This paper examines the concept of manifestation process in Kashmir Shaivism from Shiva tattva to Prithvi tattva and their transcendental and immanent predicates (Prakrti and Purusa).This paper also shows that the ultimate reality, Paramshiva, manifests itself into various forms which likely represent the theory of causation. This research paper also provides answer to two questions; First, how ultimate reality with its thirty-six principles or elements manifest in various forms and what types of forms ‘Descent’ attains from the ‘universal self’? Second, (...) how manifestation process takes place from the ‘cosmic self’ (universal consciousness) to a ‘limited self’ (Jiva)? Since, this paper is based on philosophical exploration of manifestation process and contains interpretation and argumentation of Pratyabhijna philosophy only; it excludes manifestation due to Yogas (Upayas) and Karmas. Moreover, it explains the Trika form of reality (Shiva/God, Shakti/World, and Nara/Man) and also the identity between ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’. Manifestation further investigates the union of Shiva and Shakti with Maya and displays its character (Prakashvimarshmaya). This work further tries to describe the contribution of Abhinavagupta in the concept of manifestation. (shrink)

When it is ethically justifiable to stop medical treatment? For many Muslim patients, families, and clinicians this ethical question remains a challenging one as Islamic ethico-legal guidance on such matters remains scattered and difficult to interpret. In light of this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review to aggregate rulings from Islamic jurists and juridical councils on whether, and when, it is permitted to withdraw and/or withhold life-sustaining care. A total of 16 fatwās were found, 8 of which were single-author (...) rulings, and 8 represented the collective view of a juridical council. The fatwās are similar in that nearly all judge that Islamic law, provided certain conditions are met, permits abstaining from life-sustaining treatment. Notably, the justifying conditions appear to rely on physician assessment of the clinical prognosis. The fatwās differ when it comes to what conditions justify withdrawing or withholding life- sustaining care. Our analyses suggest that while notions of futility greatly impact the bioethical discourse regarding with holding and/or withdrawal of treatment, the conceptualization of futility lacks nuance. Therefore, clinicians, Islamic jurists, and bioethicists need to come together in order to unify a conception of medical futility and relate it to the ethics of withholding and/or withdrawal of treatment. (shrink)

BackgroundThe pharmaceutical market in Bangladesh is highly concentrated. Due to high competition aggressive marketing strategies are adopted for greater market share, which sometimes cross limit. There is lack of data on this aspect in Bangladesh. This exploratory study aimed to fill this gap by investigating current promotional practices of the pharmaceutical companies including the role of their medical representatives.MethodsThis qualitative study was conducted as part of a larger study to explore the status of governance in health sector in 2009. Data (...) were collected from Dhaka, Chittagong and Bogra districts through in-depth interview, observation, and round table discussion.ResultsFindings reveal a highly structured system geared to generate prescriptions and ensure market share instituted by the pharmaceuticals. A comprehensive training curriculum for the MRs prepares the newly recruited science graduates for generating enough prescriptions by catering to the identified needs and demands of the physicians expressed or otherwise, and thus grab higher market-share for the companies they represent. Approaches such as inducements, persuasion, emotional blackmail, serving family members, etc. are used. The type, quantity and quality of inducements offered to the physicians depend upon his/her capacity to produce prescriptions. The popular physicians are cultivated meticulously by the MRs to establish brand loyalty and fulfill individual and company targets. The physicians, willingly or unwillingly, become part of the system with few exceptions. Neither the regulatory authority nor the professional or consumer rights bodies has any role to control or ractify the process.ConclusionsThe aggressive marketing of the pharmaceutical companies compel their MRs, programmed to maximize market share, to adopt unethical means if and when necessary. When medicines are prescribed and dispensed more for financial interests than for needs of the patients, it reflects system’s failed ability to hold individuals and entities accountable for adhering to basic professional ethics, code of conduct, and statutory laws. (shrink)

End-of-life medical decision making presents a major challenge to patients and physicians alike. In order to determine whether it is ethically justifiable to forgo medical treatment in such scenarios, clinical data must be interpreted alongside patient values, as well as in light of the physician's ethical commitments. Though much has been written about this ethical issue from religious perspectives , little work has been done from an Islamic point of view. To fill the gap in the literature around Islamic bioethical (...) perspectives on the matter, we derive a theologically rooted rubric for goals of care. We use the Islamic obligation for Muslims to seek medical treatment as the foundation for determining the clinical conditions under which Muslim physicians have a duty to treat. We next link the theological concept of accountability before God to quality-of-life assessment. Using this construct, we suggest that a Muslim physician is not obligated to maintain or conti.. (shrink)

Social capital and scaling social impact are two of the most important concepts within social entrepreneurship and social enterprise research. However, what role social capital plays in scaling social impact is less understood and academic literatures on the connection of these two crucial concepts are fragmented and scattered. To fill this research gap, we have conducted a bibliometric review to inform academics and researchers the salient agents in the field and categorize the conceptual structure of the knowledge base. Using science (...) mapping techniques, we have analyzed 1549 relevant documents from SCOPUS that are published between 1986 and 2021. The primary objective of this review is to uncover the size, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of literatures related to social capital's role in scaling social impact. Additionally, we have also analyzed key publishing journals, authors, and documents to map the intellectual structure and research fronts of the domain. The review shows that there is a reasonable accumulation of scientific knowledge concerning social capital's role in scaling social impact in the last three decades. Another key finding is that, some of the keywords identified within the research fronts are closely aligned with a number of UN-SDG goals. This is the first study to systematically map social capital's role in scaling social impact literature with the help of a science mapping tool called bibliometric analysis. This work provides a clear overview of the evolution of the research field and presents potentially important research gaps that require further attention. (shrink)

This paper aims to introduce a robust framework for forecasting demand, including data preprocessing, data transformation and standardization, feature selection, cross-validation, and regression ensemble framework. Bagging ), boosting and extreme gradient boosting regression ), and stacking are employed as ensemble models. Different machine learning approaches, including support vector regression, extreme learning machine, and multilayer perceptron neural network, are adopted as reference models. In order to maximize the determination coefficient value and reduce the root mean square error, hyperparameters are set using (...) the grid search method. Using a steel industry dataset, all tests are carried out under identical experimental conditions. In this context, STACK1 and STACK2 models provided better performance than other models. The highest accuracies of R2 of 0.97 and 0.97 are obtained using STACK1 and STACK2, respectively. Moreover, the rank according to performances is STACK1, STACK2, XGBR, GBR, RFR, MLP, ELM, and SVR. As it improves the performance of models and reduces the risk of decision-making, the ensemble method can be used to forecast the demand in a steel industry one month ahead. (shrink)

Child Labour in Kashmiri Society: A Socio-human Rights Study The Constitution of India guarantees fundamental rights and the full freedom to enjoy childhood. In spite of that millions of children are being put to arduous work for short and narrow gains. By 1989, the standards concerning children were brought together in a single legal instrument agreed to by the international community. It unambiguously spelt out the rights to which every child is entitled, regardless of place of birth, descent, sex, religion, (...) or social origin. A number of aspects, such as gender, family background, cultural acceptance, issues of health and recreation, the legal aspect and so on, have been covered. The life worlds of working children, legal protection to children from exploitation and the human rights perspective of child labour is the main focus of this article. (shrink)

Most scientists and philosophers of science recognize that, when it comes to accepting and rejecting theories in science, considerations that have to do with simplicity, unity, symmetry, elegance, beauty or explanatory power have an important role to play, in addition to empirical considerations. Until recently, however, no one has been able to give a satisfactory account of what simplicity (etc.) is, or how giving preference to simple theories is to be justified. But in the last few years, two different but (...) related accounts have appeared, both of which address the above issues. On the one hand, James McAllister has argued that aesthetic criteria in science reflect scientists' judgements about what kind of theory is most likely to be empirically successful, based on the relative empirical success and failure of different kinds of theories in the past. Scientists employ what McAllister dubs "the aesthetic induction". On the other hand, I have argued that we need to see science as making a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, these assumptions asserting less and less as one ascends the hierarchy. One of the more substantial of these assumptions is that the universe is physically comprehensible. The key non-empirical feature a body of fundamental theories in physics must possess to be acceptable is unity. The better such a body of theory exemplifies the metaphysical thesis that the universe is physically comprehensible, in the sense that it has a unified dynamic structure, so the more acceptable such a body of theory is, from this standpoint. This affects not just theoretical physics, but the whole of natural science. In this paper I compare and contrast, and try to assess impartially the relative merits of, these two views. (shrink)

One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form “S knows that p, rather than q”. In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too relaxed concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge (...) relation. (shrink)

Memory can play two quite different roles in grief. Memories involving a deceased loved one can make them feel either enjoyably present, or especially and painfully absent. In this paper, we consider what makes it possible for memory to play these two different roles, both in grief and more generally. We answer this question by appeal to the phenomenological nature of vivid remembering, and the context in which such memories occur. We argue that different contexts can make salient different aspects (...) of memory's phenomenological nature, thus making what is remembered sometimes feel pleasantly 'present' again, and sometimes painfully absent. (shrink)

Many researchers determine the question “Why anything rather than nothing?” as the most ancient and fundamental philosophical problem. Furthermore, it is very close to the idea of Creation shared by religion, science, and philosophy, e.g. as the “Big Bang”, the doctrine of “first cause” or “causa sui”, the Creation in six days in the Bible, etc. Thus, the solution of quantum mechanics, being scientific in fact, can be interpreted also philosophically, and even religiously. However, only the philosophical interpretation is (...) the topic of the text. The essence of the answer of quantum mechanics is: 1. The creation is necessary in a rigorous mathematical sense. Thus, it does not need any choice, free will, subject, God, etc. to appear. The world exists in virtue of mathematical necessity, e.g. as any mathematical truth such as 2+2=4. 2. The being is less than nothing rather than more than nothing. So, the creation is not an increase of nothing, but the decrease of nothing: it is a deficiency in relation of nothing. Time and its “arrow” are the way of that diminishing or incompleteness to nothing. (shrink)

Haeusermann et al. (Citation2023) draw three overall conclusions from their study on closed loop neuromodulation and self-perception in clinical treatment of refractory epilepsy. The first is that closed-loop neuromodulation devices did not substantially change epileptic patient’s personalities or self-perception postoperatively. The second is that some patients and caregivers attributed observed changes in personality and self-perception to the epilepsy itself and not to the DBS treatments. The third is that the devices provided participants with novel ways to make sense of their (...) illness. These findings further demonstrate a misalignment between some neuroethicists’ concerns about putative postoperative changes to personality, and the empirical evidence for such changes. Haeusermann et al. nonetheless concede that “neurotechnology directed at persisting rather than episodic clinical phenomena could have greater implications for personality or self-perception, either because they operate more continuously or are directed at clinical phenomena that are more stably integrated into patients’ self-concepts” (41). We acknowledge that the hypothesis that participants did not report changes because they were only episodically and not continually stimulated offers an interesting line for future investigation. Nonetheless, we would like to propose that potential postoperative personality changes might be correlated with the pathophysiology itself, rather than the stimulation effects of the technology. Generally, we advance the view that unintended effects solely induced by the technology cannot be excluded per se. Regardless, this comment aims to highlight that ethicists’ starting premise should be that patients suffering from diverse pathophysiology, or patients who are treated with stimulation in different brain regions and with differing parameters, would likely not react in the same way to treatment. (shrink)

Daniel Bell’s writings are often cast as offering a contemporary jeremiad regarding the corrosive effects of culture upon the modern economic and social order. In this paper, I take the opposite approach and argue that Bell is a sensitive cultural analyst who is claiming that human experience ought not to be deprived of culture – understood as symbol and myth that tap into the felt need for human transcendence. Bell could therefore be seen as a strong advocate for the concept (...) of culture, and for a cultural sociology. It is only that the modern (and postmodern) versions of culture do not realize the full potential of culture to move and inspire human actors. The conclusion is reached that what ails modern culture is neither rationalization nor secularization, but rather what Bell termed the ‘Great Profanization’. Rendering culture profane is much more serious, and deleterious, than any of the other specific dynamics sociologists have diagnosed regarding modern culture. (shrink)

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

Formal logic may be an inappropriate framework for understanding perception. The responses of neurons at various levels of the sensory hierarchy may be better described in terms of probability than logic. Analysis and modeling of the multisensory responses of neurons in the midbrain provide a case study.

Daniel Bell’s writings are often cast as offering a contemporary jeremiad regarding the corrosive effects of culture upon the modern economic and social order. In this paper, I take the opposite approach and argue that Bell is a sensitive cultural analyst who is claiming that human experience ought not to be deprived of culture – understood as symbol and myth that tap into the felt need for human transcendence. Bell could therefore be seen as a strong advocate for the concept (...) of culture, and for a cultural sociology. It is only that the modern versions of culture do not realize the full potential of culture to move and inspire human actors. The conclusion is reached that what ails modern culture is neither rationalization nor secularization, but rather what Bell termed the ‘Great Profanization’. Rendering culture profane is much more serious, and deleterious, than any of the other specific dynamics sociologists have diagnosed regarding modern culture. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage TheoryJasbir K. Puar“Grids happen” writes Brian Massumi, at a moment in Parables for the Virtual where one is tempted to be swept away by the endless affirmative becomings of movement, flux, and potential, as opposed to being pinned down by the retroactive positioning of identity (2002, 8). For the most part, Massumi has been less interested in (...) how grids happen than in asking how they can un-happen, or not happen. What the tension between the two purportedly opposing forces signals, at this junction of scholarly criticism, might be thought of as a dialogue between theories that deploy the subject as a primary analytic frame, and those that highlight the forces that make subject formation tenuous, if not impossible or even undesirable. I have seen this tension manifest acutely in my own work on intersectionality and assemblage theory. On the one hand I have been a staunch advocate of what is now commonly known as an intersectional approach: analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation. Numerous feminist thinkers consider intersectionality the dominant paradigm through which feminist theory has analyzed difference; Leslie McCall argues that intersectionality might be considered “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). Intersectional analysis is now a prevalent approach in queer theory.1 At the same time, encountering a poststructuralist fatigue with the now-predictable yet still [End Page 49] necessary demands for subject recognition, I also argued in my book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, that intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented—if not complicated and reconceptualized—by a notion of assemblage. Following Massumi on the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality,” in Terrorist Assemblages I write, “[I]ntersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension... intersectional identities are the byproducts of attempts to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (Puar 2007, 213). Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it; epistemological correctives cannot apprehend ontological becomings; the complexity of process is continually mistaken for a resultant product.2Since the publication of Terrorist Assemblages, in response to anxieties about my apparent prescription to leave intersectionality behind (as if one could), I have often been asked to elaborate on the political usages of assemblages and assemblage theory. A prominent concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, assemblage seems to inspire doubt about its political “ applicability,” while intersectionality seems to hold fast as a successful tool for political and scholarly transformation. Part of the assumption at work in these queries is that representation, and its recognized subjects, is the dominant, primary, or most efficacious platform of political intervention, while a Deleuzian nonrepresentational, non-subject-oriented politics is deemed impossible. Perhaps these queries also reveal concerns about how they might be somehow incompatible or even oppositional, despite the fact that intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous in terms of content, utility, or deployment. As analytics, they may not be reconcilable. Yet they need not be oppositional but rather, I argue, frictional.In what follows, I offer some preliminary thoughts on the limits and possibilities of intersectionality and assemblage and what might be gained by thinking them through and with each other. What are the strengths of each in the realms of theory, political organizing, legal structures, and method? Through highlighting the convivial crossings of these two differentiated but not oppositional genealogies, I offer some thoughts on epistemological correctives in feminist knowledge production—which has been driven, sometimes single-mindedly, by the mandate of intersectional analysis—to see what kinds of futures are possible for feminist theorizing. I reread the formative concept that fueled the metaphoric invocation of intersectionality, specifically Kimberlé Crenshaw’s use of the traffic intersection, to show where intersectionality, as that which retroactively forms the grid and... (shrink)

In economics, thought experiments are frequently justified by the difficulty of conducting controlled experiments. They serve several functions, such as establishing causal facts, isolating tendencies, and allowing inferences from models to reality. In this paper, I argue that thought experiments served a further function in economics: facilitating the quantitative definition and measurement of the theoretical concept of utility, thereby bridging the gap between theory and statistical data. I support my argument by a case study, the “hypothetical experiments” of the Norwegian (...) economist Ragnar Frisch (1895-1973). Frisch aimed to eliminate introspection and a subjective concept of utility from economic reasoning. At the same time, he sought behavioral foundations for economic theory that enabled quantitative reasoning. By using thought experiments to justify his set of choice axioms and facilitating the operationalization of utility, Frisch circumvented the problem of observing utility via actual experiments without eliminating the concept of utility from economic theory altogether. As such, these experiments helped Frisch to empirically support the theory’s most important results, such as the laws of demand and supply, without the input of new empirical findings. I suggest that Frisch’s experiments fulfill the main characteristics of thought experiments. (shrink)

Arbib derives the origin of language from the emergence of a complex imitation system; however, it is unlikely that this complication could occur without a prior complicating within the imitated systems. This means that Arbib's hypothesis is not correct, because the other systems determined the appearance of language. In my opinion, language emerged when the motivational system became able to support goal-directed processes with no innate basis.

My aim here is to answer the question about why is there something rather than nothing by arguing for the existence of some necessary beings (that, as such, couldn’t not exist) – the space, the time, and the natural basic laws – and by showing that the existence of nothingness is logically impossible. I also try to account for the fact that contingent beings arise from necessary beings by distinguishing between necessary existence and necessary arising, as to answer the (...) question about why is there anything contingent at all and to propose a solution to the Dilemma of Contingency. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 90-92.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 139-169.

In this paper I develop a theory of contrastive why questions that establishes under what conditions it is sensible to ask "why p rather than q?". p and q must be outcomes of a single type of causal process.

In chapter I, different types of interpretations of Lessing’s ring-parable are introduced. After a summary of them , the different types are sketched and their plausibility is evaluated . I suggest preferring the interpretation according to which Lessing suggests that, although the truth of religion is undecided, we can nevertheless be epistemically justified to continue believing in our Christian, Jewish, Muslim ...religion . In chapter II, I defend the philosophical tenability of Lessing’s solution. He does not advocate the philosophically untenable (...) idea that truth can be relativized . His contentions should be interpreted as not primarily targeting questions of truth proper but, rather, questions of justification. After sketching the difference between accounts of justification and of truth proper, I show in which fashion Lessing answers questions of justification . In chapter III, I show that a solution along Lessing’s lines brings fresh and promising resources to the study of the philosophy of religion. What I call the standard paradigmin the philosophy of religion, viz. the attempt to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religion, has provided inconclusive results in my judgment. And there is little hope that the decisive argument for or against religion will surface in the foreseeable future. Thus I suggest that, rather than devoting our energies to the standard paradigm, we should devote them to what I call the new paradigm. According to the latter, the question whether or not certain religious utterances are epistemically justified rather than the question whether they are true is crucial . Finally, I show in which fashion William James, Alvin Plantinga, and my own coherentist holism are all proponents of this new paradigm, thus intellectual allies of Lessing. (shrink)

I argue that Žižek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents us with a radically original variety of metaphysics both in terms of Žižek's own intellectual development and the history of philosophy. Rather than being concerned with the study of being qua being, Less Than Nothing proclaims that we ought to investigate nothing qua nothing inasmuch as contemporary physics demonstrates that the more we analyze reality the more we find a void, this latter now in (...) matter of fact exhibiting the traits of ultimate reality rather than the order of the perceived universe. Before arriving at this, however, I demonstrate how Žižek is led to contemporary physics in order to overcome inherent limitations in his own previous metaphysics of Hegelian inspiration. If thinking substance as subject imposes upon us the recognition that substance as a self-articulating totality of necessity is an illusion, subject being nothing but a synonymous for its constitutive tension with itself, if we are to explain how this weakly structured nature does not collapse upon itself we must go further. In this manner, Less Than Nothing outlines one way in which we must step beyond Hegel to find new metaphysical solutions for impasses that have emerged out of thinking the obscure ground of the psychoanalytic subject. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, (...) nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral ‘zero’ that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered. The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical (...) adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something., namely, ‘Thinking Negation in Early Hinduism and Classical Indian Philosophy’ ; and ‘Negation, Non-existents, and a Distinctive Pramāṇa in the Nyāya-Mīmāṃsā’ ).After a discussion of interests in being, non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, published later as ‘What is Metaphysics?’ The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of ‘Metaphysical’ at ‘Nihilism’. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen has given a probabilistic answer to the fundamental question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’: There is something, because the probability of there being nothing is 0. Some philosophers have recently examined van Inwagen's argument and concluded that it does not really work. Three points are central in their criticism: the premise which states that there is only one empty possible world is false, the premise which states that all possible worlds have the same probability (...) is not plausible and the argument is not significant for the question it sets out to answer. In this paper, I shall show that even if there are many empty worlds, this does not necessarily invalidate the argument in its general lines, the examples they offer to support the intuition that possible worlds may have different probabilities fail, and even if the conclusion of the argument does not really answer the question van Inwagen sets out to answer, it is still not an insignificant response to the question. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, (...) nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

As a reply to the commentary (Humphreys in Found Sci, 2012), we explore the methodological implications of seeing artificial neural networks as generic classification tools, we show in which sense the use of descriptions and models in data analysis is not equivalent to the original empirical use of epicycles in describing planetary motion, and we argue that agnostic science is essentially related to the type of problems we ask about a phenomenon and to the processes used to find answers.