This article explores the use of intoxicants by a community of Kulina Indians in western Brazil. I suggest that Kulina intoxication through alcohol, tobacco, and ayahuasca is best understood as a form of semiotic appropriation of the identity of cosmological “others,” including animal spirits, creator beings, other Indian groups, and Brazilians. I consider how embodying practices, such as song and physical movement, enhance the experience of being an “alter,” facilitated by the alterations in consciousness produced by intoxicants.

This study accounts for disparate portrayals of divine destroyer Śiva in the normative Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata as opposed to Kālidāsa’s amatory Kumārasaṃbhava and Raghuvaṃśa by contrasting the primary and secondary Sanskrit epic authors’ respective reliances on the Mānavadharmaśāstra and the Kāmasūtra. By arguing, per Richard Johnson’s postpoststructuralism, that these mythological and philosophical differences deliberately reflect those poets’ specific sociohistorical contexts, this inquiry accounts more accurately for Śiva’s classical-epic depictions than do Stella Kramrisch’s and Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty]’s investigations informed by Claude (...) Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Don Handelman and David Shulman’s researches influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralism. The present work, in revising such prevailing Indological notions as Romila Thapar’s traditional construal of the “classical,” Donald R. Davis Jr.’s anthropocentric definition of puruṣārtha (human aim), and Sheldon Pollock’s unvarying characterization of śāstras (treatises), models a historically aware approach that appreciates the interrelationship of mythological philosophy and philosophical mythology. (shrink)

A probabilistic and counterfactual theory of causality is developed within the framework of branching time. The theory combines ideas developed by James Fetzer, Donald Nute, Patrick Suppes, Ming Xu, John Pollock, David Lewis and Mellor among others.

We distinguish three aspects of medical diagnosis: generating new diagnostic hypotheses, selecting hypotheses for further pursuit, and evaluating their probability in light of the available evidence. Drawing on Peirce’s account of abduction, we argue that hypothesis generation is amenable to normative analysis: physicians need to make good decisions about when and how to generate new diagnostic hypothesis as well as when to stop. The intertwining relationship between the generation and selection of diagnostic hypotheses is illustrated through the analysis of a (...) detailed clinical case study. This interaction is not adequately captured by the existing probabilistic, decision-theoretic models of the threshold approach to clinical decision-making. Instead, we propose to conceptualize medical diagnosis in terms of strategic reasoning. (shrink)

It is widely accepted by philosophers of well‐being that the shape or narrative structure of a life is a significant determinant of its overall welfare value. Most arguments for this thesis posit agent‐independent value in certain life shapes. The desire theory of well‐being, I argue, has all of the resources needed to account for the value that many philosophers have identified in lives with certain shapes. The theory denies that there is any agent‐independent value in shapes and, indeed, allows that (...) there can be both agent‐dependent value and agent‐dependent disvalue in the shapes commonly claimed to hold agent‐independent value. (shrink)

Donald Shriver argues that recognition of morally negative events in American history is essential to the health of our society. The failure to acknowledge and repent of these events skews the relations of many Americans to one another and breeds ongoing hostility. Focusing on the wrongs suffered by African Americans and Native Americans, Shriver examines the challenges associated with the call for collective repentance: What can it mean to morally master a past whose victims are dead and whose sufferings (...) cannot be alleviated? What are the measures that lend substance to language and action expressing repentance? In answering these questions Shriver creates a compelling vision of the collective repentance and apology that must precede real progress in relations between the races in this country. (shrink)

Is a social complex identical to many united people or is it a group entity in addition to the people? For specificity, I will assume that a social complex is a plural subject in Margaret Gilbert’s sense. By appeal to my theory of Aspects, according to which there can be qualitative difference without numerical difference, I give an answer that is a middle way between metaphysical individualism and metaphysical holism. This answer will enable answers to two additional metaphysical questions: (i) (...) how can two social complexes have all the same members and (ii) how can there be a social complex of social complexes? (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on “Corporate Reputation: Being Good and Looking Good.” Three of the five included articles help to reinforce a conclusion that “being good” and “looking good” are not dichotomous, mutually exclusive conditions. Rather, the two dimensions are linked in some kind of causal relationship for which continuing conceptual and empirical research is desirable. A fourth article concerns the reputational effects of the stock-option backdating scandal. The fifth article offers a critique of conventional approaches to defining (...) and measuring reputation. (shrink)

There is a familiar problem in moral theories that recognize positive obligations to help others related to the practical room these obligations leave for ordinary life, and the risk that open-ended obligations to help others will consume our lives and resources. Responding to this problem, Kantians have tended to emphasize the idea of limits on positive obligations but are typically unsatisfactorily vague about the nature and extent of these limits. I argue here that aspects of Kant’s discussion of duties of (...) virtue owed to ourselves suggest a useful metric we can use in discussing these limits and that generalizing this account and combining it with elements of Barbara Herman’s view, offers us an attractive model of moral deliberation with the resources we need to engage the critic’s challenge properly. (shrink)

In this essay I set out to defend the objectives of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) to promote ‘religious studies’ in the modern university as a rigorous scientific enterprise in search of descriptive, explanatory, and theoretical knowledge of religious thought and behaviour. More often than not, however, the discipline has been, and currently still is, presented as a ‘life-enhancing-discipline.’ At the tenth IAHR world congress held in Marburg Germany in 1960, the conflict between these incommensurable approaches (...) to the study of religion was resolved by the adoption of a set of ‘basic minimum presuppositions’ for the scientific agenda of the Association. In 2019, the Executive Committee of the IAHR again proposed an expansion of the IAHR’s mandate to include moral, theological, and political concerns. This paper calls for a reaffirmation of the framework for the field adopted in Marburg in 1960. (shrink)

This chapter is an expository essay on Alexander’s character as a philosopher and his philosophical system. Alexander’s belief in the substance of philosophy and its classical problems is compared and contrasted with positivism and linguisticism, arguing that the latter schools of thought are anti-philosophical at root. The main aspects of Alexander’s philosophy are outlined such as his theory of space and time, the categories, emergentism, realist epistemology, and God, with various criticisms. It is further argued however that Alexander’s approach to (...) philosophy has value in large part because he proposed a constructive hypothesis about reality that allows us to consider a comprehensive vision of the world’s structure. (shrink)

Ecology is composed of a remarkably diverse set of scientific disciplines. There are many different sub-fields in ecology—physiological, behavioral, evolutionary, population, community, ecosystem, and landscape ecology. Clearly, no summary will do them all justice. However, for the present context, ecology as a science can be divided into three basic areas—population, community, and ecosystem ecology. This entry will introduce some of the fundamental philosophical issues raised by these three disciplines. The first order of business is to ask what is the science (...) of ecology, and more importantly, what is it not (see Brennan 1988). Sometimes the term ‘ecology’ is treated as synonymous or coextensive with three different concepts or sets of concepts: • The science of ecology: the study of organisms and groups of them and their relation to their environment. (shrink)

Outlines the key concepts in the work of Foucault, showing how his concepts of discourse, of power/knowledge, and of governmentality offer a way to understand how ideas of educational leadership and management have emerged, how they serve to establish a discipline, and how they construct individuals in particular ideological ways.

The human person is the focal point of contemporary concern. This first sentence from Andre Ligneul's Teilhard and Personalism touches on the very nature of the present status of the evolutionary object called man--the human person. To be a person is to be the ever evolving organism that represents the present pinnacle of evolutionary success on the planet Earth. The human person will be the focus of this research project. Through the many writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but most (...) specifically The Phenomenon of Man, an attempt will be made to define the process that is the human person. A further goal is to set this process in the present context of social evolution occurring in the United States. Special emphasis will be placed on some educational implications that Teilhard's process may have for the United States and the world... (shrink)

Food Regime scholars conclude that we now live in a ‘Corporate Food Regime’. 1 Characterised by market liberalisation and the deregulation of the financial industry, the political economy of our Fo...