Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then (...) report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges. (shrink)

The advent of the intelligent robot has occupied a significant position in society over the past decades and has given rise to new issues in society. As we know, the primary aim of artificial intelligence or robotic research is not only to develop advanced programs to solve our problems but also to reproduce mental qualities in machines. The critical claim of artificial intelligence advocates is that there is no distinction between mind and machines and thus they argue that there are (...) possibilities for machine ethics, just as human ethics. Unlike computer ethics, which has traditionally focused on ethical issues surrounding human use of machines, AI or machine ethics is concerned with the behaviour of machines towards human users and perhaps other machines as well, and the ethicality of these interactions. The ultimate goal of machine ethics, according to the AI scientists, is to create a machine that itself follows an ideal ethical principle or a set of principles; that is to say, it is guided by this principle or these principles in decisions it makes about possible courses of action it could takea. Thus, machine ethics task of ensuring ethical behaviour of an artificial agent. Although, there are many philosophical issues related to artificial intelligence, but our attempt in this paper is to discuss, first, whether ethics is the sort of thing that can be computed. Second, if we are ascribing mind to machines, it gives rise to ethical issues regarding machines. And if we are not drawing the difference between mind and machines, we are not only redefining specifically human mind but also the society as a whole. Having a mind is, among other things, having the capacity to make voluntary decisions and actions. The notion of mind is central to our ethical thinking, and this is because the human mind is self-conscious, and this is a property that machines lack, as yet. (shrink)

This volume discusses the development of the dialogue between Tagore (1861-1941) and Gandhi (1869-1948) during 1915 and 1941, about many things of personal, national, and international significance---satyagraha, non-cooperation, the boycott and burning of foreign cloth, the efficacy of fasting as a means of resistance and Gandhi's mantra connecting "swaraj" and "charkha". The author, Bindu Puri, argues that the debate was about more fundamental issues, such as the nature of truth and swaraj/freedom and the possibilities of untruth that Tagore saw (...) in Gandhi's movements for truth and freedom. Puri shows that the differences between the two men's perspectives came from differently negotiated relationships to (and understandings of) tradition and modernity. Tagore was part of the Bengal renaissance and powerfully influenced by the idea that the Enlightenment consisted in the freedom of the individual to reason for herself. Gandhi, on the other hand, remained close to the Indian philosophical tradition which linked individual freedom to moral progress. Puri points out that Tagore cannot, however, be unreflectively assimilated to the Enlightenment project of Western modernity, for he came fairly close to Gandhi in rejecting the anthropocentricism of modernity and shared Gandhi's belief in an enchanted cosmos. The only single-authored volume on the Tagore-Gandhi debate, this book is a welcome addition to the existing literature. (shrink)

Fat stigma is pervasive. Being fat is widely regarded a bad thing, and fat persons suffer numerous social and material disadvantages in virtue of their weight being regarded that way. Despite the seriousness of this problem, it has received relatively little attention from analytic philosophers. In this paper, I set out to explore whether there is a reasoned basis for stigmatizing fatness, and, if so, what forms of stigmatization could be justified. I consider two lines of reasoning that might be (...) advanced to defend fat stigma. The first is broadly consequentialist. It seeks to justify stigmatizing fatness based on the public health benefits that might be produced by doing so. The second argument takes stigmatizing fatness to be a warranted response to the morally blameworthy failure to slim down exhibited by fat persons. Clarifying and assessing each of these two lines of reasoning is the main task of this paper. I argue that, upon careful examination, both these attempts to justify the stigmatization of fatness fail. (shrink)

This article examines the role of Harlequin and Mills and Boon romance novels in the lives of young, single, middle-class women readers in urban India. The article focuses on the readers' interpretations of the novels given the differences in the sites of production of the romance novels and the sociocultural context of reception. Three themes are explored in this study: the influence of romance novels on the readers' expectations of marital sexuality and gender role patterns, the limitations of novels in (...) dealing with the social uncertainties that face the readers as young women in Indian culture, and the generation of readers' social anxieties due to the difference between the content of the novels and the sociocultural context in which they are read. The article concludes with a discussion of its implications for understanding global forms of culture, contested meanings of culturally transposed texts, and the shaping of popular cultural practices in a transnational arena around vectors of gender and socioeconomic class. (shrink)

What bearing does living in an increasingly globalized world have upon the moral assessment of global inequality? This paper defends an account of global egalitarianism that differs from standard accounts with respect to both the content of and the justification for the imperative to reduce global inequality. According to standard accounts of global egalitarianism, the global order unjustly allows a person’s relative life prospects to track the morally arbitrary trait of where she happens to be born. After raising some worries (...) with these accounts, the author offers an alternative account of global egalitarianism, “social egalitarianism,” which locates the wrongfulness of global inequalities in their effects on social and political interaction rather than in the unfairness of their source. On this view, global inequalities wrongfully exclude the worse-off from partaking in the benefits of globalization. Consequently, social egalitarianism aims for the elimination of only those inequalities that impede such participation. (shrink)

Using the databases created under Education Watch, a civil society initiative to monitor primary and basic education in Bangladesh, this paper explores trends, socioeconomic differentials and cost in private supplementary tutoring among primary students and its impact on learning achievement. The rate of primary school students getting access to private supplementary tutoring is increasing at two percentage points per year and reached 31% in 2005. Incidence of private tutoring was greater among boys and urban students than respective counterparts. Educated parents (...) and well‐off families were more likely to arrange supplementary tutoring for their children. A wide variation in the cost for private tutoring prevailed. The tutees spent 46% of their total private expenditure for education on supplementary tutoring. Supplementary tutoring helped students learn more than those who had no such support. Private tutors for primary school students have become a well‐accepted norm. Finally, a number of social implications are discussed. (shrink)

Recent years have featured a leap in academic and public interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and related corporate reporting. Two main themes in this literature are the exploration of management incentives to engage in and disclose this information, and of the use and value of this information to market participants. We extend the second theme by examining the interest that specific investor classes have in the use of CSR information. We rely on feminist intersectionality, which suggests that gender (...) intersects with other identities to yield different values, experiences, and opportunities that can lead to gender-based preferences for CSR information. Based upon a survey of 750 US-based retail investors, we find that female retail investors have a greater interest in the use of CSR information, relative to male retail investors. Women express greater anticipated future demand for this information than do men. Further, the magnitude of the increase from current use to anticipated future demand is greater for women than men. Age is a significant modifying factor in that the discrepancy between women of any age and older men is greater than that between women and younger men. Finally, women also exhibit greater demand for streamlining of the information flow, consistent with pressures induced by time poverty. It appears that current disclosure practices provide a less than optimal match with the needs of the information consumers that are primarily interested in using this information. This mismatch may result in a systematic disenfranchisement of female investing classes which suggests an ethical need to level the playing field. (shrink)

In the past few decades, there has been a growing literature on relational egalitarianism. Relational egalitarianism is a view on the nature and value of equality. In contrast to the dominant view in recent debates on equality—distributive egalitarianism, on which equality is about ensuring people have or fare the same in some respect—on the relational view, equality is a matter of the terms on which relationships are structured. But what exactly does it mean for people to relate as equals? And (...) why are relations of equality valuable? Relational egalitarians have offered quite different answers to each of these questions. In this article, I draw attention to some key issues that underlie these disagree- ments, and I offer a taxonomy of different viewpoints that have emerged in the recent literature on these matters. (shrink)

In mid-twentieth century, the hypothesis, ‘a machine can think’ became very popular after, Alan Turing’s article on ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. This hypothesis, ‘a machine can think’ established the foundations of machine intelligence (MI), and claimed that machines have consciousness and creativity, with the power to compete with human beings. In the first section, I shall show how consciousness and creativity is conceptualized in the domain of MI. The main aim of MI is not only to construct difficult programs to (...) solve our day-to-day problems, but also to reproduce mentality in machines. It was claimed that all the mental qualities are ascribable to machines. My intention in this paper is to clarify consciousness and creativity from a subjective point of view. My claim is that consciousness and creativity cannot be fully represented in a mechanistic domain. There are subjective mental or conscious states, which can be seen in a first-person perspective of their proper understanding. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell: Ethics This article confines itself to Bertrand Russell’s conversion from ethical cognitivism (similar to G. E. Moore) to ethical non-cognitivism (similar to Ayer). Russell’s conversion is not only historically important, as it contributes to the rise of metaethics, but it also clarifies the central issues between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Traditionally, ethics has been […].

Doing research on cancer patients often involves painful journeys through the processes of involvement and detachment with research settings and participants. It is a self-transforming event to see close cared for people die. Yet frequently these experiences remain unreported in academic writing. The present article attempts to depict the narratives of attachment in the context of terminal illness and detachment as a consequence of death of the research participant, Jabbar, to reflect on such a journey. It focuses on the formation (...) of a relationship beyond the boundaries of the purposes of research to reflect on two related issues, first, the nature of attachments and relationship building that goes in parallel to the formal dimensions of the research, and second, emotions, self-transformation and contextual embeddedness of doing research with terminally ill cancer patients. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to examine Nāgārjuna’s idea of the self and its contemporaneity interpretations in philosophy. As we know, Nāgārjuna examines the emptiness of various things in which the emptiness of the self occupies an important position in the Buddhist philosophical tradition. The main aim of this paper is to understand the meaning of emptiness to explain the nature of the self and to show how it is different from the substantial notion of self. However, Nāgārjuna’s idea (...) of the self is not identical with the contemporary materialistic notion of self. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first section, I would like to explain the nature of emptiness in relation to self and how it is different from the substantial self. The second section will focus on the constituents of the self. The third section will bring out the nature of self. In the fourth section and last section, I would like to bring out Nāgārjuna’s idea of the emptiness of the self with respect to the contemporary debates on the nature of self. (shrink)

Tagore and Gandhi shared a relationship across 26 years. They argued about many things including the means for the attainment of swaraj/freedom. In terms of this central concern with the nature of freedom they came fairly close to an issue that has perhaps dominated the (European) Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment has sought to clarify what is meant by individual freedom and attempted to secure such freedom to the individual. This article argues that the Tagore-Gandhi debate can perhaps be reconstructed around (...) the issue of freedom and the collective. Gandhi was able to employ the idea of collective action with conceptual and practical ease. He seemed to have felt no tension between individual freedom and the notion of the collective of which an individual becomes a part in his/her attempt to deal with the contending ‘other’ and secure his /her freedom/swaraj. To understand Tagore’s opposition to the Gandhian idea of swaraj this article draws a philosophical parallel between Tagore and Kant on individual freedom as primarily the freedom to reason. Tagore’s argument seemed to have centered on the insight that the location of the individual in a collective hypostatized self in order to protect his or her freedom from ‘others’ reaffirms the self other divide. The insider-outsider exclusionary dynamics that are generated not only consolidate such distinctions as external to (and outside of) the collective self, but they also initiate internal dynamics that create the ‘silenced insider.’. (shrink)

This chapter examines the case for health care policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight and for obesity-related health issues. In particular, it considers the merits of two arguments for policies that would seek to make obese individuals bear some of the higher health care costs associated with being that way. On the fairness argument, it is claimed that such policies would serve the interests of fairness by holding obese individuals to account for irresponsible lifestyle choices that (...) are linked to their higher weight and its associated health risks. On the public health promotion argument, it is claimed that adopting such policies could produce impressive public health benefits: encouraging people to make healthier lifestyle choices, reducing obesity rates, and reducing obesity-related health care spending. Both arguments face serious objections. Contrary to the fairness argument, policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight or for related health problems would neither treat people as they deserve to be treated nor make the distribution of health care resources fairer. And contrary to the public health promotion argument, those policies would not produce better health outcomes for society at large. Indeed, they would tend to do just the opposite. Reflection on the shortcomings of those arguments reveals that their conclusion is false: society should not adopt policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight or for obesity-related health problems. (shrink)

Putnam has given a different twist to the ethical issues in his philosophical writing on ethics. In his book on ‘Ethics Without Ontology,’ he has given the different interpretation to the ethical issues. Putnam states that there is no ‘ontology’ in ethics. For him, there is nothing wrong with ethics, rather there is something wrong with metaphysics. The ethics cannot be justified from a non-ethical standpoint of view. In this way, Putnam challenges both inflationary ontological ethics and deflationary ontological ethics (...) and he bids goodbye to all varieties of ontologies. This idea of ethics goes against the possibility of Vedanta, Buddhism, Aristotelian metaphysics, Platonic forms, Islam, Kantian category, Levinas’s ‘being’, and Heidegger’s ontology. He replaced ‘ethical ontology’ with that of pragmatic pluralism: the recognition that we employ in our everyday lives different kinds of discourses, discourses subject to different standards and possessing different sorts of applications that all contribute to the description of reality. Putnam is right in many of his criticisms of metaphysical ethics, but it is not clear how he can avoid the idea of absolute values, which are transcendental as proposed by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein accepts both aspects of ethical life, i.e., transcendental and empirical. I shall try to show that we have every reason to accept Wittgenstein’s view that there is ontology in ethics. (shrink)

This paper makes an attempt to philosophically re-construct what I have termed as a fundamental paradox at the heart of deontological liberalism. It is argued that liberalism attempts to create the possibilities of rational consensus and of bringing people together socially and politically by developing methodologies which overcome the divisive nature of essentially parochial substantive conceptions of the good. Such methodologies relying on the supposed universally valid dictates of reason and notions of procedural rationality proceed by disengaging men from the (...) divisive particularities of their plural value contexts. That disengagement is sought to be achieved by conceptualizing the individual as self sufficient in her moral and epistemic being thereby conceptually isolating individual man from the other. The liberal effort to create rational consensus which can bring people together then gets off the ground by isolating the individual from the other. This I have termed as the paradox of the self and the other or alternatively the paradox of social atomism and universalism. As a possible philosophical alternative this paper makes an attempt to re-construct Gandhi’s conceptualization of the relationship between swaraj as self rule and Satyagraha as non-violent resistance. This Gandhian connection, it is argued, has the potential to transform the moral psychology of our response to the other, thereby posing a challenge to the modern, predominantly liberal, conceptualization of such a response. (shrink)

An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether knowledge is necessary for wisdom. In this paper I argue that knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. Towards this, firstly, I individuate two modal properties relevant for wise actions: (i) counterfactual robustness: an action performed in the actual world is wise only if it leads to or is constituted by the goals of living well in all nearby worlds; (ii) rational robustness: an action performed for the sake of (...) living well is wise only if, in all nearby worlds, when an agent has sufficient reasons to perform the action, she performs the action. Secondly, I argue that these two modal properties are best explained in terms of two central features of knowledge: (a) safety: if the agent knows that a certain action will help her successfully reach the relevant goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goal(s), then in all the nearby worlds, her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal is true; (b) stability: the agent's knowledge that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goals, entails that her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s), or is constituted by those goals, isn’t based on any reason that could easily have been defeated by misleading evidence. (shrink)

According to ‘global institutionalism,’ individuals who do not share a state have duties of justice to one another, and this is explained, in part, by the institutional connections that obtain between them. In this chapter, I defend this view against two challenges. First, I consider challenges raised by ‘non-institutionalists,’ who deny that facts about global institutional interaction bear on the nature of duties of justice that arise between particular individuals. Second, I address challenges posed by ‘domestic institutionalists,’ who accept the (...) claim that facts about institutional interaction bear upon the scope of justice but deny that the right sort of interaction necessary to ground duties of justice is found in the global domain. (shrink)

This paper will consider the ideas of absolute equality and absolute difference that are part of Gandhi’s vision on the plurality of religions. It will fall into three sections. The first section is entitled “Thinking samadarshana through samabhava-Gandhi on “equimindedness” and religious ‘others’”. It will seek to bring out the central ideas in Gandhi’s thoughts on the plurality of religions. In this context the paper will briefly examine the difference between Gandhi’s arguments for absolute equality and the liberal position on (...) religious toleration. The second section will elaborate Gandhi’s reasons for thinking the absolute equality of all religions and will be entitled “The Religion at the heart of all religions- Truth or God”. The third section will be entitled “The truth-untruths of religious others and the duty of resistance: Difficulties with a relativist reading of Gandhi”. It will recapitulate the different strands of the argument in the paper and bring out the implications of ahimsa as love as it transforms resistance to what one thinks of as the truth-untruths of religious ‘others’ in a plural context. It will also take issue with an important contemporary reading of Gandhi, that of Professor Akeel Bilgrami, who reads Gandhi’s position along the lines of a “thorough going relativism about Truth”. In the course of the paper it is hoped to unpack the absolute equality in absolute difference that constituted Gandhi’s vision on the plurality of religions. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses moral philosophy, philosophical psychology, religion, and aesthetics.

The problem of consciousness is one of the most important problems both in cognitive science and in philosophy. There are different philosophers and different scientists who define consciousness and explain it differently. In philosophy, ‘consciousness’ does not have a definition in terms of genus and differentia or necessary and sufficient conditions. In this paper, I shall explore the very idea of machine consciousness. The machine consciousness has offered causal explanation to the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of consciousness, but they fail to (...) explain the ‘why’ of consciousness. Their explanation is based on the ground that consciousness is causally dependent on the material universe and that of all conscious phenomena can be explained by mapping the physical universe. In this regard, consciousness is basically a physical phenomenon and can be mechanically explained following the naturalistic methods of science. In other words, the mechanistic assumption is that consciousness and mind have an artificial origin and therefore have to be understood only within a mechanistic framework available in the sciences. If this is so, then this epistemological theory of consciousness is essentially committed to scientific world view that cannot avoid metaphysical implication of consciousness. At the same time, neo-Advaitins have maintained that the evolution of nature leads to the manifestation of human consciousness only because consciousness is already implicit in the material nature. Thus, the existence of consciousness in this physical world far exceeds the methods of science and needs a non-mechanical metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

Liberal theory and practice rests upon, and constantly re-affirms, a division between the secular/rational and the religious/faithful aspects of individual life. This paper will explore the philosophical implications of an alternative Gandhian understanding of the role of faith and reason in individual life. The paper will argue that M K Gandhi thought of moral life differently from both the religious traditionalist and the liberal. The distinctiveness of Gandhi’s vision came from the manner in which he could reconcile two very different (...) ways of thinking about the good human life. These could be simply put as the religious insight into the good life as an essentially integrated life and the alternative liberal insight that morality was better connected with the idea of universalizability/reciprocity. The first section of this paper entitled “An alternative Gandhian understanding of faith, reason, and the integrity of the good life” philosophically unpacks Gandhi’s arguments about the integrity between faith and reason in reading religious texts with a view to living a good life. The second section is entitled “On religious belief: Gandhi and liberalism”. It brings out the differences between Gandhi and liberals on faith, reason, and the truth of religious belief. Both Gandhi and the liberals agree that religious beliefs should be held with modesty. However, the liberal argument for modesty comes from an avowed skepticism about the truth of religious belief. It is such skepticism that philosophically grounds the liberal division between faith and reason. In this section, there will be an attempt to bring out Gandhi’s reasons for being modest about religious beliefs held with certitude. The paper ends with the thought that though one cannot say which of these positions on faith and reason—Gandhian or liberal—is more coherent, there is some reason for exploring the Gandhian position if only because religious persons can act on Gandhi’s arguments quite consistently with their faith. (shrink)

According to 'statism,' the distinctive nature of the state association gives rise to certain demands of distributive justice that exclusively obtain within the state and apply between fellow citizens. This chapter is devoted to critically examining the merits of the statist position. I consider three main strategies that statists employ in defense of their claim about the scope of egalitarian distributive justice—based on, respectively, the relevance of coercion, co-authorship of the state's terms, and the state's provision of basic goods. I (...) argue that this scope restriction is unjustified on two grounds. First, I offer reasons for rejecting the empirical claims posited by statists concerning how the global domain differs from the state. Second, I explain problems facing the normative claims defended by statists concerning the factors in virtue of which demands of distributive justice arise. I conclude that the restriction of demands of egalitarian distributive justice to the state, at least according to the statist positions that I have considered, is unjustified. (shrink)

Using the mainstreaming of socially responsible investing as our empirical context, we show that as the divestment movement in the late twentieth century got institutionalized by being incorporated as a business strategy into more mainstream financial instruments like mutual funds, the prior meanings and categorical definition of ethical investing became ambiguous due to fuzzy boundaries, duality of virtue inherent in the portfolio targets, and exercise of discretion by portfolio managers. We find that increased heterogeneity in standards led to greater ambiguity (...) about who belongs to a category, and fund managers adopted distinct measures-based, values-based and expertise-based approaches to resolve this ambiguity. One consequence of such ambiguity is that individual self-expression, self-consciousness and agency that are central in such movements become appropriated by discretionary and meaning-making work at the institutional level. (shrink)

This book deals with the major philosophical issues in the theoretical framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular and cognitive science in general.

As is fairly well-known several issues raised by Tagore became a subject of some debate between Gandhi and him during the years between 1915 and 1941 (Puri, 2015). These issues could be broadly categorized into two, those concerning an uncritical adoption of the western modular nation as the end/goal by those engaged in the movement for India’s freedom and those concerning satyagraha (in the form of non-cooperation, boycott, fasting, etc.) as the unquestioned “moral” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 49) means to that (...) end. This essay will examine the first set of issues and argue that though Tagore had difficulties with what he described as “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996: 425) these difficulties did not amount to a rejection of the “case for self-determination-the forging of the national links” (Berlin, 1999: 264) or of an independent politically reorganized Indian nation but were targeted at the uncritical acceptance of “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996. 425)/“cruel epidemic of evil” (ibid., 424) which was “sweeping over the human world” (ibid.); as the goal of India’s struggle for freedom/swaraj. This essay will take issue with scholars who argue that Tagore’s arguments against the western nation did not distance him from Gandhi because both shared insights into the illegitimacy of the nation-state. It will suggest, to the contrary, that what these thinkers had rejected was the modular western nation-state which they saw as a product of enlightenment modernity, and that this was not a rejection of the nation per se. Gandhi and Tagore came together in their “love of country” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 70), expressed in/by a resolve of building a praja or great eastern nesan in continuity with the premodern communities of India’s past. One which was modelled closely along the lines of harmony in diversity and in the spirit of Tagore’s swadeshi samaj/indigenous Indian society. (shrink)

Virginia Held argues that terrorism can be justified in some instances. But unlike standard, consequentialist justifications, hers is deontological. This paper critically examines her argument. It explores how the values of fairness, responsibility, and desert can serve to justify acts of terrorism. In doing so, two interpretations of her account are considered: a responsibility-insensitive and a responsibility-sensitive interpretation. On the first, her argument collapses into a consequentialist justification. On the second, it relies on an implausible conception of responsibility. Either way, (...) her argument fails as a distinctly deontological defense of terrorism. (shrink)

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India's electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly 'Western' concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history (...) of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of the modern nation-state. (shrink)

In the mid of nineteenth century, the hypothesis, “machine can think,” became very popular after Alan Turing’s article on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” This hypothesis, “machine can think,” established the foundations of machine intelligence and claimed that machines have a mind. It has the power to compete with human beings. In the first section, I shall explore the importance of Turing thesis, which has been conceptualized in the domain of machine intelligence. Turing presented a completely different view of the machine (...) itself. It addressed philosophers, rather than the mathematicians, and proclaimed that digital computers might be considered as intelligent machines. This approach was wholly new, both philosophically and technically, and started many philosophical debates which continue to this day. He proposed an imitation game, as a test, what is now referred to as a Turing test to evaluate if a machine thinks. That is to say that the main aim of machine intelligence not only constructs challenging programs to solve our day-to-day problems but also reproduce mentality in machines and claimed that all the mental qualities are ascribable to machines. What will be attempted in this paper is a critical evaluation of the arguments against the Turing test put forward by many philosophers. (shrink)

In this paper, we will discuss solipsism and the limits of experience in the light of Wittgenstein’s TLP. One cannot draw the limits of experience without bringing in the notion of the experiencer. That is to say, the notion of self is very relevant to the discussion on the limits of experience. Solipsism means that ‘I’ is the only reality, and what I experience is all that I could know. We will focus on solipsism from two points of view, the (...) empirical point of view and the transcendental point of view. The empirical approach to solipsism makes the self as a matter of its experience. However, from the transcendental point of view, the transcendental or metaphysical self becomes the transcendental ground of our experiences. In the second section, we will discuss the relationship between solipsism and realism. Then how the self is related to the world will be discussed in the third section. For Wittgenstein, the self ‘I' is neither causally nor logically related to the world. This self is the metaphysical subject, and it is the limit of the world. In the fourth section, we will discuss the importance of the limit-self. The limit-self is not the matter or object of experience; rather, it is the ground of our world's experience. For Wittgenstein, it is not an item of the world; rather, it is the limit of the world. The limit-self cannot be described in language, and thus it is beyond our language. It is the limit of our language and also the limit of the world. Then, we will critically analyze the limit of experience, and the metaphysical self is placed on the limit of experience. This self is the non-solipsistic self. (shrink)

Posthumanism is one of the well-known and significant concepts in the present day. It impacted numerous contemporary fields like philosophy, literary theories, art, and culture for the last few decades. The movement has been concentrated around the technological development of present days due to industrial advancement in society and the current proliferated daily usage of technology. Posthumanism indicated a deconstruction of our radical conception of ‘human’, and it further shifts our societal value alignment system to a novel dimension. The majority (...) of our population is getting deeply involved in virtual reality in daily life. Sooner or later, we shall get a different conception of ‘biological human being’ through the advancement of artificial intelligence technology. If an automated artificial system could replace the human brain and repair any physical loss of our biological body, it will certainly become a journey towards immortality for scientists. However, we must analyze whether posthumanism will consider ‘hybrid human beings’ as moral agents, similar to biological humans. This is why, in the future, the relation between biological human beings and posthumans will play an active role in designing artificial moral agents. Whether the future posthumans would overpower biological humanity or both of them would work as peers to form a digital utopian society and create new dimensions of rationality is still a case of anticipation. Our aim in this paper is to critically analyze the authenticity of the posthuman cyborg as an agent, their relations with humans and the emergence of ‘AI ethics’. (shrink)

On social equality, individuals ought to relate on terms of equality. An important issue concerning this theory, which has not received much attention, is its scope: which individuals ought to relate on egalitarian terms? The answer depends on the theory’s grounds: the basis upon which demands of social equality arise when they do. In this chapter, I consider how we ought to construe the scope and the grounds of social equality. I argue that underlying the considerations social egalitarians advance for (...) taking demands of social equality to arise in the context of the state are relational facts that can obtain beyond state borders. So, my argument suggests an account of the grounds of social equality, and this account provides support for the scope of social equality potentially transcending the state. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to discuss the meaning of life in Indian philosophy. All Indian philosophies are philosophies of life. Indian philosophy is not merely an intellectual activity but has practical application which enables men to lead an enlightened life. Any philosophy, either Indian or Western which makes no difference to human life, is not a philosophy. The human life always strives towards freedom, duty, wisdom, well-being, etc. These are the noble values in Indian philosophy that play a (...) very vital role in shaping the meaning of life. All schools of Indian philosophy give importance to individual freedom for self-realization. Every school of Indian philosophy prescribes its way of overcoming ignorance, and thereby overcoming pain, to achieve the goal of life. Thus, every human being has to look within, understand his nature, and figure out her or his way to self-realization. The way to reach this goal includes selfless love, service to others, self-control, and self-purification. Because of their practicality, each system of Indian philosophy is as new today as it was 3000 years ago. These are the ideas which we can find in Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and many others. All these philosophical schools/thinkers hold that philosophy and practical life are necessarily integrated. (shrink)