Laura Weed

In this paper I will present the accounts of two influential contemporary moral philosophers, Grace Clement and Amartya Sen, to argue for the social context and inter-related nature of autonomy. In fact, there can be no autonomy for anyone without a loving and caring social environment that actively promotes independent thinking and capacity empowerment among people. This social dimension of autonomy has often been ignored by traditional theorists, who have considered autonomy to be an individual accomplishment that is a function of an individual's will power, intellectual ability, or self-discipline and virtue.

This paper compares Kant's positions on space, time, the relational character of noumena, and the relational character of the self, with the somewhat similar accounts of those things in two philosophers of the Kyoto school: Keiji Nishitani and Nishida Kitaro. I will argue that the philosophers of the Kyoto school had a more coherent and better integrated account of those ideas, that was open to Kant. I think that the comparison both clarifies Kant's position on these topics, and elucidates the topics.

This paper will compare some discoveries and debates within contemporary neuroscience to some of Advaita Vedanta's analyses of the mind, as presented in the work of Shankara and some of his followers. I will argue, first, that the conception of mind within Advaita Vedanta provides a better model for contemporary neuroscience than either Cartesian dualism, or its antithesis, reductivist materialism, does. Second, I will show how some discoveries and arguments within contemporary neuroscience could benefit from the Vedantic philosophical framework. Finally, I will show how Vedanta might profit from interactions with contemporary neuroscience, and suggest some areas for cross-fertilization between the Indian philosophical system and contemporary brain science.

: This paper defends James's pragmatic theory of truth from the two most prominent theories of truth in contemporary philosophy: the post-modern deconstructionist theory and the analytic deflationary theory. I argue that truth is an important concept, which can best be understood as framed by James's radical empiricism. Paradigmatic examples such as court testimony, sincerity and personal integrity in speech, and accuracy of description of a recalcitrant reality, as it impacts a stream of consciousness, do a much better job of framing issues related to truth than do 'cats on mats' or the political ramifications of 'schizophrenia.' I argue that this pragmatic concept of truth differs sharply from the trivial correspondence embraced by the deflationist account and the texts-mirroring-texts account espoused by the deconstructionists. I also point out that James's conception of truth is the best for explaining discoveries about language in contemporary neuroscience.