S. K. Sarkar

This book is a collection of papers which reflect the recent trends in the philosophy and history of molecular biology. It brings together historians, philosophers, and molecular biologists who reflect on the discipline's emergence in the 1950's, its explosive growth, and the directions in which it is going. Questions addressed include: (i) what are the limits of molecular biology? (ii) What is the relation of molecular biology to older subdisciplines of biology, especially biochemistry? (iii) Are there theories in molecular biology? (iv) If so, how are these theories structured? (v) What role did information theory play in the rise of molecular biology? The book will open the way for many future researchers.

This article is a systematic critical survey of work done in the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist tradition, beginning in the 1930s and until the end of the 1950s. It challenges a popular view that the logical empiricists either ignored biology altogether or produced analyses of little value. The earliest work on the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist corpus was that of Philipp Frank, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Felix Mainx. Mainx, in particular, provided a detailed analysis of biology in the 1930s and 1940s in his contribution to the logical empiricists’ Encyclopedia of Unified Science. However, the most important contributions to the philosophy of biology were those of Joseph Henry Woodger and Ernest Nagel. Woodger is primarily remembered for deploying the axiomatic method in biology but he also used semiformal methods for the analysis of many biological problems. While Woodger’s axiomatic work was often derided by some later philosophers of biology (e.g., David Hull and Michael Ruse), this article defends both the biological and the philosophical significance of some of that work, for instance, those aspects that led to the recognition of the conceptual complexity of mereology and temporal identity in biological systems. Woodger’s semiformal analyses were even more important, for instance, his explication of the concepts of the Bauplan and of innateness. Nagel’s importance lies in his analyses of reduction and emergence in the context of all empirical sciences and his use of these analyses in a careful exploration of biological problems. While Nagel’s model of reduction was generally rejected by philosophers of science in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly for biological contexts, it has recently been sympathetically reconstructed by many commentators; this article defends its continued relevance for the philosophy of biology.

One of the basic observations of the classical world is that physical entities are real and can be distinguished from each other. However, within quantum theory, the idea of physical realism is not well established. A framework to analyse how observations in experiments can be described using some physical states of reality was recently developed, known as ontological models framework. Different principles when imposed on the ontological level give rise to different theories, the validity of which can be tested based on the statistics generated by these theories. Using the ontological models framework, we formulate a novel notion of classicality termed ontic-distinguishability, which is based upon the physical principles that in classical theories extremal states are physical states of reality and every sharp measurement observes the state of the system perfectly. We construct a communication task in which the success probability is bounded from above for ontological models satisfying the notion of ontic-distinguishability. Contrary to previous notions of classicality which either required systems of dimension strictly greater than two or atleast three preparations, a violation of ontic-distinguishability can be observed using just a pair of qubits and a pair of incompatible measurements. We further show that violation of previously known notions of classicality such as preparation non-contextuality and Bell’s local causality is a violation of ontic-distinguishability.

We study a multilateral bargaining problem, where the buyer intends to purchase a subset of available items, each owned by a seller. The subset purchased must satisfy a notion of contiguity, which is modeled using graphs. The graph theoretic approach allows us to study different degrees of complementarity and substitutability between items. It also allows us to examine how degrees of complementarity and substitutability affect the share of surplus obtained by the buyer in the equilibrium of the bargaining game. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the graphs for the buyer to extract full surplus in subgame perfect equilibrium. When the conditions are not met, we provide upper bounds on the equilibrium surplus share of the buyer.

Contemporary India is a primitive, patriarchal society of various feudal tribes. When we refer to caste in Considering the education system to be secular in the sense, when dealing with minority participation, we must bear in mind the debate expressed by Irfan Ahmed that “the characterization of minorities is not just numbers but a comparative and powerless position vis-a-vis the majority community in a given government”. Socio-religious issues dominate the understanding of minority female students and their participation in the education system while the existing considerations are subject to the internal affairs of the state; The current social conditions affected by the pandemic have changed and forced these conditions to be watched out for in order to create a global education system. Using qualitavie and survey research methods. This study aims to take advantage of this global space to investigate the participation status of Muslim female students and to identify areas for improvement.

With the advent of the Human Genome Project there have been many claims for the genetic origins of complex human behavior including insanity, criminality, and intelligence. But what does it really mean to call something 'genetic'? This is the fundamental question that Sahotra Sarkar's book addresses. The author analyses the nature of reductionism in classical and molecular genetics. He shows that there are two radically different kinds of reductionist explanation: genetic reduction (as found in classical genetics) and physical reduction (found in molecular genetics). This important book clarifies the meaning of the term 'genetic', shows how molecular studies have affected genetics, and provides the philosophical background necessary to understand the debates over the Human Genome Project. It will be of particular interest to professionals and students in the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the social studies of science, medicine, and technology.

Background and rationale Clinicians often encounter a variety of ethical challenges in their routine clinical practice, and it varies across healthcare and cultural settings of their practice. Despite of this, there are no clear-cut available guidelines concerning the right course of action in a given ethically challenging situation. A validated instrument that could capture the health care providers’ (HCP’s) viewpoints in this regard is lacking from Indian settings. Thus, the current study aimed at developing an instrument to assess the HCP’s perspective regarding different ethically challenging situations encountered in the Indian settings. Methods The questionnaire was developed by involving 15 medical experts. A mixed-method approach, Delphi-technique, and online survey were used for item generation and validation. Results The questionnaire comprised of 11 items (accounts 57% variance; having an α = 0.68) representing four factors: health-resource constraints, medical responsibility of the HCP, obtaining patients/family members’ consent for the treatment, and treatment beyond the standard protocol. The gender and clinical disciplines of the participants were related to their level of endorsement for various domains of the ECCS-Q. Conclusions Ethical challenges in the clinical practice fall in different clusters. The clinicians’ course of action in such situations have many socio-demographic and professional determinants. Future studies are warranted to investigate these phenomena.

The first in-depth reference in the field that combines scientific knowledge with philosophical inquiry, _The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia_ is a two-volume set that brings together an international team of leading scholars to provide over 130 entries on the essential concepts in the philosophy of science. _The areas covered include:_ biology chemistry epistemology and metaphysics physics psychology and mind the social sciences key figures in the combined studies of science and philosophy. The essays represent the most up-to-date philosophical thinking on timeless scientific topics such as: determinism, explanation, laws of nature, perception, individuality, time, and economics as well as timely topics like adaptation, conservation biology, quantum logic, consciousness, evolutionary psychology, and game theory.

Since the 1980s, Bryan Norton’s work has exerted a major influence on the field of environmental philosophy, demonstrating the potential of a more interdisciplinary and pragmatic approach to the moral, epistemological and methodological dimensions of the human-environment relationship. More recently, Norton has been an important voice in the emergence of the sustainability agenda, both in the academy and across the wider management and policy communities. This chapter introduces the volume, A Sustainable Philosophy, which collects fifteen thoughtful and probing contributions from a diverse assembly of authors from an array of disciplines—including environmental philosophy, but also biology, public policy, environmental economics, environmental history, and natural resource management—exploring the contours and value of Norton’s work and its continuing relevance. An overview of the book is provided, as well as an evaluation of Norton’s intellectual and professional legacy for environmental philosophy, sustainability studies, and environmental decision making and management.

The role of CPT invariance and consequences for bipartite entanglement of neutral (K) mesons are discussed. A relaxation of CPT leads to a modification of the entanglement which is known as the ω effect. The relaxation of assumptions required to prove the CPT theorem are examined within the context of models of space-time foam. It is shown that the evasion of the EPR type entanglement implied by CPT (which is connected with spin statistics) is rather elusive. Relaxation of locality (through non-commutative geometry) or the introduction of an environment do not by themselves lead to a destruction of the entanglement. One model of the environment, which is based on non-critical strings and D-particle capture and recoil, leads to a specific momentum dependent stochastic contribution to the space-time metric and consequent change in the neutral meson bipartite entanglement. Although the class of models producing the omega effect is non-empty, the lack of an omega effect is demonstrated for a wide class of models based on thermal like baths which are often considered as generic models appropriate for the study of space-time foam

The transformation from industrial social work to corporate social responsibility points out a definite shift in the realm of social work vis-á-vis goal, objective and priorities of business. Over the past several decades social workers around the world have successfully been able to integrate with the modern production and business processes, particularly in addressing the emergent needs of the industrial population like those arising out of the psychosocial impact of workforce alienation, over-specialization, competitiveness, and stress and fatigue on their life. Over all these years, as there has been a major transformation in defining human beings in the context of business from human resource to human capital, the corporate has also been restructuring its role in revitalizing its human resources alongside taking care of the vast external stakeholders (customers) through its new slogan of ‘corporate social responsibility’. But this new configuration lends itself to the process of self-examination and the litmus test remains: Is corporate social responsibility a new area structured to delineate the corporate's idea of greater variety of social services for humankind; or just one more catchphrase used to establish the fact that business houses are doing ‘a lot more’ than mere expansion of industrial social work; or has there been a change in the principal objective and priority of the corporate at the back of starting these programmes—from curbing loss to ‘just making profit’?