradition's preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground, and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions. (shrink)

The Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin, the earliest known Javanese literary work, is based on the sixth-century Sanskrit Bhaṭṭikāvya. It is an outcome of a careful and thorough project of translation and adaptation that took place at a formative moment in the cultural exchange between South and Southeast Asia. In this essay we explore what it was that the Javanese poets set out to capture when they rendered the Bhaṭṭikāvya into Old Javanese, what sort of knowledge and protocols informed their work, (...) in what way the outcome was different from the original, and what the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa can teach us about Bhaṭṭi’s poem and the nascent poetics of kakawin literature. In particular, we show how Sanskrit figures of speech, or ornaments were understood, commented upon, expanded, and reconfigured. A close look at these texts allows us insights into this remarkable moment of cultural exchange. (shrink)

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

Vedānta Deśika produced his monumental poetic biography of Kṛṣṇa in a time when Kṛṣṇa-centered devotionalism was expanding to become perhaps the dominant mode of bhakti across South Asia. Central to this phenomenon is the growing popularity of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and especially of its exploration of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic play with the gopīs in his youth. Troubled by the unrestrained and seemingly adharmic sexuality of Kṛṣṇa, Deśika used the literary techniques and narrative paradigms of the mahākāvya to assimilate but also domesticate this (...) increasingly important Bhāgavata episode: Kṛṣṇa’s eroticism remains central but confined within more conventional marital norms and is thus made dharmically and theologically acceptable. Once he has resolved these dharmic problems, however, Deśika is happy to explore the soteriological, devotional, and paradoxical dimensions of erotic love with Kṛṣṇa. (shrink)

The heated and unresolved debate in philosophy of history evoked by Hempel’s suggestion that the deductive-nomological model of explanation is equally applicable to the natural sciences and history, has unintentionally led to a distorted conception of what it is to explain in history. We argue that explanation in history, at its best, is contingent not on general laws, not even on consequentiality, but on labels as frames of meaning. These labels further serve as a basis for eliciting models which help (...) determine the fuller meaning of occurrences and processes in history. (shrink)

This article offers a new definition of culture which hinges on what we consider to be its most distinctive feature, namely its artificiality. Our definition enables us to resolve some of the main issues and controversies involved in the concept of culture and its course of development. We argue that the large human brain played a revolutionary role in inverting the course of natural adaptation of the human species. This dramatic turnabout allowed humans to set their own conditions of existence (...) in their created environment; and one which unlike nature they were able to shape and dominate. We demonstrate the crucial part of language not merely in communication but in forming a web of meaningful symbols which gave rise to the human spiritual or metaphysical world. We depict human society as an unparalleled elaborate web of relationships which gave hominids an advantage over other species from the very beginning. (shrink)

As has been obvious to anyone who has looked at them, there is a special relationship between the two earliest extant works on Sanskrit poetics: Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra (Ornamenting Poetry) and Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (The Mirror of Poetry). The two not only share an analytical framework and many aspects of their organization but also often employ the selfsame language and imagery when they are defining and exemplifying what is by and large a shared repertoire of literary devices. In addition, they also betray (...) highly specific disagreements regarding the nature and aesthetic value of a set of literary phenomena. It has thus long been clear to Indologists that the two are in conversation with one another, but the nature of the conversation and its directionality have never been determined: Was Bhāmaha responding to Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa ? Was Daṇḍin making a rejoinder to Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra ? Were the two authors contemporaries who directly interacted with one another? Or was their interaction indirect and mediated through other texts that are no longer extant? Determining the nature of the interrelations between the two authors and their texts may teach us a great deal about the origins of Sanskrit poetics, the direction in which it developed during its formative period, and the way in which some of the disagreements between Daṇḍin and Bhāmaha metamorphosed in later time. By reviewing existing scholarship, considering new evidence, and taking a fresh look at some of the passages that have long stood at the center of this debate, this article sets out to answer the question of the texts’ relationship and relative chronology. (shrink)

Recognizing newness is a difficult task in any intellectual history, and different cultures have gauged and evaluated novelty in different ways. In this paper we ponder the status of innovation in the context of the somewhat unusual history of one Sanskrit knowledge system, that of poetics, and try to define what in the methodology, views, style, and self-awareness of Sanskrit literary theorists in the early modern period was new. The paper focuses primarily on one thinker, Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, the most famous (...) and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīkṣita. We discuss Jagannātha’s complex system of labeling of ideas as “new” and “old,” the new essay style that he used to chart the evolution of ideas in his tradition, his notion of himself as an independent thinker capable of improving the system created by his predecessors in order to protect its essential assets, and the reasons his critique of Appayya was so harsh. For both scholars what emerges as new is not so much their opinions on particular topics as the new ways in which they position themselves in relation to their system. (shrink)

There is something quite deceptive about Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadevacarita , one of the most popular and oft-quoted works of the Sanskrit canon. The poem conforms perfectly to the stipulations of the mahākāvya genre: it is replete with descriptions of bravery in battle and amorous plays with beautiful women; its language is intensified by a powerful arsenal of ornaments and images; and it portrays its main hero, King Vikramāṅka VI of the Cāḷukya dynasty (r. 1076–1126), as an equal of Rāma. At the (...) same time, the poem subverts these very aspects of Sanskrit literary culture: the poetic language is thinned down at a series of crucial junctions; the Rāmaness of the hero is repeatedly undermined; and the poet consistently airs his ambivalence toward, if not utter resentment for his immediate cultural milieu, his own patron and subject matter, and the very task of a court poet. The article argues that Bilhaṇa’s ambivalence and alienation are the hallmark of his work, and that the poet constantly and consciously struggles with and comments on what he sees as the utter incompatibility between poetry and political reality. It also demonstrates that Bilhaṇa’s unique, personal voice resonates in his many afterlives and in several collections of poems attributed to him posthumously. I argue that it may well be a sign of recognition of what was truly innovative in his poetry that the tradition has credited Bilhaṇa with such additional lives and corpora. (shrink)

We designed scaffolded tasks that targeted the skill of identifying reasoning errors and conducted a study with 472 middle school students. The study results showed a small positive impact of the scaffolding on student performance on one topic, but not the other, indicating that student skills of writing critiques could be affected by the topic and argument content. Additionally, students from low-SES families did not perform as well as their peers. Student performance on the critique tasks had moderate or strong (...) correlations with students’ state reading and writing test scores. Implications of the scaffolding and critique task design are discussed. (shrink)

We offer a case-study in irrationality, showing that even in a high stakes context, intelligent and well trained professionals may adopt dominated practices. In multiple-choice tests one cannot distinguish lucky guesses from answers based on knowledge. Test-makers have dealt with this problem by lowering the incentive to guess, through penalizing errors (called formula scoring), and by eliminating various cues for outperforming random guessing (e.g., a preponderance of correct answers in middle positions), through key balancing. These policies, though widespread and intuitively (...) appealing, are in fact ‘‘irrational’’, and are dominated by alternative solutions. Number-right scoring is superior to formula scoring, and key randomization is superior to key balancing. We suggest that these policies have persisted since all stake-holders – test-makers, test-takers and test-coaches – share the same faulty intuitions. (shrink)

Splitting livers allows two people to receive a liver transplant from one donated adult liver, but the risks to the adult recipient are greater than if they had received the equivalent whole liver. It has been suggested, therefore, that splitting livers harms adult recipients. Without liver splitting, however, there would be few livers available for children, and paediatric waiting time and waiting list mortality would significantly increase. In this paper, we argue that although splitting livers makes adults worse off, this (...) should be considered sub-optimal benefit rather than harm. We explore justifications for sub-optimally benefitting adults in this way and consider alternatives to the current approach. We argue that splitting livers masks the more fundamental problem of low paediatric donation rates and that increasing the number of paediatric donations would improve the situation for both adult and paediatric liver patients. (shrink)

Background and aims: Liver transplantation provides an opportunity of survival for patients with liver failure, however, this procedure is known to be psychologically and physically fatiguing for patients and their informal caregivers. The aim of this study was to investigate how perceived social support and the distribution of dependency were associated with the psychological wellbeing of patients waiting for liver transplantation and their caregivers, as a dyad. Methods: The present was a cross sectional study. 95 participants were recruited at a (...) hospital in Northern Italy, during the psychological evaluation for inclusion in the transplantation list: 51 patients (19 with alcohol-related illness), and 44 family caregivers. Both patients and caregivers filled in a Symptom Checklist and Kelly's Dependency Grids. Patients also compiled the Medical Outcomes Study Social-Support Survey, and caregivers the Family Strain Questionnaire Short- Form. Results: Caregivers reported important levels of strain, also strongly related to a worsening of their own and patients’ symptoms Patients with alcohol-related pathologies had a narrower social network, which corresponded to an increase in family strain. On the sample as a whole, regression analyses showed that perceived social support and dependency measures did not predict patients’ and caregivers’ symptoms. Nevertheless, cluster analysis identified a group of caregivers who distributed their dependency more and experienced lower levels of depression, anxiety and strain. Conclusions: These results suggest the usefulness of a dyadic approach in the research, prevention and care of liver diseases. A deeper comprehension of the functioning of dyads will help practitioners in the identification of situations at risk. (shrink)

This paper discusses the views of 17 healthcare practitioners involved with transplantation on the ethics of live liver donations . Donations between emotionally related donor and recipients increased the acceptability of an LLD compared with those between strangers. Most healthcare professionals disapproved of altruistic stranger donations, considering them to entail an unacceptable degree of risk taking. Participants tended to emphasise the need to balance the harms of proceeding against those of not proceeding, rather than calculating the harm-to-benefits ratio of donor (...) versus recipient. Participants’ views suggested that a complex process of negotiation is required, which respects the autonomy of donor, recipient and HCP. Although they considered that, of the three, donor autonomy is of primary importance, they also placed considerable weight on their own autonomy. Our participants suggest that their opinions about acceptable risk taking were more objective than those of the recipient or donor and were therefore given greater weight. However, it was clear that more subjective values were also influential. Processes used in live kidney donation were thought to be a good model for LLD, but our participants stressed that there is a danger that patients may underestimate the risks involved in LLD if it is too closely associated with LKD. (shrink)

The ethics committee of the University of São Paulo Medical College Hospital and Clinics has authorized partial liver transplantation from living donors. The request for this type of transplantation was brought to the committee by a team of professors of surgery operating at the university, headed by Dr. Silvano Raia. Their request and justification are presented here, with discussion following.

Living donation provides important access to organ transplantation, which is the optimal therapy for patients with end-stage liver or kidney failure. Paired exchanges have facilitated thousands of kidney transplants and enable transplantation when the donor and recipient are incompatible. However, frequently willing and otherwise healthy donors have contraindications to the donation of the organ that their recipient needs. Trans-organ paired exchanges would enable a donor associated with a kidney recipient to donate a lobe of liver and a donor associated with (...) a liver recipient to donate a kidney. This article explores some of the ethical concerns that trans-organ exchange might encounter including unbalanced donor risks, the validity of informed consent, and effects on deceased organ donation. (shrink)

Split liver transplantation (SLT) provides an opportunity to divide a donor liver, offering transplants to two small patients (one or both could be a child) rather than keeping it whole and providing a transplant to a single larger adult patient. In this article, we attempt to address the following question that is identified by the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network and United Network for Organ Sharing: ‘Should a large liver always be split if medically safe?’ This article aims to defend (...) an answer—‘not always’—and clarify under what circumstances SLT is ethically desirable. Our answer will show why a more dynamic approach is needed to the ethics of SLT. First, we discuss a case that does not need a dynamic approach. Then, we explain what is meant by a dynamic approach and why it is needed. (shrink)

Liver transplantation (LT) activities during the COVID-19 pandemic have been curtailed in many countries. The impact of various policies restricting LT on outcomes of potential LT candidates is unclear. We studied all patients on the nationwide LT waitlists in Hong Kong and Singapore between January 2016 and May 2020. We used continuous time Markov chains to model the effects of different scenarios and varying durations of disruption on LT candidates.

Many believe that it is morally wrong to give lower priority for a liver transplant to alcoholics with end-stage liver disease than to patients whose disease is not alcohol-related. Presumably, alcoholism is a disease that results from factors beyond one's control and therefore one cannot be causally or morally responsible for alcoholism or the liver failure that results from it. Moreover, giving lower priority to alcoholics unfairly singles them out for the moral vice of heavy drinking. I argue that the (...) etiology of alcoholism may involve enough control for the alcoholic to be responsible for his condition and accordingly have a weaker claim to receive a new liver than someone who acquires the disease through no fault of his own. In addition, I show why it is more plausible to reframe the question of priority in terms of control and responsibility rather than virtue and vice. Given that medical resources like livers are scarce, some people may justifiably be given lower priority than others in receiving these resources. (shrink)

In a provocative 1991 paper, Alvin Moss and Mark Siegler argued that it may be fair to give individuals with alcohol-related end-stage liver disease lower priority for a liver transplant than those who develop end-stage liver disease from other factors. Like other organs, there is a substantial gap between the available livers for transplantation and the number of people who need liver transplants. Yet, unlike those with end-stage renal disease, who can survive for some time on dialysis before receiving a (...) kidney transplant, those with liver failure will die without a liver transplant. (shrink)

Background: Allocation of scarce organs for transplantation is ethically challenging. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been proposed to assist in liver allocation, however the ethics of this remains unexplored and the view of the public unknown. The aim of this paper was to assess public attitudes on whether AI should be used in liver allocation and how it should be implemented. Methods: We first introduce some potential ethical issues concerning AI in liver allocation, before analysing a pilot survey including online responses (...) from 172 UK laypeople, recruited through Prolific Academic. Findings: Most participants found AI in liver allocation acceptable (69.2%) and would not be less likely to donate their organs if AI was used in allocation (72.7%). Respondents thought AI was more likely to be consistent and less biased compared to humans, although were concerned about the “dehumanisation of healthcare” and whether AI could consider important nuances in allocation decisions. Participants valued accuracy, impartiality, and consistency in a decision-maker, more than interpretability and empathy. Respondents were split on whether AI should be trained on previous decisions or programmed with specific objectives. Whether allocation decisions were made by transplant committee or AI, participants valued consideration of urgency, survival likelihood, life years gained, age, future medication compliance, quality of life, future alcohol use and past alcohol use. On the other hand, the majority thought the following factors were not relevant to prioritisation: past crime, future crime, future societal contribution, social disadvantage, and gender. Conclusions: There are good reasons to use AI in liver allocation, and our sample of participants appeared to support its use. If confirmed, this support would give democratic legitimacy to the use of AI in this context and reduce the risk that donation rates could be affected negatively. Our findings on specific ethical concerns also identify potential expectations and reservations laypeople have regarding AI in this area, which can inform how AI in liver allocation could be best implemented. (shrink)

BackgroundThe German guidelines for liver transplantation stipulate that every patient with alcohol-related liver disease needs to prove evidence of a 6-month abstinence period before they can be admitted to the waiting list for liver transplantation. This internationally widespread abstinence rule has been criticised as it prevents patients at least temporarily from receiving an effective and potentially life-saving therapy. This poses the question of how this abstinence rule is depicted and justified by transplantation professionals.ArgumentsIn case of the 6‑month abstinence rule, guidelines (...) are used as a tool for rationing health care. Four frames of interpretation can be reconstructed from the ethical and medical literature. Each linguistically mediated frame offers a different representation of the 6‑month abstinence rule. According to these different framings, the 6‑month waiting period is depicted (1) as a diagnostic tool to determine the regenerative capacity of the liver, (2) as a prognostic tool to determine the prospects of success of a transplantation, and (3) to determine the drinking behaviour after transplantation. In a further context, the abstinence rule (4) is interpreted as an expression of an obligation to avoid behaviour harmful to health.ConclusionThese four frames provide linguistically mediated patterns of interpretation that are used by different actors to limit the indication for liver transplantation. They give rise to different ethical questions that allow a systematic ethical assessment of the 6‑month abstinence rule. (shrink)

The world’s first living donor liver transplant from an HIV-positive mother to her HIV-negative child, performed by our team in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2017, was necessitated by disease profile and health system challenges. In our country, we have a major shortage of donor organs, which compels us to consider innovative solutions to save lives. Simultaneously, the transition of the HIV pandemic, from a death sentence to a chronic illness with excellent survival on treatment required us to rethink our policies (...) regarding HIV infection and living donor liver transplantation. Although HIV infection in the donor is internationally considered an absolute contraindication for transplant to an HIV-negative recipient, there have been a very small number of unintentional transplants from HIV-positive deceased donors to HIV-negative recipients. These transplant recipients do well on antiretroviral medication and their graft survival is not compromised. We have had a number of HIV-positive parents in our setting express a desire to be living liver donors for their critically ill children. Declining these parents as living donors has become increasingly unjustifiable given the very small deceased donor pool in SA; and because many of these parents are virally suppressed and would otherwise fulfil our eligibility criteria as living donors. This paper discusses the evolution of HIV and transplantation in SA, highlights some of the primary ethical considerations for us when embarking on this case and considers the new ethical issues that have arisen since we undertook this transplant. (shrink)