Shiva Rahman

Could there be a balanced philosophical stance capable of accommodating the scientific facts pertaining to free will without compromising the ideal of human freedom and autonomy? A stance that can render intelligible the inferences emerging from the factual analysis of free will in terms of the phenomenon called ‘Readiness Potential’(RP), at the same time, existentially upholding the ideal of freedom? In the present paper, an attempt will be made to bring to light such an existential phenomenological perspective implicit in the philosophy of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the analysis, some of the most relevant scientific facts pertaining to RPs and the corresponding scientific inferences as to the conception of ‘free will’ will be taken into account with a view to see how in this phenomenological scheme they could all be intelligibly accommodated. Once this is achieved, a unique version of compatibilism inherent in Merleau-Ponty’s thought will also be traced.

The formalism of mathematics has always inspired ontological theorization based on it. As is evident from his magnum opus Being and Event, Alain Badiou remains one of the most important contemporary contributors to this enterprise. His famous maxim—“mathematics is ontology” has its basis in the ingenuity that he has shown in capitalizing on Gödel’s and Cohen’s work in the field of set theory. Their work jointly establish the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the standard axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, with Gödel’s result showing their consistency to the affirmative, while Cohen’s showing it to the negative. These results serve as the cornerstone of Badiou’s mathematical ontology. In it, drawing heavily on Cohen’s technically formidable method of forcing, Badiou makes the latter result the key to his defense of the possibility of a faithful tracing of the consequences in the ‘state’ of an ‘event’ by a ‘subject’. Whereas, Gödel’s result based on the assumption of constructability becomes the pivot for criticism of the general philosophical orientation that Badiou calls ‘constructivism’. Viewed from a position internal to mathematical formalism itself, and taking into account the twentieth century developments in the relevant field, Badiou’s stance seems to be neither appreciative of the actual course of such developments, nor just to the philosophical view point that was actually maintained by Gödel. In the present paper, this concern is intended to be substantiated through an exposition of certain facts pertaining to the said developments as well as to Gödel’s philosophical inclinations.

We have become a singularly confessing society…. [The confession] plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites: one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell…. One confesses—or is forced to confess.This is an observation made decades before all the changes that information and communication technology have brought about in our social and personal lives lately. With the impositions of the current pandemic scenario added, we have now literally become confessing...

The field of enquiry into the phenomenon of language has long been dominated by the Computational-Representational (C-R) theories of language. This seems to be the most natural and plausible state of affairs, given the revolutionary impact that the advent of computers and the emergence of information technology have had in our lives lately. Noam Chomsky’s variant has been the most influential among such theories. However, there are certain conceptual issues pertaining to the very method, object and modality of the Chomskyan project. In the present paper, I will try to locate these issues and contend that they arise from the peculiar conception of human embodiment involved in the propositions forming the Chomskyan scheme of language. They come to light only when engaged closely with from a phenomenological viewpoint. And this will be done in the first part. Once this is done, I will propose an alternative approach towards language, contained in the phenomenological insights on human embodiment and perception of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty. I will also hint at how befitting this alternative scheme is to the connectionist-neural network models of language, which are fast replacing the C–R models lately.

The problem of alienation has come to the focus of philosophical discourse in terms of cogito’s loss of immediacy with the body and intimacy with the world, ever since Descartes—the founding father of modern thought—had his famous meditations. Putting the problem of alienation at the focus of philosophy, how should this human situation be reflected upon and the problem be addressed or dissolved at the least? One thing is clear that the method of enquiry cannot be purely intellectual wherein the subject–object dichotomy has to be rigorously maintained. Rather, it has to turn intuitive at some stage, so that human subjective consciousness could be given its due place in the enquiry and the interplay of it with and the embeddedness of it in the material reality be revealed and accounted for as well. Only such an approach would address the problem at hand. But one cannot remain very optimistic about Western philosophy in this endeavor, due to the reasons to be elaborated in present paper. It is in this context that an enquiry into other philosophical systems becomes relevant. In the Eastern philosophical traditions, the issue at hand is addressed more creatively. Particularly in the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian Philosophy, the problem of alienation is tackled in an original way by elevating altogether the ‘being of man’ to a different level by way of an existential blending of his intellectual and intuitive capacities. Precisely in the Taittiriya Upanishad, man’s true nature is formulated in tune with nature, giving it a unique existential thrust. This conception once elaborated seems to be capable of productively addressing the issue at hand. An attempt will be made in the paper, at elucidating this view.

Martin Buber has always made it clear that his dialogic principle is not to be treated as an abstract conception but an ontological reality. But admittedly, in I And Thou he could only point to such reality and could not properly present it in discursive prose. However there are instances in the text where he strives to do the latter. One particular instance is where he elaborates the emergence of consciousness of “I”. Through this elaboration, what Buber has tried to point at is the bringing forth of the primary word ‘I-It’ forming part of his dialogic principle, as it ‘emerges round about’ the perceptual consciousness realised in body as some sort of a ‘primitive function of knowledge’. However, this still amounts only to an abstract conception, and not to a description of ontological reality as Buber would have aspired for. Hence the thought: what if there exists an endeavour carried out independently of Buber’s work, nevertheless in the same spirit as Buber but without his notorious mixing up of philosophy and religion? There indeed has been such an Existential-phenomenological take on embodiment and perception by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as is laid out in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. In the present paper we will explicate this interesting coincidence, thereby honouring Buber’s aspiration for ontological status to his dialogic principle, at the same time demonstrating how existentially resonating and ontologically converging the thought of these two great thinkers’ have been, though they had totally different intellectual pursuits and concerns.

© 2015 Rahman et al.Mathematical models predict an exponential distribution of infection prevalence across communities where a disease is disappearing. Trachoma control programs offer an opportunity to test this hypothesis, as the World Health Organization has targeted trachoma for elimination as a public health concern by the year 2020. Local programs may benefit if a single survey could reveal whether infection was headed towards elimination. Using data from a previously-published 2009 survey, we test the hypothesis that Chlamydia trachomatis prevalence across 75 Tanzanian communities where trachoma had been documented to be disappearing is exponentially distributed. We fit multiple continuous distributions to the Tanzanian data and found the exponential gave the best approximation. Model selection by Akaike Information Criteria suggested the exponential distribution had the most parsimonious fit to the data. Those distributions which do not include the exponential as a special or limiting case had much lower likelihoods of fitting the observed data. 95% confidence intervals for shape parameter estimates of those distributions which do include the exponential as a special or limiting case were consistent with the exponential. Lastly, goodness-of-fit testing was unable to reject the hypothesis that the prevalence data came from an exponential distribution. Models correctly predict that infection prevalence across communities where a disease is disappearing is best described by an exponential distribution. In Tanzanian communities where local control efforts had reduced the clinical signs of trachoma by 80% over 10 years, an exponential distribution gave the best fit to prevalence data. An exponential distribution has a relatively heavy tail, thus occasional high-prevalence communities are to be expected even when infection is disappearing. A single cross-sectional survey may be able to reveal whether elimination efforts are on-track.