In their recent article, scholars Keisha Ray and Jane Fallis Cooper claim that “bioethicists should not be deterred from advocating for a healthy environment […] instead, […] underscore the importa...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that “[i]t is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood” (11). The author calls on the field to ask different kinds of normative questions about the mo...

This essay reflects on the future of world history by reflecting on its past. It looks to how Iberian historiography in the early modern period “rediscovered” Islamic historiography in the course of Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean region in the sixteenth century. However, since the Iberians had deliberately cultivated a form of amnesia regarding this historiography as a result of the so-called Reconquest, new modes and methods of appropriation had to be found. Further, whereas medieval contact had largely been (...) with materials in Arabic, the sixteenth-century world was far more centrally concerned with materials in Persian. The essay proposes that these materials and their perspective had a significant impact on humanist historians such as João de Barros as well as on their successors. Equally, access to European historical writings in Latin had some impact on Indo-Persian chroniclers at the Mughal court and elsewhere. However, it may be argued that an even greater impact on the Mughals was that of “Hindu” writings regarding the ancient past of India. All in all, the essay suggests that the past of such historical writing was crucially mediated by philological practice. Nor can philology be neglected for future projects in the writing of world history or global history. The essay thus questions the presumptions of both neoskeptics, who neglect how historians have worked in the past, and of scientistic historians, who oppose the central place of humanistic disciplines in the future writing of history. (shrink)

The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nīti, has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts (...) on dharma, which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nīti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nīti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India. (shrink)

Background The emergence of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs as key features of the United States (US) HIV strategy since 2018 has caused major controversies. HIV surveillance programs that re-use individuals’ routinely collected clinical HIV data do not require consent on the basis that the public benefit of these programs outweighs individuals’ rights to opt out. However, criticisms of MHS/CDR have questioned whether expanded uses of HIV genetic sequence data for prevention reach beyond traditional (...) public health ethics frameworks. This study aimed to explore views on consent within MHS/CDR among critical stakeholders.Methods In 2021 we interviewed 26 US HIV stakeholders who identified as being critical or concerned about the rollout of MHS/CDR. Stakeholders included participants belonging to networks of people living with HIV, other advocates, academics, and public health professionals. This analysis focused on identifying the range of positions among critical and concerned stakeholders on consent affordances, opt-outs, how to best inform people living with HIV about how data about them are used in public health programs, and related ethical issues.Results Participants were broadly supportive of introducing some forms of consent into MHS/CDR. However, they differed on the specifics of implementing consent. While some participants did not support introducing consent affordances, all supported the idea that people living with HIV should be informed about how HIV surveillance and prevention is conducted and how individuals’ data are used.Conclusions MHS/CDR has caused sustained controversy. Among critical stakeholders, consent is generally desirable but contested, although the right for people living with HIV to be informed was centrally supported. In an era of big data-driven public health interventions and routine uses of HIV genetic sequence data in surveillance and prevention, CDC and other agencies should revisit public health ethics frameworks and consider the possibility of consent processes. (shrink)

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history--the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process--in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in (...) general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Individuals’ beliefs, as well as their spiritual orientations (SOs), can affect the quality of their work life cycle. Given that a large portion of people’s lives are spent in organisations, it is crucial to consider the factors affecting quality of work life (QWL) among employees. Against this background, the present study investigated the effects of the Islam-based SOs on the QWL in Muslim employees working for Iraqi municipalities in 2022. For this purpose, an applied research design was adopted, using field (...) studies of the correlational type for data collection. In total, 1345 staff of Iraqi municipalities were selected by simple random sampling in 2022, and two standardised questionnaires were utilised to collect the data. The content validity method was further recruited to determine the validity of the questionnaires, and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to measure the reliability. To analyse the data, descriptive tests, including frequency, mean and standard deviation (SD), along with inferential statistics, namely one-sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t-test, were implemented using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software package. The correlation coefficients accordingly showed a rising trend in the QWL among these employees following the growth in their SOs. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the components of SOs, namely spiritual beliefs, sense of spirituality, spiritual self-actualisation and spiritual practices, and the QWL of the Muslim employees.Contribution: This study revealed that the increase in the Islam-based SOs and its components led to an increase in the QWL of Iraqi Muslim employees. (shrink)

The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003 , Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as (...) well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor e Director do Center for India and South Asia na Universidade da Califórnia, Los Angeles (UCLA) desde 2004, fez os seus estudos em Nova Deli, na University of Delhi e na Delhi School of Economics, onde leccionou até 1995. Nessa altura integrou a École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, de Paris, como Directeur d’ Études, e tornou-se, em 2002, Professor na Universidade de Oxford. É também Joint Managing Editor da Indian Economic and Social History Review (...) (No... (shrink)

Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics. Muzzafar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 516. $89.50, £62 ; $29.50, £20.50.

Buddhist Inscriptions of Andhradesa. B.S.L. Hanumantha Rao, N. S. Ramachandra Murthy, B. Subrahmanyam, E. Sivanagi Reddy. Ananda Buddha Vihara Trust, Secunderabad 1998. xi, 278 pp. Rs 500.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAvram AlpertThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in (...) the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview.But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189).Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world.Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose... (shrink)

This essay considers an important and enduring problem in the writing of Indian history: how do we historians approach precolonial narratives of the past? A rich and suggestive new study of South Indian modes of historiography, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has positioned itself at the center of this debate. For a variety of reasons, precolonial narratives have been demoted to the status of mere information, and (...) genres of South Indian writing have been dismissed as showing that South Indians lacked the ability to write history and indeed lacked historical consciousness. Textures of Time responds to this picture by proposing a novel historical method for locating historical sensibility in precolonial narratives of the past. The authors ask us not to judge all textual traditions in India, especially narratives of the past, on the basis of the verifiability of facts contained in them. Rather they suggest a radical openness of the text, and they argue that a historical narrative is constituted in the act of reading itself. They do this by examining the role of genre and what they call texture in precolonial South Indian writing.This essay examines the strengths and limitations of their proposal. It does so by examining the formation of colonial archives starting in the late-eighteenth century in order to understand the predicament of history in South Asia. Colonial archives brought about a crisis in historiographical practices in India; they not only transformed texts into raw information for the historian to then reconstruct a historical narrative, they also delegitimized precolonial modes of historiography. A better understanding of these archives puts one in a better position to assess the insights of Textures of Time, but it also helps to highlight the problems in its solution. In particular, it reveals how the book continues to use modern criteria to assess premodern works, and in this way perhaps to judge them inappropriately. (shrink)

This book offers a definitive and wide-ranging overview of developments in behavioral finance over the past ten years. In 1993, the first volume provided the standard reference to this new approach in finance--an approach that, as editor Richard Thaler put it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Much has changed since then. Not least, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the subsequent market decline further demonstrated (...) that financial markets often fail to behave as they would if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors who populate financial theories. Behavioral finance has made an indelible mark on areas from asset pricing to individual investor behavior to corporate finance, and continues to see exciting empirical and theoretical advances. Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II constitutes the essential new resource in the field. It presents twenty recent papers by leading specialists that illustrate the abiding power of behavioral finance--of how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. As with the first volume, it reaches beyond the world of finance to suggest, powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. The contributors are Brad M. Barber, Nicholas Barberis, Shlomo Benartzi, John Y. Campbell, Emil M. Dabora, Daniel Kent, François Degeorge, Kenneth A. Froot, J. B. Heaton, David Hirshleifer, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Josef Lakonishok, Owen A. Lamont, Roni Michaely, Terrance Odean, Jayendu Patel, Tano Santos, Andrei Shleifer, Robert J. Shiller, Jeremy C. Stein, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Richard H. Thaler, Sheridan Titman, Robert W. Vishny, Kent L. Womack, and Richard Zeckhauser. (shrink)