Department of Philosophy

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

In ‘Colonialism, territory and pre-existing obligations,’ Cara Nine argues that Lea Ypi’s account of the wrongness of colonialism has a hole in it: Ypi leaves open the possibility of justified settler colonialism. Nine suggests that we can patch this hole by attaching value to existing political associations. But Nine’s solution has its own hole. Many political associations exist due to settler colonialism, and thus if we endorse the value of these associations we seem to endorse colonialism. In response, we could say that past colonial injustices have been remediated or superseded. Or, we could leave the hole open: colonialism is sometimes justified. I argue that, surprisingly, the second option is likely preferable, because it does not require us to say that the injustices of colonialism are gone, and because it points towards a better theory of colonialism’s wrongness than Ypi’s: cosmopolitan instrumentalism, according to which colonialism is wrong only when it is unjust according to one’s overall theory of cosmopolitan justice.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

Colonialism, injustices of the past, and the hole in Nine

Philosophical Quarterly

Must i Accept Prosecution for Civil Disobedience?

One of the more distinctive features of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's neologicism about arithmetic is their invocation of Frege's Constraint – roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. In particular, they maintain that, if adopted, Frege's Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation – Hume's Principle – and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind-Peano axioms. In what follows we establish two main claims. First, we show that, if sound, Hale and Wright's arguments for Frege's Constraint at most establish a version on which the relevant application of the naturals is transitive counting – roughly, the counting procedure by which numerals are used to answer “how many”-questions. Second, we show that this version of Frege's Constraint fails to adjudicate in favor of Hume's Principle. If this is the version of Frege's Constraint that a foundation for arithmetic must respect, then Hume's Principle no more – and no less – meets the requirement than the Dedekind-Peano axioms do. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

World University root node

Nous

Neologicism, Frege's Constraint, and the Frege-Heck Condition

The article concerns a mediaeval Indian debate over whether, and if so how, we can know that a self (ātman) exists, understood here as a subject of cognition (jñātṛ) that outlives individual cognitions, being their common substrate. A passage that has not yet been translated from Sanskrit into a European language, from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī (c. 890 CE), ‘Blossoms of Reasoning’, is examined. This rich passage reveals something not yet noted in secondary literature, namely that Mīmāṃsakas advanced four different models of what happens when the self perceives itself. The article clarifies the differences between the four, and the historical and logical relationships between them. It also hypothesizes pressures that constituted the need for the creation of the newer views, i.e. perceived problems with the earlier views, which the proponents of the newer views saw themselves as overcoming. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.

Journal of Indian Philosophy

Four Mīmāṃsā Views Concerning the Self’s Perception of Itself

Journal of Value Inquiry

On the Alleged Laziness of Moral Realists

Essays on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic

Frege on the Real Numbers

We address a puzzle about the meanings of fraction words, due to Nathan Salmon. Counting 2 (Formula presented.) oranges seemingly requires enumerating a collection of objects with a non-whole cardinal number, which is incoherent by the lights of traditional analyses of cardinality expressions. Thus, some argue that counting 2 (Formula presented.) oranges really amounts to measuring quantities of orange-stuff. However, we claim that ‘2 (Formula presented.) oranges’ is ambiguous between counting- and measuring-interpretations; and recognizing this affords a novel solution to Salmon’s puzzle that is consistent with traditional analyses. © 2019, © 2019 Australasian Association of Philosophy.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

How To Count 2 Oranges

Prominent figures in the philosophical literature on attention hold that the connection between attention and selection is essential (Mole, 2011), necessary (Wu, 2011 and 2014), or conceptual (Smithies, 2011). I argue that selection is neither essentially, necessarily, nor conceptually tied to attention. I first isolate the target conception of selection that I deny is so tightly coupled with attention: graded intramodal selection within consciousness. I analyse two visual cases: analysis of the first case shows that there can be attention without a connection to tasks or action and analysis of the second case shows that there can be attention without a phenomenal foreground/background structure. Finally, I extend the argument into the domain of the body by considering a form of meditative absorption in body sensations to recapitulate the conclusions drawn from the two visual cases.

Journal of Consciousness Studies

Meditative attention to bodily sensations: Conscious attention without selection?

This essay contrasts Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Buddhist explanations of attention. Section 1 lays out the ontological postulates that Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhists deemed necessary for the explanation of attention. Section 2 looks at three arguments that the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas gave for their principal postulate, the manas, and three corresponding Buddhist responses to these arguments. Sections 3 and 4 look at contrasting Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Buddhist explanations of, respectively, "shifts of attention" and "competition for attention." Section 5 considers whether the Buddhist model can adequately account for voluntary or endogenous attention, and whether the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika model can adequately account for involuntary or exogenous attention. The final section identifies three things that are commonly attributed to attention and that may seem impossible in both the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and the Buddhist models; it shows how the two Indian models can account for them.

Philosophy East and West

Contrasting nyaya-vaise?ika and buddhist explanations of attention

The chapter looks at positions taken in the self versus no-self debate between Buddhism and the Brahmanical traditions. Section 1 identifies key issues in the debate between Nyāya and Buddhism. Section 2 introduces the Śaiva Siddhānta view, honouring its self-representation as falling in the middle ground between Nyāya and Buddhism. Section 3 argues that this self-representation is misleading, that Śaiva Siddhānta’s position is just as extreme as Nyāya’s, and then diagnoses this polarization of the debate as resulting from a shared presupposition. Section 4 identifies some better candidates for the middle ground - Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, Jainism, Personalist Buddhism (pudgalavāda) and ‘Buddhism without momentariness’ - and explicates their views by placing them on a spectrum. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Purushottama Bilimoria; individual chapters, the contributors.

History of Indian Philosophy

A spectrum of metaphysical positions concerning the existence or non- existence of a self: Nyāya, śaiva siddhānta, mīmāṃsā, jainism and buddhism