Amita Chatterjee

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop.

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that _p_, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that _p_, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects.

If a quiz‐master were to ask the question, “Is there anything common among the philosophies of the world?” the answer that should come from the participants with perfect aplomb is, “Yes, the concern for truth.” The presumed unanimity of this response, however, does not imply that philosophers possess a uniform understanding of the notion of truth. There are, indeed, many similarities in the way great minds think on this topic, yet divergences among them are also too significant to be ignored. In this article, therefore, I propose to expound the various aspects of truth from a typically Indian perspective (although, of course, in the contemporary philosophical idiom) before making a comparative assessment of different philosophical theories of truth.

Right from its inception, Indian Ethics has been dharma-centric which can be justifiably translated as virtue-centric. Yet, in most of the global ethical literature, ethicists have been found to engage in Greek ethics and Chinese ethics in discussions of virtue ethics where Indian ethics is conspicuously absent. So, the first objective of my paper is to highlight the nature of Indian ethics as a virtue ethics. Drawing on the resources of the Dharmaśāstra-s, the Vedanta literature and the Bhagavad Gita, I would like to establish that though Indian theorists have laid down definite sets of rules of conduct, moral prescriptions and prohibitions, yet these have always been subservient to the goal of attaining a kind of excellence, i.e., being a certain kind of person by realizing the divinity already existing in man. The second objective of the paper is to show that Indian ethics is a genuine brand of Virtue Ethics and not merely a Virtue Theory though many interpreters of the Gita have often placed its ethics within consequentialist or deontological frame.

In this anthology, we insert a review as a supplement that provides relevant ethical insights on the richest document available on society, polity and value system of ancient India. Analysis of a critique is made as a nested analysis, originated by Indian Logician, Bimal Krishna Matilal. This rich discursive confluence is highlighted to identify the gap in the moral philosophical literature. Chakravarti is shown to circumnavigate the philosophy of Matilal by providing a relevant ‘philosophical interpretation and the possible universal message of the epic.’ There, moral ideas and duty-based ethical duties listed in the Mahabharata that can be divided into three categories: Universal duties (sadharana dharma-s); Duties emanating from the concept of debt (ṛṇa); and Duties relative to one’s station of life (varnasrama-dharama). In the grand scheme of the epic, four virtues have been identified as the principles underlying all virtuous acts. These are: truth, forgiveness, sympathy to others and non-attachment to the objects of the senses, and they are interconnected in the sense that ‘each is a necessary and sufficient condition for the rest. Truth has a loftier dimension than ‘the implicit idea of justice, the cosmic moral principle that gets manifested in all spheres of existence.’ Chakravarti links ṛta in the human context with the concept of mokṣa, the ultimate freedom. This existential conception of freedom, thinks Chakravarti, lies at the basis of the freedom of choice. When one’s transformation is complete, one is free to perform moral acts in the right spirit, ensuring the well-being of all spontaneously. Truth merges with non-violence and forgiveness. One requires extra-ordinary moral sensitivity to reinterpret ṛta suitably for each age, though. This is the view of both Chakravarti and Matilal. Emphasis on intuition and imaginative vision leads Chakravarti to give up reason-based morality, and locate a resonant spiritual message of the epic in the writings Rabindranath Tagore. Chakravarti’s interpretation of the Gita is off the beaten track, yet it successfully throws light on two important concepts of the Gita, svadharma and karmayoga in consonance with ṛta. His comments and conclusions are provocative enough to generate a lot of debates. I hope this brings into focus ethical insights, as readers engage with him the progress of detachment from sensual pleasures, and attainment of peace in a state of equilibrium away from the shackles of worldly attachment in moral philosophy.

Working in the tradition of world philosophy, this book puts Western virtue ethics in conversation with traditional Indian philosophies. The book begins with a contribution from Michael Slote on ‘World Philosophy: The Importance of India,’ which is followed by contributions covering metaethical topics such as the relationship between Western virtue ethics and various Indian philosophical traditions, and applied topics such as environmental ethics, business ethics, ethics and science, and moral psychology. Contributors include scholars working in both North America and India.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism.

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

The main aim of this chapter is to trace the naturalistic traits present in classical Indian philosophical systems, which are well known for their “spiritual” orientation. Having set aside initial doubts regarding the possibility of discovering naturalism in the Indian philosophical scenario, it draws attention to different kinds of naturalism, viz., ontological, methodological, semantic, linguistic, moral, and aesthetic. With reference to ontological naturalism, it discusses in detail the full‐fledged naturalism of the Cārvāka materialists, the mitigated naturalism of the Naiyāyika‐s, the Buddhists, and the Jainas, and the protonaturalism of the Sāmkhya philosophers. It then discusses methodological naturalism mainly with reference to the Nyāya epistemology and moral naturalism, keeping in mind those philosophical systems which uphold that moral values can be understood in terms of moral facts and therefore question the validity of the fact/value distinction.

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.

These essays, as the editor has very aptly put it, indeed “provide insights into both Indian philosophy and Mohanty—Indian philosophy via Mohanty and Mohanty via and beyond Indian philosophy”. Though the articles were written on different occasions, I think there is a central idea around which colorful strands of thoughts are woven. Mohanty’s main preoccupation here is to build a bridge between tradition and modernity through hermeneutic reinterpretation. This is how in every epoch outstanding philosophers have advanced philosophical thinking by examining issues from within the tradition. For like men, concepts and words too grow in course of time. So, shows Mohanty, Samkara, Gandhi, Aurobindo, K. C. Bhattachryya, N. V. Banerjee, B. K. Matilal, P. K. Mukhopadhyay—all were engaged in this exercise in their own way, at their own times; only the tools of analysis were different in each case.