Contributed essays with focus on Advaita Vedantā.

Prof. Iyengar's biography of Sri Aurobindo, long a standard reference work, is now in its fifth edition. The author's subtitle indicates the depth and breadth of the book, as it links the life of Sri Aurobindo, who played for our age the crucial role of leader of humanity's evolving destiny , with the history of India and the world. It also provides detailed discussions of Sri Aurobindo's writings, from the early poems and plays to the politics of Bande Mataram, from (...) the philosophy and social thought of the Arya to the epic masterpiece of Savitri, as the essential keys to understanding his life and work. This book is available again after a long time. (shrink)

Discovery of a second, inducible prostaglandin synthase provides explanations for many previously puzzling observations, but also raises new questions about prostanoid synthesis. A cis‐acting sequence closely related to the cyclic AMP response element has been shown to play a role in both basal and induced prostaglandin synthase 2 gene expression. Aspirin and other currently available non‐steroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs that inhibit prostaglandin synthase activity do not effectively discriminate between the inducible prostaglandin synthase 2 and constitutive prostaglandin synthase 1 enzymes. Identification of (...) a second prostaglandin synthase, induced by inflammatory stimuli, initiated a search for isoform‐specific inhibitors. Use of prostaglandin synthase 2 specific inhibitors and antisense oligonucleotides has led to the suggestion that specific ligands activate alternative pathways of prostanoid production, using one of the prostaglandin synthase isoforms preferentially. The coupling mechanisms by which these pathways are activated in response to alternative stimuli should provide additional routes of intervention in prostanoid production. (shrink)

A theorem on the partitioning of a randomly selected large population into stationary and non-stationary components by using a property of the stationary population identity is stated and proved. The methods of partitioning demonstrated are original and these are helpful in real-world situations where age-wise data is available. Applications of this theorem for practical purposes are summarized at the end.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vice and Naturalistic OntologyChristopher R. Williams (bio)Keywordscausality, criminality, determinism, medical model, positivismThese questions have been posed: Is vice (encompassing criminal and other wrongful conduct) best regarded as “sick” behavior, “immoral” behavior, or some other type altogether? Are we to understand vice in natural-medical terms, or are we better served by utilizing a moral framework? Is criminality reducible to and best categorized as a metaphysical type the essential features of (...) which are neurological or otherwise biological in nature? Or, perhaps, is criminality closer to a (non-natural) sociological type, the essential features of which can be understood only through reference to social norms and cultural conventions? These are torturously involved philosophical and theoretical questions that have given rise to an equally torturous volume of literature. Without pretending to do justice to these questions or their corresponding literature, several key considerations that must be inserted into and accounted for within the discursive pursuit of these inquiries are worth noting.Where a naturalistic ontology is employed within the study of vice, we reduce the intricacies of deviant behavioral phenomena to what we presume to be their underlying medical/biological properties. It is worth remembering that behavior itself cannot rightfully be said to be “sick”; rather, what we mean to say is that the behavior in question—in our case, various forms of “vice”—is symptomatic of some underlying illness or medical/biological condition. The presumed underlying sickness and the behavior itself are distinct, ontologically linked only through their theorized relationship to one another. This, then, is a key assumption of the medical approach to vice and its ontological classification as a natural-medical kind: that there exists a relationship between the behavior (a symptom) and the underlying illness or medical condition, and that the relationship is of the causal kind. Vice, it is suggested, is a change in state that is caused by (or, at the very least, is a direct consequence of) sickness or illness. Second, to legitimate such attributions, the illness supplying the requisite causal force must be identifiable and its causal connection to the behavior must be or be capable of being sufficiently explicated. In other words, once we have identified the relevant medical/biological properties and the behavior to which they stand in causal relatedness, we must be prepared to characterize this dynamic—we must be able to show exactly how and why such and such a condition gives rise to such and such a behavior.Problematically, causation itself is and has always been a contentious metaphysical specimen. Hume (1955) reminded us of the troubling reality [End Page 39] that we cannot ever “see” one thing cause or necessitate another. We are left, rather, to merely presume the existence of causal relationships between things. How is it, exactly, that disorder in neurodevelopment can necessitate certain behavioral outcomes? Even if we can “see” (in the empirical sense) the disorder and equally “see” the behavior, we cannot of course witness the precise causal action of the former upon the latter. Even if we are content inferring causal action in such cases, we still need to demonstrate the basic conditions of causality. To show that Condition X is causally related Behavior Y, we need to show that they are regularly associated with one another, that Condition X temporally preceded Behavior Y and, most challengingly, that no other conditions or factors have an intervening (e.g., additive, synergistic) influence. Hypothetically, if we were to posit a causal relationship between schizotypal personality traits and violent behavior, we would need to establish: (1) that schizotypal traits and violent behavior regularly coexist; (2) that those traits presented before the manifestation of the violent behavior; and (3) that no other factors (biological, psychological, and/or sociological) contributed in any meaningful way to those manifestations. We would thus need to systematically rule out family dynamics, income, education, intelligence, substance use, and so forth, as contributing factors. If, in turn, we were to determine that the presence of schizotypal traits alone is not sufficient—even if a necessary condition—to produce violent behavior but, rather, that those traits act in concert with other variables to produce the behavior, then we would not truly be... (shrink)

In this essay I wish to raise the question of whether it is meaningful to say that a certain sort of robot is in pain. This is, of course, not an empirical question. There exists no robot of the sort I shall describe. But, I shall argue, if such a robot did in fact exist, it would be meaningful to say it is in pain.

While Meinong makes scattered remarks about perception in various writings, the one text in which he makes a concentrated effort to work out a theory of perception is Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1905). This paper is a critical examination of the theory which is presented there, but also some other texts are taken into account. Special attention will be given to Meinong's views on the object (Gegenstand) of perception, both the propositional object (Objektiv) and the non-propositional object (Objekt) which (...) is allegedly "part" of the propositional object. Also, some contrasts and parallels between these views and those of other members of the Brentano School, e.g. Husserl's notion of categorial perception are discussed. (shrink)

In this book Reynold Macpherson initiates a politically-critical theory of educative leadership as a fresh line of inquiry in the practice, research and theory of educational administration and educational leadership. Divided into four parts, the book introduces the sub-discipline of political philosophy to the field of educational administration, management and leadership. It does this by clarifying the knowledge domain of each and identifying how four political ideologies, specifically pragmatism, communitarianism, communicative rationalism and egalitarian liberalism, have primarily informed and surreptitiously provided (...) contestable justifications for power in the development of practice, research and theory in the field of study. The book goes on to offer three case studies illustrating how political philosophy can be used to interpret how people become leaders and administrators of educational institutions and systems. Additional case studies then demonstrate how crises in governance in educational institutions and systems can be analyzed and improvements made using the tools of political philosophy. The final part uses the sub-discipline to critique the author's decades of research into educative leadership, and concludes the book by both establishing the relativity of politically-critical critique and the ideology it favours; neo-pragmatism. Political Philosophy, Educational Administration and Educative Leadership will provide practitioners, researchers and theorists in educational administration, management and leadership with a deeper appreciation of power by formally introducing them to the assumptions, limits and tools of political philosophy. (shrink)

Before talking about the vision of Orikhov's essence of the relationship between the church and the state, one must first determine what the church is about - Catholic or Orthodox. After all, the thinker lived in Poland when there were still strong, even parity positions of both denominations. He himself was brought up in a family where his father was Catholic and his mother was Orthodox. This was reflected in his mentality: he repeatedly publicly stated the benefits of certain tenets (...) of the Orthodox faith. But most of all he settled on the problem of relations between the Catholic Church and the state. (shrink)

Deficits in social cognition and more specifically in communication have an important impact on the real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. In particular, patients have severe problems in communicative-pragmatics, for example, in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intention in everyday conversational interactions. This limit is associated with morphological and functional alteration of the left middle temporal gyrus, a cerebral area involved in various communicative processes, in particular in the distinction of ironic communicative intention from sincere and deceitful ones. We performed (...) an fMRI study on 20 patients with SZ and 20 matched healthy controls while performing a pragmatic task testing the comprehension of sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative intentions. We considered the L-MTG as the region of interest. SZ patients showed difficulties in the correct comprehension of all types of communicative intentions and, when correctly answering to the task, they exhibited a higher activation of the L-MTG, as compared to HC, under all experimental conditions. This greater involvement of the L-MTG in the group of patients could depend on different factors, such as the increasing inferential effort required in correctly understanding the speaker’s communicative intentions, and the higher integrative semantic processes involved in sentence processing. Future studies with a larger sample size and functional connectivity analysis are needed to study deeper the specific role of the L-MTG in pragmatic processes in SZ, also in relation to other brain areas. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the objection that Socrates makes against diviners, poets, and rhapsodies having knowledge is an example of what has come to be known as an opacity objection: that is, some aspect of what would be required for them to know is unrecognised by them. This chapter contends that the opacity is of a different kind than what contemporary epistemologists have considered, and claims that Socrates’ specific version should have a place in contemporary theory of knowledge.