The founding of the Han 漢 dynasty by a man of common birth, Liu Bang 劉邦, precipitated a new awareness that class boundaries had become more fluid than in prior generations. New fashions threatened the established social order as wealthy individuals pretended to status that they had not yet achieved. To respond to these concerns, Jia Yi 賈誼 proposed a new sumptuary code regulating a range of luxury goods from apparel to accessories to ritual wares. This sumptuary system was designed (...) to bolster the authority of the imperial throne and to distinguish members of the Han government and the imperial family from other elites. This essay will present an overview of Jia Yi’s sumptuary code and consider its relationship to earlier theories of ritual reform. It will argue that his system combined Lord Shang’s 商 theory of circumstantial advantage with a new scheme of imperial publicity. The final section of this study assesses the implementation of Jia Yi’s recommendations by using jade as a case study. Based on recent archaeological evidence, I argue that Jia Yi’s ideas about jade in the context of his sumptuary guidelines have a contemporaneity with the revitalization of jade craft in the early Western Han. (shrink)

The executive hypothesis of self-regulation places cognitive information processing at the center of self-regulatory success/failure. While the hypothesis is well supported by cross-sectional studies, no study has tested its primary prediction, that temporary lapses in executive control underlie moments of self-regulatory failure. Here, we conducted a naturalistic experiment investigating whether short-term variation in executive control is associated with momentary self-regulatory outcomes, indicated by negative affect reactivity to everyday stressors. We assessed working memory capacity (WMC) through ultra-brief, ambulatory assessments on smart (...) phones five times per day in a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study involving college-aged adults. We found that participants exhibited more negative affect reactivity to stressor exposures during moments when they exhibited lower than usual WMC. Contrary to previous findings, we found no between-person association between WMC and average stress reactivity. We interpret these findings as reflecting the role of executive control in determining one’s effective capacity to self-regulate. (shrink)

Pro-environmental behaviors symbolic of the three R’s—reduce, reuse, recycle—are focused on individual consumption and use patterns. These traditional environmentalist behaviors—what I shall call “shallow environmentalism”—are vulnerable to the problem of inconsequentialism, in that a single individual engaging in them does little to combat or mitigate climate change. Indeed, some argue that continued occupation with shallow environmental behaviors such as recycling and reducing travel gets in the way of fighting climate change by inappropriately focusing blame on individuals, wasting energy on ineffective (...) means, and creating a low benchmark by which people can measure whether they have done their environmental duty. Using environmental virtue ethics, I will argue for the importance of engaging in shallow environmentalism. I will use findings in behavioral psychology to show how these behaviors play an important role in fostering motivation and how behavioral alignment with popular understandings of environmentalism is related to perceptions of legitimacy of climate activists’ positions. (shrink)

Although we find Gangestad & Simpson's argument intriguing, we question some of its underlying assumptions, including: (1) that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is consistently heritable; (2) that symmetry is driving the effects; (3) that use of parametric tests with FA is appropriate; and (4) that a short-term mating strategy produces more offspring than a long-term strategy.

Success in online and blended courses requires engaging in self-regulated learning (SRL), especially for challenging STEM disciplines, such as physics. This involves students planning how they will navigate course assignments and activities, setting goals for completion, monitoring their progress and content understanding, and reflecting on how they completed each assignment. Based on Winne & Hadwin’s COPES model, SRL is a series of events that temporally unfold during learning, impacted by changing internal and external factors, such as goal orientation and content (...) difficulty. Thus, as goal orientation and content difficulty change throughout a course, so might students’ use of SRL processes. This paper studies how students’ SRL behavior and achievement goal orientation change over time in a large (N = 250) college introductory level physics course taught online. Students’ achievement goal orientation was measured by repeated administration of the achievement goals questionnaire-revised (AGQ-R). Students’ SRL behavior was measured by analyzing their clickstream event traces interacting with online learning modulesviaa combination of trace clustering and process mining. Event traces were first divided into groups similar in nature using agglomerative clustering, with similarity between traces determined based on a set of derived characteristics most reflective of students’ SRL processes. We then generated causal nets for each cluster of tracesviaprocess mining and interpreted the underlying behavior and strategy of each causal net according to the COPES SRL framework. We then measured the frequency at which students adopted each causal net and assessed whether the adoption of different causal nets was associated with responses to the AGQ-R. By repeating the analysis for three sets of online learning modules assigned at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester, we examined how the frequency of each causal net changed over time, and how the change correlated with changes to the AGQ-R responses. Results have implications for measuring the temporal nature of SRL during online learning, as well as the factors impacting the use of SRL processes in an online physics course. Results also provide guidance for developing online instructional materials that foster effective SRL for students with different motivational profiles. (shrink)

Background: Managing HIV treatment is a complex multi-dimensional task because of a combination of factors such as stigma and discrimination of some populations who frequently get infected with HIV. In addition, patient-provider encounters have become increasingly multicultural, making effective communication and provision of ethically sound care a challenge. Purpose: This article explores ethical issues that health service providers in the United States and Botswana encountered in their interaction with patients in HIV care. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was used (...) to collect data from health service providers and patients using focused group discussions. This article is based on responses from health service providers only. Participants and context: This article is based on 11 focused group discussions with a total sample of 71 service providers in seven US sites and one Botswana site. Ethical considerations: Ethical review boards at all the study sites reviewed the study protocol and approved it. Ethical review boards of the study’s coordinating centers, Rutgers University and the University of California at San Francisco, also approved it. The study participants provided a written informed consent to participate. Findings: HIV service providers encountered ethical challenges in all the four Beauchamp and Childress’ biomedical ethics of respect for patients’ autonomy, beneficence, justice, and nonmaleficence. Discussion: The finding that HIV service providers encounter ethical challenges in their interaction with patients is supported by prior studies. The ethical challenges are particularly prominent in multicultural care and resource-constrained care environments. Conclusion: Provision of HIV care is fraught with ethical challenges that tend to pose different issues depending on a given care environment. It is important that strong partnerships are developed among key stakeholders in HIV care. In addition, health service providers need to be provided with resources so they can provide quality and ethically sound care. (shrink)

David Allison here translates Derrida’s booklet, La voix et le phénomène and two essays, "La forme et le vouloir-dire" and "La différance". It is a good translation, readable and accurate, even though once or twice he seems reluctant to move fully into English idiom: why not, for instance, render "la vive voix" as "speaking out loud" instead of "living vocal medium"? Derrida claims Husserl is caught in the classical metaphysics of presence, an entrapment shown by his belief that the (...) meaning of speech can be isolated from reference or indication, at least in the privileged case of phenomenological reflection: for then we do not speak to another, only to ourselves, and no indication is needed to turn our minds towards what is discussed. In this privileged discourse we enjoy a sheer presence of meaning, with no indication or reference to anything absent, and no need for the sounding voice either. But Derrida claims that when we think we can never do without indication and sound—at least the imagined sound of inner speech—and so even the privileged presence of phenomenological reflection must involve some absences. The speaker himself is constituted only with the signs and sensuosity of speech, not by a sheer view of presence. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant introduced both transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments into philosophy. Transcendental arguments in general aim to establish conditions necessary for our having self-conscious experience at all. Transcendental idealism holds that such conditions do not hold independently of human subjects; those conditions obtain or are satisfied because they are generated or fulfilled by the structure or functioning of the subject’s cognitive capacities. Is transcendental idealism the only possible explanation of such conditions? I pursue this question (...) by exploring a widely neglected issue, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. I argue the following: (1) This issue remains vital to the second edition of the Critique, even though many passages on the topic were omitted from that edition. (2) Kant’s link between transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments is substantive, not methodological. (3) Kant’s views on transcendental affinity show that there are non-subjective, transcendental material conditions for the possibility of unified self-conscious experience. (4) These conditions and Kant’s arguments for them directly undermine Kant’s own arguments for transcendental idealism. This criticism of Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism is entirely internal to the first Critique. (5) These points reveal some serious flaws in Henry Allison’s defense of Kant’s idealism. (6) Realists, naturalists, and pragmatists have much to learn and to borrow from Kant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of unified self-conscious experience. (shrink)

The idea that noumena or things in themselves causally affect our sensibility, and thus provide us with sensations, has been rejected on two basic grounds: It is unintelligible because distinguishes between appearance and reality in such a way that things cannot in principle appear as they really are, and it requires applying the concept of causality trans-phenomenally, contra Kant’s Schematism. I argue that noumenal causality is intelligible and is required out of fidelity to Kant’s texts and doctrines. Kant’s theory of (...) meaning and his transcendental reflection on sensibility show how Kant legitimately can speak about, and determine that, our passive sensibility must be causally affected by noumena. Kant’s analysis of agency shows that Kant’s practical philosophy requires noumenal causality, both from a first- and from a third-person perspective. These points ground my criticisms of Buchdahl and Allison’s view of affection, and Strawson and Sandberg’s view of meaning. (shrink)

Roger Sullivan's earlier book, Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory, has done for Kant's moral philosophy what Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense has done for Kant's metaphysics: it offers a comprehensive and plausible account of Kant's thought and defends it from common objections and misunderstandings. Sullivan's new book draws upon his earlier one, distilling its insights into an ideal introduction to Kant's ethics that will be both useful to undergraduate and graduate students and also interesting to Kant (...) specialists. (shrink)

In this article, we review the psychology of hero development and hero worship. We propose that heroes and hero narratives fulfill important cognitive and emotional needs, including the need for wisdom, meaning, hope, inspiration, and growth. We propose a framework called the heroic leadership dynamic to explain how need-based heroism shifts over time, from our initial attraction to heroes to later retention or repudiation of heroes. Central to the HLD is idea that hero narratives fulfill both epistemic and energizing functions. (...) Hero stories provide epistemic benefits by providing scripts for prosocial action, by revealing fundamental truths about human existence, by unpacking life paradoxes, and by cultivating emotional intelligence. To energize us, heroes promote moral elevation, heal psychic wounds, inspire psychological growth, and exude charisma. We discuss the implications of our framework for theory and research on heroism, leadership processes, and positive psychology. (shrink)

Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This paper discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics (...) Bowl. Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula. (shrink)

This book moves toward building a new and more comprehensive theory of literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. The extremely popular work of Ken Wilber, unites the best of both western and eastern thought and affirms that the stages of consciousness, more refined than that of the reasoning mind, do exist.

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to reframe crises as moments of organizational opportunity instead of moments of organizational threat. The predominant crisis communication approach involves defensive pos...

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation (...) for a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of (...) the author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the (...) normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented (...) here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist feminists (...) like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)

Recently, bioethicists and the UNCRPD have advocated for supported medical decision-making on behalf of patients with intellectual disabilities. But what does supported decision-making really entail? One compelling framework is Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis’ mental prosthesis account, which envisions supported decision-making as a process in which trustees act as mere appendages for the patient’s will; the trustee provides the cognitive tools the patient requires to realize her conception of her own good. We argue that supported decision-making would be better understood (...) as a collaborative process, giving patients with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make decisions in a respectful relationship with trusted others. We offer an alternative account of supported decision-making where the primary constraint is to protect the patient from domination by the trustee. This is advantageous in its preservation of the prospects for genuine collaboration, for the mental prosthesis approach ultimately reinforces a problematic ideal of isolated patient self-determination. (shrink)

Is volitional conceptual change feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word’s use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures. Much of the relevant work in linguistics (...) has employed the methods of empirical pragmatics and diachronic semantics. In this way, the study of meaning change can be brought to bear on the conceptual engineer’s normative project. The picture that emerges tells against the sorts of engineering projects most likely to appeal to philosophers. Some may stand to succeed, but they have significantly different contours than the typical ones. (shrink)

This volume presents seventeen essays by one of the world's leading scholars on Kant. Henry E. Allison explores the nature of transcendental idealism, freedom of the will, and the concept of the purposiveness of nature. He places Kant's views in their historical context and explores their contemporary relevance to present day philosophers.

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

Efforts to recruit and retain farmers have traditionally supported the farm business through a focus on access to land, capital, and business skills. While these efforts are critical, a small body of work indicates that these may be insufficient because they rarely account for the social and economic needs of farm households and how the (in)ability to meet these needs interacts with the development and economic viability of the farm enterprise. Social and economic needs include, but are not limited to (...) access to health insurance and health care, childcare, adequate household and retirement income, affordable housing, and food security. This article introduces a symposium intended to shed light on these underappreciated needs and how they connect to the farm enterprise. We contend that a greater understanding of farm households’ lived realities meeting their social and economic needs could lead to a paradigm shift in how we understand and support farm families’ resilience. We set the stage for the eight articles in this symposium in two ways. First, we present the theoretical and empirical reasons why considering household-level needs is crucial when working towards supporting the agricultural sector. Second, we review the literature on farm households’ social and economic needs. We then thematically summarize the key insights from the eight articles. Despite variations in topics studied, research designs, and geographical contexts, we note a clear pattern in what the authors see as the implications of their findings. Namely, they reaffirm the need to challenge the traditional view that separates household needs from farm enterprise activities and outcomes. Their collective call for stronger social and agricultural programs and policies is noteworthy and may in part be connected to the structural underpinnings of the challenges meeting social and economic needs highlighted across the articles. (shrink)

R. Freeman Butts was an American historian and philosopher of education who died in March 2010. This paper will investigate Butts’ various roles and writings and ask the question: why is Butts important to the contemporary generation of teacher educators and teachers? This paper will argue that the breadth of Butts’ work builds connections and is a very positive model for sub-disciplines in education. Firstly, it is critical to examine Butts’ contribution, as Butts provokes teachers to inquire about the ‘context (...) of education,’ rather than simply the ‘how to’ of teaching and the question of classroom management. Additionally, it is significant to for educators to study Butts’ life and works as they embody the essence of service – in his case, as an education diplomat. He started with what former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton calls ‘the conversation,’ and this led eventually to projects such as the Afghan Project to bring development to Afghanistan in the era of the mid to late twentieth century. Finally, one can argue that Freeman Butts’ life and works provide educators with an interdisciplinary example as Butts’ combined the talents of an historian and an international educator, something that remains sorely needed today. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals . Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.

According to Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers, everything depends for its existence on something else. But what would a world devoid of fundamentalia look like? In this paper, I argue that the anti-foundationalist “neither-one-nor-many argument” of the Indian Mādhyamika Śrīgupta commits him to a position I call “metaphysical indefinitism.” I demonstrate how this view follows from Śrīgupta’s rejection of mereological simples and ontologically independent being, when understood in light of his account of conventional reality. Contra recent claims in the secondary literature, I (...) clarify how the Madhyamaka metaphysical dependence structure is not a straightforward infinitism since it does not honor strict asymmetry or transitivity. Instead, its dependence relations are irreflexive and extendable, admitting of dependence chains of indefinite (though not actually infinite) length and dependence loops of non-zero length. Yet, the flexible ontology of Śrīgupta's Madhyamaka can accommodate a contextualist account of asymmetry and support a revisable theory of conventional truth, delivering significant payoffs for the view, including the capacity to accommodate developments in scientific explanation. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making in public health rarely involves simply avoiding a bad choice in favor of a good choice. Instead, it requires policymakers to strike a balance among conflicting goals that are all good—goals such as the health of populations and individuals, knowledge gained through scientific research, autonomy, social justice, and the efficient use of limited resources. This balance can be elusive, and perfect examples are the legal instruments governing dual-use research, a term describing scientific endeavors meant to produce beneficial knowledge (...) or technology, but that could also be misapplied. Dual-use research of concern policies were implemented... (shrink)

This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in these settings, and to gain an understanding of how different ethical issues are managed by these groups. We used an institutional ethnographic method to investigate ethical issues in HIV clinics. Our researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews, compiled participant observation notes, and studied health records in order to document ethical (...) issues in the clinics, and to understand how health care providers and clinic clients manage and resolve these issues. We found that health care providers and clinic clients have developed work processes for managing ethical issues of various types: conflicts between client-autonomy and public health priorities, difficulties associated with the criminalization of nondisclosure of HIV positive status, challenges with non-adherence to HIV treatment, the protection of confidentiality, barriers to treatment access, and negative social determinants of health and well-being. Some ethical issues resulted from structural disadvantages experienced by clinic clients. The most striking findings in our study were the negative social determinants of health and well-being experienced by some clinic clients – such as experiences of violence and trauma, poverty, racism, colonization, homelessness, and other factors affecting well-being such as problematic substance use. These negative determinants were at the root of other ethical issues, and are themselves of ethical concern. (shrink)

Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. Everyday Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, (...) the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic... Read More. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the requirement to obtain informed consent for medical procedures is deeply enshrined in both U.S. moral and legal doctrine, empirical studies and anecdotal accounts show that women's rights to informed consent and refusal of treatment are routinely undermined and ignored during childbirth. For example, citing the most recent Listening to Mothers survey, Marianne Nieuwenhuijze and Lisa Kane Low state that "a significant number of women said they felt pressure from a caregiver to agree to having an (...) intervention that they did not want during birth". Specifically, Nieuwenhuijze and Low cite that "19% of women who did not have epidural analgesia felt... (shrink)

There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers like Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an unfounded illusion. In this paper, I present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s "neither-one-nor-many argument" against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning (...) is driven by a set of implicit questions concerning the nature of and relation between consciousness and its intentional object. These questions not only set the agenda for centuries of intra-Buddhist debate on the topic, but they are also questions to which any defender of unified consciousness or a simple subject of experience arguably owes responses. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the life, work, and philosophical contributions of Śāntarakṣita (c. 725–788), who is known for his synthesis of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka with elements of the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti tradition of logic and epistemology. His two most important independent treatises, the Compendium of True Principles (Tattvasaṃgraha) and the Ornament of the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra), are characterized by an emphasis on the indispensable role of rational analysis on the Buddhist path as well as serious and systematic engagement with competing Buddhist (...) and non-Buddhist schools of thought. Śāntarakṣita employs a pedagogical-rhetorical device of provisionally adopting what he deems to be successively more rational views to reject less rational ones. Using this approach, in the Ornament of the Middle Way, he recommends a gradual path to arrive at an understanding of the Madhyamaka ultimate truth by incorporating Yogācāra idealist ontology into his presentation of conventional truth. In this same text, he presents an influential iteration of the neither-one-nor-many argument for the Madhyamaka ultimate truth, the emptiness of intrinsic nature—i.e., the universal negation of ontologically independent being—leaving a lasting and significant impact on both Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy. (shrink)