Review of "Quick and Concise: Philosophy" Vaishali Gahlyan Guest Faculty, Miranda House College, Delhi University Book Review # Jul 24, 2025 Book review of Shamik Chakravarty's Quick and Concise: Philosophy (Hachette India, 2025). Shamik Chakravarty’s A Quick and Concise Introduction to Philosophy is a refreshing and intellectually sincere attempt to bring philosophical reflection into accessible terrain. If one had to recommend a single text to ignite philosophical curiosity without intimidation, this would be it. I suggest, ‘A must-read for minds that wonder and wander’. While most beginner-level philosophy books shy away from topics like the philosophy of art and Skepticism, Chakravarti boldly includes them and this choice alone elevates the book above typical primers. Structured into accessible, argument-driven chapters, the book journeys through serious philosophical questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, always grounding abstractions in vivid thought experiments—from Descartes’ Evil Demon, the Brain-in-a-Vat to Gettier cases, Swampman, and Ship of Theseus. The author made a bold attempt to draw strong cross-cultural comparisons: Dharmakīrti and Gangesa are placed alongside Putnam, while Nāṭyaśāstra’s rasa theory dialogues with Beardsley’s aesthetic intention. Author’s style is conversational yet not condescending; technical without being arcane, prose is elegant without jargon, philosophical without pedantry. He invites readers not into dogma, but dialogue—an approach invaluable for pedagogy. And because of this approach, the book is equally useful for undergraduate classrooms, civil services preparation, high school students or general readers hungry for clarity without compromise. And yet, it does not oversimplify; each chapter ends with open questions, gently nudging the reader toward deeper reflection. That said, some limitations remain. The Indian perspectives, though sincerely integrated, often appear in passing—more like philosophical footnotes than equal interlocutors. Similarly, some dense conceptual debates (e.g., skepticism or personal identity) are outlined with brevity that may leave curious readers wanting more. The book’s analytic focus also leaves limited room for continental traditions, feminist ethics, or existential urgency. Nonetheless, as a pedagogical tool, it is a powerful asset: precise in exposition, economical in length, and dialogical in tone. The book doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive—but in what it does cover, it teaches philosophy as both a method and Praxis, which is the need of hour as so much work is going globally in Philosophical Praxis, also the book offers a blend of theory and practical examples evident in almost all the chapters. Chapter 1 is a well-crafted entry point, presenting philosophy as a rigorous discipline rooted in argumentation, logical clarity, and the courage to scrutinize our most basic assumptions. In rejecting the popular image of philosophers as mystics or self-help sages, the chapter reclaims philosophy as an intellectual craft—one that thrives on both deductive and inductive reasoning, and demands precision in thought. It offers a panoramic view of philosophy’s major domains—ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, mind-body theory, and even aesthetics— making it an ideal outset for the book. Ethical debates like abortion or capital punishment ground philosophy in real-world dilemmas, while metaphysics and epistemology confront timeless puzzles about reality, knowledge, and truth. The discussion of Sellars’s “manifest image” versus the “scientific image” is a highlight, dramatizing the tension between our lived, human experience and cold scientific reductionism. Yet despite its strengths, the chapter suffers from what might be called analytic parochialism . It offers a “constricted portrait” that privileges logical rigor over ethical seriousness, spiritual depth, or phenomenological insight. There is little room here for the Socratic imperative to “know thyself,” the existential urgency of Camus (who declared suicide the only serious philosophical question), or Foucault’s vision of philosophy as “a practice of self, of freedom, and of critique.” In its precision, the chapter excels. Chapter 2 succeeds in presenting a panoramic and intellectually rigorous account of how different philosophical traditions have addressed the meaning of life. Chakrabarti charts a philosophically ambitious journey through the terrain of life’s meaning—without ever pretending that there’s a single, satisfying destination. With admirable clarity, he juxtaposes the mythic defiance of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus with the sober skepticism of Thomas Nagel ( The Absurd ), who sees absurdity not in cosmic indifference but in our very ability to reflect.Chakrabarti balances metaphysical rebellion with grounded responses—like Richard Taylor’s Good and Evil , where meaning stems from inner desire, and Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters , which offers a hybrid view: meaning lies in passionately engaging with “projects of worth.” Chakrabarti insightfully connects this to Aristotelian eudaimonia and Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of narrative unity. However, it also raises unanswered questions: Can meaning be fully subjective? What is the standard for “worth”? Is cosmic purpose necessary or dispensable? In attempting to reconcile these views, the chapter not only educates but also invites readers into philosophy’s deepest and most personal question. As Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’” (Frankl, 1946/2006). The chapter does not give us that ‘why’—but it does illuminate the many paths by which it might be found. Chapter 3 is a philosophically alive, critically engaged, and pedagogically effective treatment of morality and normative ethics. Chakrabarti does not simply explain theories; he animates them, juxtaposes them, and tests their limits. The chapter’s strength lies in its refusal to offer easy answers. Instead, it leaves the reader with better questions—and a sharpened moral imagination. The chapter begins with Cultural Relativism, using Ruth Benedict to challenge moral universalism, while critics like Bernard Williams and Mary Midgley raise tough questions about ethical paralysis and judgment across cultures. Psychological Egoism is dissected through the Lincoln piglet anecdote, exposing the fallacy of reducing all kindness to self-interest. With Utilitarianism, Chakrabarti tackles the ethical arithmetic of Mill and Singer, showing both its appeal and its dangers—especially when happiness outweighs justice. Kantian ethics then shifts the focus to duty, dignity, and the Categorical Imperative, with Onora O’Neill’s famine ethics offering a striking real-world application. Chakrabarti skillfully presents Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics as a character-centered approach to morality, weaving in Hursthouse’s nuanced take on abortion and the concept of phronesis . He enriches this non-western ethical tapestry by integrating Buddhist mindfulness too and later through Greene’s neuroscientific dual-process theory offers cognitive depth. The chapter avoids moral dogma, leaving us not with answers, but better tools—and deeper questions. One might wish for more engagement with feminist or care ethics, or with contemporary debates in metaethics, but given the scope and purpose of the book, these omissions are understandable. Chapter 4, plunges into one of philosophy’s most tantalizing riddles: Are we truly free, or just well-dressed puppets of causality? Beginning with the bold moral act of whistleblower Dinesh Thakur, Chakrabarti raises the stakes—our legal systems, moral responsibility, and self-respect hinge on the assumption of free will. But determinism quickly enters like a philosophical wrecking ball: if every action is causally determined, could we ever have done otherwise? Libertarianism is explored through the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), then refined via Robert Kane’s “self-forming actions” that emerge from internal moral conflict. Agent causation theorists like O’Connor and Kevin Mitchell offer naturalized views preserving responsibility within a scientific worldview. Chakrabarti presents compatibilism— especially Frankfurt’s model of second-order volitions—as a powerful alternative, showing how one can be morally responsible even without alternative options. Yet, through Susan Wolf’s “JoJo” case, he questions whether internal coherence suffices for freedom when autonomy itself is shaped by corrupt contexts. Libet’s neuroscience experiments raise empirical challenges, but Chakrabarti resists reductionism, referencing critiques and newer studies that uphold deliberation in complex decisions. The tension between determinism and moral accountability is not resolved here (nor could it be), but readers come away better equipped to understand the stakes and structure of the problem. And though the chapter could have further engaged with existential and Eastern views,still it stands as a philosophically rich and accessible map of one of philosophy’s most enduring dilemmas: Do we choose, or are we chosen by cause? In Chapter 5, Chakrabarti undertakes the most classical and intense epistemological question—what is knowledge?—with philosophical precision and pedagogical finesse. Beginning with the tripartite model of Justified True Belief (JTB), Chakrabarti clarifies the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions, illustrating with sharp analogies and conditional logic. Yet the chapter’s intellectual pivot comes with Edmund Gettier’s 1963 challenge, which shattered JTB’s sufficiency through clever counterexamples, revealing how epistemic luck can satisfy all conditions yet still fall short of genuine knowledge. He then moves systematically through responses: the No False Lemmas approach fails under Feldman’s variation; Goldman’s Causal Theory is tested by the Fake Barn case, thus leading to discussions on externalism, this also reflects Williamson’s “safety” condition. Nozick’s Tracking Theory offers an elegant model but stumbles under Kripke’s red-green barn puzzle. The No Defeaters theory introduces a regress problem—how many defeaters can be defeated before knowledge collapses? Chakrabarti critically engages BonJour’s Clairvoyant Norman, challenging Reliabilism, and introduces Zagzebski’s “inescapability of Gettier problems”, which undermines all definitions separating justification and truth. A comparative turn brings in Dharmottara’s mirage and the Nyāya theory of pramāṇa, revealing striking parallels with modern causal and reliabilist accounts. The chapter closes with experimental philosophy, the figure of the Ideal Knower, raising doubts about whether knowledge can ever be fully defined. While the chapter masterfully unpacks epistemology but its structure mirrors the very fragmentation it critiques—layer after layer of fixes that never quite resolve the problem. Through examples, Eastern and Western traditions, and sharp critiques, Chakrabarti suggests that the real task may not be to define knowledge, but to understand why it resists final analysis. Chapter 6, confronts one of philosophy’s most enduring anxieties: How do we know anything about the external world? Through Descartes’ Evil Demon and the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment, he illustrates how epistemic closure—if you know p, and p entails q, you must know q—is turned against us. Timothy Williamson, however, rejects this fragility by treating knowledge as a fundamental mental state, immune to decomposition. The chapter surveys a rich tapestry of responses. G.E. Moore’s “Here is a hand” reverses the skeptic’s premise through modus tollens, asserting that if I know I have hands, I can’t be a BIV. Contextualists like Keith DeRose, David Lewis, and Stewart Cohen rescue knowledge claims by showing how epistemic standards shift with context. Meanwhile, Putnam’s semantic externalism collapses the skeptical scenario under its own logic—if you’ve always been a BIV, you can’t meaningfully assert it. Vogel’s Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) refutes skepticism abductively: the Real-World Hypothesis explains our experience more simply than the Minimal Skeptical Hypothesis, invoking Occam’s Razor. Still, skeptics persist. Relevant Alternatives Theory (RAT), pioneered by Fred Dretske, narrows knowledge requirements— we need not rule out every fantastical alternative, only relevant ones. Chakrabarti draws brilliant parallels to Nyāya philosophers like Uddyotakara and Gangeśa, who also reject radical doubt unless specific defeating conditions ( bādhaka ) are present. Even Experimental Philosophy (x-phi) gets a voice, showing that lay intuitions often resist full-blown skepticism. While the chapter strikes a fine balance between analytic rigor and accessibility, it occasionally skims over unresolved tensions—especially around abductive reasoning and its philosophical limits. The chapter’s greatest strength lies in its intellectual restraint—it resists the temptation to offer premature closure—but this very openness leaves the reader wondering: is realism just the best story we can tell, or is it epistemically secure? Chapter 7, this expansive and provocative chapter examines the metaphysical enigma of personal identity. From Locke’s memory-based theory to Parfit’s psychological continuity and the soul theory’s spiritual roots, the chapter maps philosophical attempts to understand what makes us the same person over time. Through the iconic Teletransporter thought experiment, the reader confronts the clash between qualitative and numerical identity. Locke’s “Prince and Cobbler” case, Reid’s memory-gap objection, and Parfit’s q-memory innovation all test the viability of memory-based accounts. Shoemaker, Schechtman, and Butler deepen the debate with concerns over circularity and personality. Chakrabarti then surveys bodily and brain-based theories, presenting Bernard Williams’s torture cases and Olson’s animalism , while engaging the ethical dilemmas of Dissociative Identity Disorder. The split-brain studies of Sperry and Gazzaniga support the radical No-Self View , echoing Hume’s Bundle Theory and the Buddhist Nāgasena dialogue. Chakrabarti even includes the Soul Theory , but ultimately dismisses it as empirically vacuous. With references to MPD, feminist critiques, and metaphysical puzzles, the chapter leaves readers with a disquieting insight: perhaps identity is not a fixed entity—but a fluid, fragmented construction resisting neat philosophical closure. While most textbooks stop at ethics, knowledge, and metaphysics, Chakrabarti dares to ask: What is art? And more importantly— why does it matter? Chapter 8 is a masterful culmination of the book’s intellectual arc, taking the deceptively simple question on art and unfolding it into a profound philosophical investigation. From Plato’s suspicion of art as illusion to Aristotle’s rehabilitation of mimesis, the chapter begins by grounding readers in classical debates, different kinds of theories of art with their fundamental questions, only to subvert them with modern provocations. Opening with provocative examples like John Cage’s 4'33" and Duchamp’s infamous urinal ( Fountain ), Chakrabarti unsettles the reader immediately. What counts as art when silence or plumbing fixtures are exalted in galleries? Can a banana duct-taped to a wall (Cattelan’s Comedian ) command millions because of its context rather than content? From here, Chakrabarti traverses the aesthetic terrain with both classical insight and contemporary savvy. Beardsley’s definition—anchoring art in aesthetic experience—meets its match in Duchamp, who exposes the paradox of anti-aesthetic masterpieces, then moving fluidly from Bell’s formalism and Collingwood’s expressive theory. Danto’s conceptual theory picks up this thread: art isn’t just what we see, but the context and interpretation we attach to it. Dickie’s Institutional Theory follows suit, arguing that the “artworld” confers status. But what, then, of outsider art—like the haunting works collected by Hans Prinzhorn from psychiatric patients? Each theory is critically examined through vivid examples—Bruegel’s narrative art, Rothko’s abstraction, Duchamp’s urinal—and juxtaposed with cross-cultural insights like the Rasa theory of Indian aesthetics, the devotional art of India, which flourishes outside institutional validation? Crucially, this is a book with a conscience. It resists the temptation to offer easy Philosophical answers, and instead offers better questions and a mirror to thought itself: fallible, contested, and always in motion. Whether one is encountering philosophy for the first time or returning to its terrain anew, Chakrabarti’s work is both a reliable compass and a bold provocation. References Beardsley, M. C. (1958). Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism . Harcourt, Brace. Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning (I. Lasch, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946) Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 8 (4), 529–566. Nagel, T. (1971). The absurd. The Journal of Philosophy , 68 (20), 716–727. Nāṭyaśāstra. (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE). Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata . (See A. Rangacharya or M. Ghosh editions for scholarly citations). Philosophy Now. (n.d.). A magazine of ideas – covering beginner-friendly articles on ethics, art, and identity . https://philosophynow.org/ Putnam, H. (1981). Brains in a vat. In Reason, Truth and History (pp. 1–21). Cambridge University Press. Reid, T. (1785). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man . (Reprint editions available from MIT Press and Liberty Fund). Sellars, W. (1963). Science, Perception and Reality . Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Plato, Aristotle, Aesthetics, Knowledge, etc. https://plato.stanford.edu/ Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits . Oxford University Press. Wolf, S. (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters . Princeton University Press. Yale University. (n.d.). Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 181) by Shelly Kagan. Open Yale Courses. https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181 Zagzebski, L. T. (1994). The inescapability of Gettier problems. The Philosophical Quarterly , 44 (174), 65–73.

Srajana Kaikini In conversation with Sahana Rajan (Lecturer, Jindal Global Business School) February 2022 Dr Srajana Kaikini's work spans across curatorial, artistic and philosophical domains. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Manipal Centre for Humanities, and has a Masters in Arts and Aesthetic from JNU. She was at de Appel Art Centre’s Curatorial Programme in 2012-13, is the recipient of 2013 FICA Research Fellowship and was Curator at KK Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre (2015-2019) at Manipal. Some of her recent curatorial projects include Searching for the Present, Where? Being-Becoming in Akbar Padamsee’s Figurations (1995 – 2006) at the Guild, Mumbai (2021), Backstage of Biology (2019), at Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, Mukhaputa (2017) at the KK Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre and Vectors of Kinship (2016) at the 11th Shanghai Biennale. She has been resident artist-curator at the Delfina Foundation, London and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and is a regular contributor to writing platforms on philosophy, arts and aesthetics. Her academic writing has been published in journals such as Ethical Perspectives, Voices in Bioethics, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Kunstlicht, Journal for Cancer Research and Therapeutics amidst others. She is on the Editorial Boards of SciPhiWeb Repository of Reflections on Science, Philosophy and Gaming and Barefoot Philosophers and member of the Bioethics Forum - Collaborative for Palliative Care at Columbia University. She is currently working on her forthcoming book Philosophy of Curation (Routledge) and teaches as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences at Krea University, India. Sahana: Lets start this conversation by knowing your research interests Srajana : I am interested in philosophy as a creative practice. As an artist-philosopher, it is extremely exciting to dive into the work of philosophy through practice, be it in my curatorial work, in my studio practice or by way of writing and teaching. This also means having a keen commitment to being inconspicuously soaked in philosophy while engaging with the world. Implicit and the ineffable registers of experience haunt my philosophical enquiry. I am curious about the ways in which relationalities emerge. The disciplinary probes then develop in service of this keenness. Aesthetics and Metaphysics are my core areas if one looks for #keywords . Philosophy for me is my practice. For more details on my work, one may find sufficient information on internet repositories. Please provide a brief biography of yourself I grew up in Bombay, a city that shapes my childhood and later in Bangalore. For the past decade, I have been mostly nomadic - from New Delhi to Amsterdam to London to Manipal to Bangalore and now to Pulicat - each place has given me so much. Two places that hold a special place for me are Suriname and Japan. A moment I recall in recent past, is when I touched a viking rune etched on a parapet of Hagia Sophia. For this context, I’d like to stick to this sparsed out geo-biography. What has been your experience of studying and being part of academic philosophy in India? I came to philosophy out of a personal necessity - to engage with certain concepts that haunted me - these were questions about my practice that I wanted to think through and wanted to learn from my teacher. The term academia does not hold much of an importance to me in qualifying my philosophical belonging. I was first introduced to philosophy during my Masters in JNU through my teachers who were scholars as well as artists. Art has always been part of the lived atmosphere at home. The experience of studying philosophy is mostly one of auto-didactism - even when one is taught by a teacher, the teacher’s success is in teaching the student how to teach herself. I was grateful for all my teachers who have made philosophy meaningful and lovable for me. I am grateful to continue learning from my teachers and peers, the barefoot philosophers. I consider this an ongoing process. I prefer not to dwell too much on what I am part of and what I am not. Could you share your reflections on philosophy as a discipline in India? How do you foresee the development of the discipline? The discipline of philosophy in India needs more affirmative attention - keeping in mind the place of philosophy for its people. There is a necessity for a way of engaging with concepts, contexts and their ideas, and to have meaningful dialogues, discussions and debates addressing questions that matter to you, me, the various kinds of ‘us’ that we inhabit or long for. As with any other discipline, when philosophers concern themselves with the work that can be done by philosophy, the discipline becomes self-sustainable. What kind of career path in philosophy are you interested in, or you think are available in philosophy in India? As an artist-philosopher I consider myself as a creative practitioner of philosophy. I curate, I sing, I make art, I write, I teach, I walk by way of doing philosophy. Philosophers are potentially everywhere around us. They are the policy-makers, the advisors, the mediators, the listeners, the poets, the storytellers, the caregivers, the gardeners, the carpenters, the bus drivers. I resist becoming a salesperson for the discipline, precisely because it does not need selling.

Modernity and its Futures Past Nishad Patnaik Faculty, IIIT Delhi Book Excerpt # Jan 8, 2025 An excerpt from Nishad Patnaik's book Modernity and its Futures Past: Recovering Unalienated Life (2023, Palgrave Macmillan, India). The basic claim of the book is that the contemporary figuration of modernity, in the positivistic understanding of nature, and capitalist form of society (as two sides of the same coin), constitutes the reification of the original universal, critical-rational impulse of the Enlightenment. Such reification sets up a tension between the universalizing and particularizing tendencies of reason, reflected, for instance, in the current dominance of the de-territorializing forces of globalized capitalism, on the one hand, and the simultaneous reemergence of xenophobic forms of nationalism, based on narrow, territorially bounded identifications along religious, ethnic or linguistic lines on the other. The tension between the universal and the particular, symptomatic of this deeper structural tendency towards reification, leads to a series of impasses in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, which come to constitute our sense of alienation. The book responds to this problematic by attempting to reconcile this tension in dialectical fashion, and thereby articulate an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . Thus, instead of understanding the tension between the universal and the particular, the one and the many, the same and the other etc., as representing a mutually exclusive either-or choice, the book approaches these issues by elaborating their mutually constitutive co-dependence. As a corollary, it shows that the series of impasses to which modernity succumbs in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, stem from the attempt to reduce the ‘universal’ to the ‘particular’ or vice versa. The work argues that if we resist this tendency towards reduction, we can still renew the emancipatory promise that Enlightenment modernity once held, for providing a rational-universal self-foundation for humanity, while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of a reified form of universality. As we know, (and as Husserl elaborates with his evocation of the sense of ‘crisis’ in what he calls the ‘European Sciences’) the early optimism and ‘naïve faith’ in ‘universal reason’ has long since given way to skeptical resignation in the face of the positivistic form of reason that comes to dominate. The ‘positivistic reduction’ of reason has resulted in a morass of ‘posts’—'post-modernism’, ‘post-truth’, post-structuralism, post-Marxism etc., at the level of theory, which indicate a tendency towards the ‘empiricization’ of reason. The effects of such empiricization are felt in the intertwined ethical, political, and economic domains. And yet, at the level of socio-political and economic history, as the long, sordid past of the contemporary capitalist figuration of modernity, marked by the violence of colonialism, slavery etc., shows, any straightforward positing of the universal dimension of reason, in the face of such skepticism and resulting empiricization, is no longer possible. For, it is precisely in the name of ‘universal reason’, mediated through the inherent expansionary economic logic of capitalism, that colonial subjugation and exploitation (primary/‘primitive accumulation of capital’ in Marx’s terminology) unfolded (and I argue, continues to unfold in a transformed modality under the current neoliberal regime, which imposes its own neo-imperialist tendencies). Indeed, the skeptical reaction to the universal claims of ‘enlightened’ reason, leading to their empiricization (positivistic reduction), stems, in large measure, from these effects of an uncritical, reified universalism, which (qua concrete or determinate universal’ in the Hegelian sense) tend to exclude certain cultures, peoples (and their interests), and modes of thought. This is because, as many thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Judith Butler etc. have pointed out, any determinate universal, qua determinate, must necessarily be limited in its scope. The scope of the universal has historically determined, and continues to determine, the constitution of identity and difference, the ‘same’ and the ‘other’, that is, those that are included in, and excluded from, its scope. In modernity, as the scope of the universal is extended, at least in principle, to include all human beings (and now increasingly non-human species), it can set up a movement where the excluded can come to ‘haunt’ the universal, forcing its expansion (but also possible contraction). This also indicates the possibility of modernist ethics as an ethics without specific content, or a negative ethics, that is committed only to the ‘gap’ between any concretization of the universal—the ethically invested content/normative order of any political discourse, and the empty universal it represents—its indeterminate ‘horizonal beyond’ by which it is necessarily oriented, such that the former is always subject to critique and revision in light of the latter. Explicating this movement (‘hauntology’) Butler, for instance, writes, modern “democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated upon their absence. That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and re-articulation of the basic premise of democracy itself” (Butler, 2000, 11) . These considerations make visible, the basic dialectic between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, in its enmeshed ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ aspects. That is, they make visible both the constitutive interrelation and dependence between the universal and the particular, as well as the tendency towards reduction/reification of this interrelation to one of its poles (dialectical ‘one-sidedness’) that gives rise to the tensions or impasses inherent in our contemporary (alienated) modernity. It follows that the ultimately ethical task of renewing the emancipatory potential inherent in the critical-rational and universal dimension of reason that constituted the original impetus of Enlightenment modernity, in the face of its contemporary reified ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ configuration, calls for a revised, non-reified conception of universality. The latter, I argue, can be nothing but a negative universality—a universality in constant ‘becoming’, (therefore, in its processive movement, nothing but a negative dialectic). Further, as I noted, the rearticulation of universality in this transformed, negative sense, in the face of reified (positivist and capitalist) modernity, amounts to the (re)articulation of an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . For, as we know, the critical thrust of enlightened reason lies in the disenchantment of the world—stripping it of ‘meaning’ and ‘purposiveness’, which come to be seen as merely anthropomorphic projections. The disenchanted world, particularly in its capitalistic figuration, alienates human beings from nature and from each other. Thus, to rearticulate human emancipatory possibilities calls for the rearticulation of a non-alienated conception of both nature and society. However, the disenchantment wrought by the critical-reflective rationality of the Enlightenment cannot simply be undone in a return to pre-modern ‘enchantment’ —to a sacralised conception of the world, and to some posited ‘original’ unity with it in unalienated ‘immediacy’. For, on the one hand, the historically emergent critical-reflective experience of disenchantment (as an expression of reflective distance, transcendence vis-a-vis ‘immediacy’, inescapable mediation, or universality in a negative sense etc.), constitutive of our modernist form of consciousness and society, cannot simply be obliterated, in what would amount to ‘collective amnesia’ (although the dangers of such amnesia are always present, and become exacerbated in times of socio-economic and political crises). On the other, the earlier ‘enchanted’ conceptions of the world, with their naturalized/sacralised order and hierarchy, where the source of power and legitimacy lay in a transcendent ‘beyond’, were subject to their own modes of (unthematized) reification, and therefore, (implicit forms of) alienation. Thus, the rearticulation of human emancipatory possibilities, which can accommodate irreversible disenchantment, (or the negativity inherent in critical-reflective distance), must take the form of the recovery/renewal of an unalienated mode of existence, from within a non-reified modernity. The study begins by posing a question regarding our contemporary situation—why are we witnessing the resurgence of various forms of xenophobic nationalism, and the re-emergence of narrow, pre-modern solidarities along religious or ethnic lines, precisely when globalized, finance-driven capital is purportedly breaking down the traditional territorial and cultural boundaries of the nation-state? It elaborates this tension inherent in the present, by taking into consideration aspects of the arguments presented by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), as well as by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983), while critiquing both. Whereas Hardt and Negri emphasize the supra-national tendencies of capital (captured in the de-territorialized sovereignty of ‘empire’), Anderson emphasizes the continued existence of nations and territorial boundaries. Yet, the present juncture is marked by both these tendencies, that is, both universalism (in the economic and juridical-normative domains) and particularism (nationalist parochialism). I argue that thinking of these tendencies as mutually opposed and exclusive, leads to an impasse both on the economic and political front, constitutive of contemporary capitalist modernity. More broadly, it results in a reified conception of modernity, which is the source of contemporary alienation. The latter then manifests itself in the regression to various pre-modern, parochial forms of identification and identity. This calls for a revised understanding of the present—one which does not merely emphasize one set of processes (universalistic tendencies), to the exclusion of the other (particularistic tendencies), but can account for their simultaneous co-existence. I account for this co-existence by arguing for their mutually constitutive co-dependence. By showing how the nation-state is essential to the wide-spread implementation of neo-liberal economic policies, I introduce the notion of hegemony (of the latter), as a possible, initial explication of this co-dependence. I take up this problematic in a concrete sense, through an analysis of the historical emergence of nationalist consciousness, and the ‘nation’, as a new, specifically modernist form of identity and political formation. It seems obvious that the modalities of nationalist consciousness and the conception of the nation itself, must differ depending on the historical and geographical contexts of their birth. That is, the birth of the nation state in the West, usually traced to the Westphalian peace treaties (1648) in Europe, and its emergence through the colonial encounter and anti-colonial struggle in Asia and Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries, cannot be exactly the ‘same’ in their form, and certainly not, in their ‘content’. Yet, they do share certain continuities of form, arising from the universalizing tendencies inherent in capitalism, that give rise to colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggles, and the affirmation of nationalist consciousness/identities, on the part of the colonized. I elaborate these claims through an examination of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), to compare and critique their analyses concerning the emergence of the ‘nation’. I show that Gellner does not take the ‘universal’ (both in its ‘structural’ and ‘normative’) dimension, inherent in capitalism too seriously. Thus, he does not see the close interconnection between the emergence of capitalist modernity, the rise of modern ‘nation-state’ (in Europe) and colonialism, preferring instead to restrict his analysis to an empirical level. Anderson in contrast, does take the normative dimension of ‘universality’ into account in his idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, only to rigidly fix its structural aspect in a ‘modular’ form that first arises in Europe, and is then transplanted to other parts of the world, through the colonial encounter. I discuss Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Anderson’s ‘modularity thesis’, in relation to the emergence of nationalist consciousness in post-colonial ‘imaginations’, in his The Nation and its Fragments (1993). I argue that the colonial encounter cannot be understood either on the ‘modular’ conception, or on Chatterjee’s ‘inner-spiritual’ and ‘outer-material scientific’ divide and the communitarian alternative that, he thinks, flows from it. Rather, its processive movement (which Chatterjee captures, but interprets differently) reveals the ‘inner dialectic’ (where Chatterjee’s conception of the inner-outer can be accommodated terms of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ phase that emergent self-consciousness goes through) constitutive of the nationalist consciousness that emerges in colonized subjects, in and through the struggle for independence. This incremental critique of Gellner’s, Anderson’s, and Chatterjee’s positions clears the decks for rethinking the possibility of unalienated forms of co-existence under conditions of modernity. That is, without taking recourse to various, ultimately pre-modern, sacralized conceptions of ‘community’, understood as modernity’s suppressed ‘other’. One such articulation of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of an unalienated form of life, which attempts to accommodate modernist disenchantment, is represented by Akeel Bilgrami’s work. Bilgrami shows how the tension between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, running through the Enlightenment, becomes the defining feature of modern liberal-democratic (and capitalistic) societies and cannot be resolved within it. This sets up the basic coordinates within which an unalienated form of society, in a modern, desacralized sense, must be thought. For, such a society must be able to reconcile the tension between ‘liberty’ and equality, which hitherto have always been thought in an oppositional sense, that is, as an opposition between individual liberty and collective equality. In his essay, Gandhi (and Marx) (2014), Bilgrami, in a two-step argument, first prepares the ground for an alternative, modernist form of unalienated life by bringing to light the contingent ‘hegemony’ of late capitalism. By tracing the historical and intellectual genealogy of capitalist modernity, and how it impinged on emergent nationalist consciousness in India under colonial rule, Bilgrami underscores both the historically, and rationally contingent character of the capitalist form that modernity takes. Yet, its contingency is not seen as such. That is, capitalism appears not as one possible configuration of modernity (that was ‘in fact’ realized) among other, equally historically and rationally viable possibilities (that, it so happened, were not realized), but as ‘objective’ (universal, rational) ‘reality’. Yet, I argue that on the one hand, the historically extant alternative visions that Bilgrami invokes (Levelers and Diggers, Gandhi), involve a sacralized conception of nature and of the human (and are therefore, not really ‘modernist’, but invoke a certain nostalgia for the pre-modern past). On the other, insofar as his rational, counterfactual argument, based on ‘opportunity costs’ remains a primarily negative critique of the rational argument (based on social contract) for capitalism (the rational justification of the privatization of the commons), it does not sufficiently account for the skeptical consequences inherent in the notion of ‘contingent hegemony’. In other words, it does not address the possibility that these skeptical consequences end up undercutting not only the claim to the (rational) universality of capitalist social organization, but also that of any alternative conception of modernity based on universal reason, understood in its positive institutional-social configuration. Bilgrami’s argument ends up affecting a split between reason and history that is in keeping with the tendency towards empiricization, where the movement of history, and specifically the socio-political domain, becomes nothing but an endless series of contestations and provisional victories (in the form of a temporary hegemonic consensus). To mitigate these skeptical effects of empiricization/particularism, I turn to the dialectical model of thought which emphasizes the movement of history through the movement of determinate negation, which is itself based on the processive character of reification. Through the latter, the universal dimension of rationality inherent in the historical emergence of modernity comes to be ‘reduced’ to the capitalist form of society on the one hand, and inseparable from it, the techno-scientific understanding of nature on the other. Such reduction, constitutes the source of our alienation in relation to others, and to ‘nature’. I trace this sense of alienation and its basis in reified modernity, via the ‘disenchantment’ of nature and of human relations, brought about through the historical trajectory and shape that modernity comes to take in the Enlightenment. I elaborate the imbricated historicities of the techno-scientifically mediated conception of ‘nature’ (as disenchanted), and the capitalist form of social organization (which permits the fullest manipulation and exploitation of ‘disenchanted’, quantified nature), through a discussion of Hegel’s Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s writings. Once this idea of a reified modernity determined by the capitalistic and techno-scientific framework, is established, it brings to the fore the question of the possibility of an ‘alternative unalienated form of modernity’. Yet, on the one hand, as I noted, such a recovery cannot mean a return to a pre-modern, sacralized conception of community and nature, since these forms of existence involve their own unreflective modes of reification, (in terms of deified, hence, ‘naturalized’ social hierarchies etc.), and therefore, unthematized modes of alienated existence. On the other, it cannot entail an orientation which, either in the present or in the future, attempts to restore or realize the immediacy of the ‘real’ (a ‘metaphysics of presence’) in the objective-universal sense (conceived either as ‘material’ or ideal-rational reality), specific to reified modernity. From an epistemological perspective, such immediacy (presence) is ruled out in principle—as varied philosophical traditions, from transcendental idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction etc. have argued. But, in a related sense, it is also critiqued from a political-normative perspective, insofar as the attempt to realize the impossible ideal/telos of a ‘society without antagonisms’, leads to a totalizing conception, which can have totalitarian consequences—a charge often brought against communist societies, which are said to exemplify a reified, distinctly modernist form of totalitarianism. Thus, the task of articulating an ‘alternative conception of modernity’, in and through the articulation of unalienated existence, calls for a ‘non-reified’ account of modernity. More precisely, as I elaborate in my reading of Marx, since the process of reification is inevitable (due to our spatio-temporal finitude, as Kant had already shown) it calls for an account where this process is reflectively and institutionally acknowledged, and thus rendered ‘harmless’ (echoing the Kantian sense of the term in the Transcendental Dialectic ) that is, where the institutionalized modes of such reflective acknowledgment circumvent the deleterious consequences of reification. Insofar as this task is explicitly political, it gives rise to further issues concerning the very possibility and scope of political-emancipatory projects. I trace these issues to universalistic and particularistic tendencies in the political domain. I noted how, when seen merely as contradictory, or mutually exclusive, the universalistic and particularistic orientations result in the reification of modernity, and in the economic and political impasses that flow from such reification. On the political front, the impasse manifests itself in the perpetual back and forth movement between politics conceived as merely empirical, that is, as an endless game of conflicts and provisional hegemonic formations in the name of the universal; and as making genuinely universal claims based on ‘justice’, or as the historical struggle/‘progress’ towards the realization of a ‘universally’ just, non-hierarchical, equal society. In contrast, I show that these particularistic and universalistic tendencies are mutually constitutive in a dialectical sense. How the mutual dependence and interconnection between the ‘particular’ and the universal in the political sphere, and therefore, the notion of dialectics itself, is to be understood, is the subject of debate between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in their book— Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). I analyze this debate, and focus on Butler’s notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, as an elaboration of the constitutive relation between the particular and universal within the political, and thus, of the recovery and articulation of a non-reified modernity. The notion of a ‘universal in becoming’ raises further conceptual and ‘practical’ issues. Are appeals to ‘universality’ (the appeals to justice, rights etc.) that articulate contemporary politics, appeals to a ‘ contingent universality’ (as Laclau contends), constituted by projecting particular claims as apparently universal, but which come to acquire legitimacy only by acquiring hegemony ? Or can political claims and struggles be articulated by a universality that remains explicitly empty—devoid of determinate content, hence a processive universal always in becoming, and it is this very emptiness that constitutes its normative legitimacy, as both Butler and Žižek argue, although in different ways? I address this problem through a return to the writings of Marx and Hegel, which form the background of this debate. In returning to Marx and Hegel, I underscore the centrality of the dialectic for explicating how the notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, plays out in the in the domain of political economy. However, with this return, the dialectic is no longer restricted to the present—to the oscillation between the particular and the universal constitutive of the impasse of the political in contemporary, reified modernity. Rather, I take up the notion of the dialectic in its historical movement, in order to provide a revised interpretation of both Marx’s (and Hegel’s) positions. This revision shows how Hegel’s theoretical conception of ‘absolute knowing’, and Marx’s political-normative project of overcoming (capitalist) alienation (and the realization of unalienated existence), does not culminate in the dead-end of absolute self-presence. That is, it does not entail the ‘end of history’, where the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history finally come together in reflective self-coincidence, in a society fully transparent to itself—without antagonisms, difference etc. Instead, I argue that since reification is inevitable, (Hegel’s and) Marx’s position cannot amount to the overcoming of reification (in reflective self-coincidence or transparency) but to its reflective acknowledgement, an acknowledgement that is institutionally realized in post-capitalist, unalienated society. In other words, I show how the post-Marxist, post-modern critique of Marx, based on the claim that he succumbs to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ conflates the processes of reification and alienation. Marx’s aim is to overcome capitalist alienation, but this does not entail overcoming (structural) reification. This interpretation provides fresh impetus to the ‘universalistic’ dimension of the political, thus, to the possibility of universal political-emancipatory projects, in the face of the hegemony of the capitalist form of reified modernity. In the final part of the study, I further explicate this universalist dimension, qua ‘universal in becoming’, by turning to Adorno’s notion of ‘ negative dialectics ’. Through a discussion of this idea, against the background of the Hegelian (and Marxian) conception of dialectics in our revised sense (not merely as ‘determinate negation’, as Adorno insists), I bring to light points of continuity (despite Adorno’s critique of Hegelian dialectics), between the two conceptions. The negative element of the dialectic (movement of thought), that is, a dialectic that does not culminate, each time, in a determinate negation, or assert ‘the identity of identity and non-identity’, but stays in the moment of negativity, that is ‘points beyond its own identifying movement’, amounts to a reflective awareness of our own finitude. It indicates the ‘non-closure’ of the social, from within the social, and not as (empirical) contingency etc. In other words, as Adorno, explicating the ‘double bind’ in relation to social, argues, Marx’s critique of ‘identity’ qua equivalent exchange under capitalism, does not aim at abolishing that equivalence as a ‘matter of fact’. For, not only is form/identity inescapable in principle, but a return to earlier ‘forms’ of non-equivalence/non-identity would reinstate the injustice inherent in those earlier societies. Rather, as Adorno asserts, it aims at making the “inequality within equality” visible, and thus, “aims at equality too”. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal yet unequal—our critique of inequality within equality aims at equality too […]. If no man had part of his labour withheld from him anymore rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. (Adorno, 2003, 147) Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. This, Adorno writes, “comes close enough to Hegel”. The difference with respect to Hegel lies in the direction of ‘intent’ of negative dialectics. The latter does not, theoretically or in practice, maintain the primacy of identity—claim that identity is ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’ in a final reconciliation (of identity and difference, universality and particularity etc.) that constitutes the telos of the dialectical unfolding of reason. Rather, for negative dialectics, “[…] identity is the universal coercive mechanism, which we, too, finally need , to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature””. (Adorno 2003, 147) In the book my endeavor also has been to open up the space of non-identity within identity, in order to (re)imagine a different world, a world where freedom (in noncoercive identity/equality) becomes a “matter of fact”. By reaffirming the possibility of the political in this specific sense of a ‘universal in becoming’ that is, one which involves neither a return to some pre-modern sacralized conception, nor to a reified modernist conception of universality qua ‘presence’, I bring to light the possibility and scope of an unalienated mode of existence from within the modernist tradition. The central claim that I make is that the recovery of unalienated existence in this modernist sense, implies an acknowledgement of our finitude and dependence, with respect to nature and to each other. This reflective realization of our finitude is nothing but the acknowledgement of the ‘double bind’ (oscillation between relative and absolute difference, negativity etc.) in which we are always caught. I attempt to show, how Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist society amounts to an institutional acknowledgement our finitude in this specific sense of the ‘double bind’, to which the movement of thought/reason is subject. It is in this sense therefore, that the recovery of an alternative, non-reified conception of modernity, covered over in the course of the historical emergence of contemporary modernity and the reified form it takes, must be understood. References Adorno, T. W. (2003). Negative Dialectics . New York, London: Continuum. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities . New York, London: Verso. Bilgrami, A. (2014). Secularism, Identity and Enchantment . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2000) “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism”. In, Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zižek, S., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left . New York, London: Verso Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories . New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism . Ithaca: Cornell University Press Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy . Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Response and Reply: Liberty, Secrecy, and the Right of Assessment Sania Ismailee; Daniele Santoro; Manohar Kumar Paper Review # Apr 17, 2026 This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors. Response from Sania Ismailee (Assistant Professor, School of Law, BML Munjal University) Daniele Santoro and Manohar Kumar's " Liberty, Secrecy, and the Right of Assessment " argues that government secrecy is a form of interference with individuals' rights. Their argument is twofold. First, under ideal conditions, individuals should be aware of obstacles preventing the exercise of their rights; this is the "epistemic entitlement" of rights. Second, under non-ideal conditions where secrecy is justified, the government must provide ex-post justifications for any limitations placed on fundamental freedoms. This "Right of Assessment" serves to prevent unrestrained secrecy. There are three points of critical engagement: the definition of secrecy as interference, the valuation of individual autonomy, and the Right of Assessment as an ex-post justification. The authors argue that hiding information interferes with life planning. For example, if the government secretly cancels a scholarship you count on, they interfere with your life plan before you even know it. However, not knowing is not always the same as being stopped. If the government keeps a secret regarding a project in a city you never visit, your freedom has not actually changed. By treating almost all secrecy as a violation, the definition of interference becomes too broad. The authors contend that the state wrongs you by hiding facts, treating you like a child. For example, hiding a minor health risk to prevent panic is seen as an insult to adult dignity. Yet, secrecy can be helpful; citizens might prefer the state to manage a complex crisis quietly to maintain daily peace. The authors prioritize the process of choosing, but safety or stability may sometimes be more important than knowing everything. Courts often defer to national security claims. A strong right requires independent oversight. Imagine a teacher punishing a student for a secret reason. If the student's Right of Assessment only allows the teacher to review the evidence, the teacher is essentially grading their own homework. Because the state holds all secret information, the Right of Assessment relies entirely on the state's honesty. Reply from Daniele Santoro and Manohar Kumar (Director, Centre for Ethics, Politics, and Society, University of Minho; Assistant Professor, Department of SSH, IIIT Delhi) We thank Sania for her thoughtful review of our paper and raising some critical concerns with our arguments or the implications of it. We have tried to address it one by one below. Response to (1): It is correct to state that not all kinds of secrecy qualify for a violation. For instance the first case you mention in your response does but not the second one. The second example would qualify, if for instance, my plan has been thwarted due to an interference by the state. It may also qualify for the doyens of that city if the nature of the information is such that has any bearing on the rights. Restrictions of liberty we argue in the paper, unless justified, amounts to threat to the overall structure of rights and would constitute an arbitrary intervention. Response to (2): Our contention is that the state may on reasons of safety and security hide some information (say to not cause panic). It is perfectly legitimate under our account. What we though claim is that when extenuating circumstances of emergency are over then it is the right of the citizens' to assess whether those circumstances demanded such a withdrawal absent which the rights of the citizens have been violated. Here the right of assessment has both forward looking and backward looking function. Response to (3): Right of Assessment is a normative claim that provides citizens with reasons to demand accountability from the state when their rights have been curtailed. We agree that it is not a sufficient guarantee and would require constant vigilance from the courts and the citizens, including skepticism towards judicial deference on matters of state security. It would require that judicial deference cross a high threshold for it to be justified and be subjected to timely reviews (as is the case with classified documents) to ensure proper oversight.

Back to Liberal Basics Danish Hamid PhD Scholar, Department of HSS , IIT Bombay Article # Feb 22, 2022 This article is part of the series of responses from philosophers on the hijab row . First a story, or what we like to call pretentiously – a thought experiment. Imagine that two brothers, Ravi and Vijay have ventured on a camping trip with a group of friends. They are all near the same age, there being no hierarchy between them. While walking through the forest, Vijay indulges his habit of plucking a single leaf from every low-hanging tree that he comes across. Ravi asks Vijay what he is doing. Of course, he can see what he is doing. What Ravi means is that he must explain his actions as being something worthwhile, sensible, and which someone might have a reason to do. In other words, ‘better give a good reason for doing this, or else, Stop.’ Is Vijay under any obligation to explain it to Ravi? I think not, unless he wants to. The others in the group agree with him. Ravi then turns back to Vijay and asks him to justify it, or offer an excuse for what he is doing. Now, “unlike explanations, justifications and excuses presume at least prima facie fault, a charge to be rebutted”. (Benn, 87) Is Vijay under an obligation to offer a justification for his innocent indulgence? After all, what’s so wrong about plucking a leaf every now and then? And it is not as if he was trespassing in a grove of threatened, near-extinct plants and trees, and neither is Ravi the resident Forest Officer, and last they checked, it was not a crime in any of the books of law. Such being the case, Vijay has “no obligation to meet a challenge to justify his performance until there is a charge to answer”. (ibid) Suppose, however, that in his capacity as an enterprising vigilante on behalf of Chlorophyll everywhere, Ravi decides to handcuff Vijay, thereby preventing him from his indulgence. Now, Vijay can properly demand a justification from him, and a mere ‘tu quoque’ reply (literally – ‘you also!’) that Vijay, on his part had also not offered Ravi a justification for plucking leaves, would just not fly. This is because Vijay’s actions had done nothing to interfere with Ravi’s. “The burden of justification falls on the interferer, not on the person interfered with” (ibid). So while Vijay might properly resent Ravi’s interference, Ravi has no ground of complaint against Vijay. Suppose now that the priggish Ravi does come up with a justification. Vijay, he says, is wasting his time – instead of pointless leaf-plucking, he could be doing something useful - helping the group plan the adventure, or listening to an ebook, or entertaining everyone with the song “Keh duun tumhe”. But, of course, Vijay doesn’t have to accept this justification for interference. Even if Ravi were right, and Vijay could have been doing something useful, what has it to do with Ravi? “An unfavorable evaluation of someone else's action does not necessarily warrant one's interfering to prevent it.” (ibid) The upshot for the Hijab Case – or any analogous case of interference Now, this story, a fabricated mish-mash from Yash Chopra’s Deewar and Stanley Benn’s A Theory of Freedom (1988) , is supposed to convey a simple point. Volatile and non-conformist though Vijay is, he is under no requirement to demonstrate to Ravi that he has good reasons for doing what he was doing. On the other hand, it is required of the conscientious but self-righteous Ravi that he must justify his interference in Vijay’s actions. The two demands for justification are incommensurable so to speak, which is philosopher’s talk to mean that they are not equal or equivalent and thus cannot be spoken of synonymously in any meaningful way. This is the most minimum, yet characteristic claim in liberal political thought – that unless your act is harming someone, nobody has a right to interfere in your actions, or prevent you from carrying them out. What constitutes harm in a given situation will be a job of a 500 page book by someone like Joel Feinberg in which the political philosopher will flesh out all her claims, followed by replies to all anticipated objections and counter-responses by other philosophers. How fun! However, this basic commitment of non-interference, if not an axiom in liberal political philosophy, is still something incredibly intuitive accepted by nearly all liberal political thoughts and its off-shoots, including modern day conservatives, socialists, many feminists, etc. It would just require a very strong argument to refute, and in the Hijab case, no one has offered any persuasive arguments yet. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is still the best place to begin thinking about this problem, and a fine example of philosophical writing where the writer anticipates many well worn counter-arguments and writes with characteristic verve. The upshot of this for the Hijab controversy should be clear enough. The Hijab is seemingly a harmless piece of clothing. To prevent women, or in this case specifically, pupils and teachers from wearing it to school would require a justification. Thus, the Preventers ought to justify why there ought to be no Hijabs in school. The Wearers, Donners, Hijabis, have to offer no justification on the liberal view that I laid out above, unless of course the Wearers, Donners, Hijabis, have themselves been forced to wear it (Some, primarily feminist thinkers, include conditioning and socialization also as reasons sufficient enough to question the Hijab. But very few go to the extent of supporting state coercion to wish to remove it). For the Preventers, matters complicate further when they want to single out Hijab over other religious symbols – the most obvious case being turbans sported by Sikh boys and men. But States are Special?! My readers might question me and say that I am misrepresenting the issue, and that the story I have related doesn’t fit the facts of the Hijab controversy. In my story, the characters are equal, there being, recall, ‘no hierarchy between them’. Those are not the facts in the Karnataka Hijab controversy. The state has decided that Hijabs are impermissible. The State is unlike Ravi and Vijay. Is the state, per me, under an obligation to provide any reasons of the sort that Ravi was sought to provide? Now we are in the realm of what Jeremy Waldron calls political Political theory – the nature of state and governmental institutions, political representation, accountability, secularism, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law. Explicating the limits and confines of state power, its relation with religion, with minorities, with religious minorities – that’s another 500 page book. What a fun topic – but certainly what a short article like this would hesitate to go into. It seems obviously true that a State is a different kind of animal, and certainly not like individuals. So while it isn’t OK for me to demand protection-money from you in exchange for protection, the state manages to collect taxes, and on my refusal to pay, may even fine me, or attach my properties, or send me to prison. So the State is special, apparently, and states have rights to make coercive laws and force individuals to do things which other individuals just don’t have. But this is too quick. Maybe the State has the power to do this, in exchange for protecting citizens' rights (and enforcing contracts, and preventing crime, and increasingly in the 20th century, in providing, healthcare, education, even jobs) because citizens agree that the state may be given these powers, along with all the corresponding duties, all neatly enshrined in a constitution, backed by the constituent power of the people. This doesn’t automatically mean that the State has the power to interfere in my personal life – what I eat, what I wear, who I worship, who I sleep with. Furthermore, it takes no philosopher to see that the State doesn’t speak in its own impersonal voice. It usually speaks in the voice of the Parliament, a legislative body, or occasionally the courts. On what grounds ought the Parliament decide an issue? Well, many, if not most liberals, would insist that any coercive rule argued for by any individual, or group which speaks for a proposition in the Parliament (from Parler. French, literally ‘talk shop’) ought to be based on a reason which is not sectarian, biased, or idiosyncratic in such a way that it is not acceptable to or justifiable, to all those persons over whom the rule is going to have authority. In a modern democracy, where free and equal citizens disagree with each other over profound or profane matters, including morals, religion, economics, and what constitutes the ‘good life’, how shall any moral or political limits be placed on us? The answer that is usually given by a version of liberalism called justificatory liberalism, is that any such imposition should be justified by an appeal to ideas, values, arguments that all those persons who are affected by said coercive rule, might be able to reasonably accept or endorse. Variations, qualifications, additions on this basic idea, will be a subject of, you guessed it, some more massive tomes by Rawls, Wolterstorff, Eberle, Talisse and other brilliant philosophers. The unsuccessful evasion of Philosophy So, philosophers might bring their tools to dissect and explore all these questions, and make us all the wiser about how the relationship between state, the individual and religious symbols in the public sphere all hang together, and some philosophers have offered to do in the (web)pages on this very network. But some others might suggest that in the interest of time and considering how disputatious philosophers are, there is no need to enter philosophical discussion in the first place. They might suggest that we ought to look instead at the nature of the Indian Constitution, its own version of secularism, the state of case-law and the practice of the Supreme Court. What do the courts say, and how to they decide these issues? What does the Constitution say? It is that document and no other that ought to tell us what the correct answer to this quandary is. So what does the Constitution say? Pertinent to this issue, a cursory look at the state of Indian Constitutionalism will tell us that it promises to its citizens the rights to equality, freedom of expression, right to life with dignity, and many others, while also giving the centre and state right to make laws such as the Karnataka Education Act. The truth is that whether the anti-philosophers like it or not, in deciding a question like this, the court will also have to dip into philosophical complexities. It will have to either balance the rights of the States and the individual (if that is meaningfully possible), or it will have to uphold the right of one party and not the other. In doing that, it will have implicitly and inevitably made a decision about which rights it deems inviolable. So as with everyone else, even the court will have to argue philosophically. One can do it well, and one can do it badly. And the truth is that, these questions are hard. So we might want to be humble, and err on the side of caution, and not be very confident in our considered opinions, to say nothing about our pre-reflective prejudices. The liberal view, I suggest, does just that. It keeps the peace, while seeking to protect the rights of all. And it often succeeds! Where do I stand? After this short explainer (written especially for non-philosophers), it should be obvious that on this Hijab issue, and any such issue where social or state interference prevents individuals from exercising their choice, I come down, unapologetically, on the side of the liberal principle. For me, Mill’s harm principle is not the last word on such matters, but it still ought to be first word. And therefore, I have to come down on the side of those who say that the girls have the right to wear the Hijab to school. I am not particularly invested in what the Muslim women in question choose to do eventually. They owe me or anyone else no explanations. In fact, I go even further. I do not like the mandate of uniforms. Sure, uniforms may have a useful purpose if they help channel the energies of pupils towards education, sport and play, and help them along in the direction of healthy socialization, instead of displaying the stark divides in wealth and incomes. On the flip side, they do seem to privilege regimentation and obedience over spontaneity and creative self expression. Be that as it may, in accordance with my liberal sympathies, I don’t agree that even these goods that I mentioned above are enough reason to force me to conform to uniforms, any uniforms (!), if I don’t want them. The reason you don’t see me (and many others like me) on the streets demonstrating against uniforms is perhaps because it doesn’t seem worth all the trouble, and frankly, a uniform isn’t egregious after all. I don’t like it in principle, but I’m willing to tolerate it. I’d prefer there weren’t any, but they don’t warrant a rebellion. [That’s the problems with us liberals, we did all the protesting we had to hundreds of years ago, when feudal and monarchical power didn’t respect our (liberal) rights to live, liberty and property, err...the pursuit of happiness. Now we wake up only when these rights are threatened...which is happening a little bit too often these days.] Between pragmatism and principle But I digress. There is a time to discuss the perils and benefits of uniforms. But this is not that time. Because the issue here is not merely about uniforms. If it were, then teachers wouldn’t have been seen removing Hijabs outside school premises before entering their classes (a scene which many onlookers have described as humiliating). This issue is after-all a conflict between religious self-expression and the right to education. Moreover, the mandate on ‘ uniform uniforms’ is sure to come a cropper, as soon as we consider other religious symbols such as the Turban. Considering that the mandate is soon to encompass the religious expression of other communities, in a country as diverse as India, one wonders whether an order like this is even rational. More importantly, to put a portion of a religious community in the unenviable position of having to choose between religious expression and education is prima facie unjust. In order to navigate around the above problem, we have seen recourse to pragmatic solutions in the past – such as that the courts shall decide whether a particular religious symbol is ‘essential’ to a particular religion. Now, given that different religious sects, trends, and tendencies in the same religion differ among themselves in their practices of reading, hermeneutical traditions, and their own debates of authority, it is difficult to see how even a constitutional court may be able to adjudicate on complex issues such as this. Anyone who knows anything about how scripture is interpreted is familiar with the deep and complex interpretive controversies, together with the demand of knowing the tradition in and out, along with expertise in a classical language, usually a dead one. What is essential to one sect is non-essential to another. I encourage readers to look up the case of Abdul Karim Shorish Kashmiri v The State of West Pakistan, where the Pakistani Court held that the legal process in incapable of determining the answer to the question ‘who is a Muslim?’, until this question was then determined by a Constitutional Amendment, leading to the change in the legal status of the Ahmadis from being Muslims to a non-Islamic religious minority. My own view is that Courts shouldn’t decide on such abstract issues of doctrine as what constitutes an essential practice, unless the rights of some individuals or vulnerable groups cannot be protected through any other means, or when the traditionalists are bent on abusing the rights of their congregants or other members of the community. Therefore, it is a mistake to go into the theological and scriptural niceties right now (or perhaps ever), about whether the Hijab is obligatory or optional in Islamic scriptures. What is important, however, is this Liberal minimum - that no organ of the state must interfere in the religious expression of a community as long as it doesn't harm people from another community or others within that religious community. Since no such prima facie case has been made, this rule appears coercive and oppressive. On the question of reform ‘Reform’ is a weasel word. What is reform to one section of a community is oppression and persecution for another. The liberal must take the principled stance against interference, without necessarily seeing every instance of it as morally pernicious per se. If an arm of the State is to be mobilized to protect the rights of those who do not wish to wear Hijab, and if this to be called ‘reform’, that is fair too, and that doesn’t by itself go against the principle of non-interference. However, if the reformist goal is the much ambitious one of ‘liberating’ Muslim, whatever that might mean, it is best that it must come from within the Muslim community itself, through dialogue, discussion, education. The truth is that only those who feel stifled by traditional authority and its imposition of Hijab will choose to call it reform. For many others, the word ‘reform’ is an affront against their avowal of religious identity. The state ought to protect those individuals who are harmed by those elements which seek to impose their view of the good life on them. But experience has shown that a purely statist ‘reformist’ interventions will only bury the problem and not solve it. The example of Ataturk’s and successive governments’ restraints on religious expression in the Turkish public sphere is right in front of us. As soon as political conditions in Turkey changed and the Erbakan- Erdogan Islamist governments came to power, Hijabs in a thousand flowery prints bloomed in Taksim Square. Therefore, one, the argument for coercive state intervention in this case needs to be very strong, and I haven't seen any one which I find persuasive. Two, even if those who wish to impose a Hijab-ban are right, their victory won’t be a permanent one. If they believe that educated, rational and reflective human beings would not wear a patriarchal relic like Hijab, they must allow girls to receive a good education, and one which inculcates critical thinking and see where the chips fall. The long march toward secular-reason Now, some might question me and say that the burden of my song has been to exonerate the Hijab, and its advocates. Quite the contrary. My position is that, as a non-Hijab donning man, it is not really my place to comment on the meaning of Hijab for many Muslim women. Although the more vocal among them have come for, against and even, believe it or not, for-and-against it. However, being a naive believer in the (liberal) dogma that correct opinions win out in the long term, if given enough breathing space and a conducive environment, I wish only to urge more discussion on the issue, which is not backed by the coercive arm of the state and the blunt instrument of the law. It seems to me that the correct (justificatory) liberal position is to let Muslim women decide. But what about the appeals to scripture, you may say. How can a liberal be pleased with a situation where religious people decide the issue invoking religious scripture, and speaking in a characteristically religious vocabulary? Well, one response is that ‘religious people, like all people, should get to decide what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ That is the quintessential liberal claim. But this aside, there is an academic/historical question about the upshot of religious-style argumentation. I shall quote Jeffrey Stout on this point ...consider the early-modern debates among Christians of various types over moral and political questions. Here we have numerous groups, all of which were committed to treating the Christian Bible as an authoritative source of normative insight into how such questions should be answered. Yet they did not differ only on what this text says and implies. They also differed on who is entitled to interpret it, on whether it is the sole authoritative source of normative insight into such matters, and on who is entitled to resolve apparent conflicts between it and other putative sources of normative insight. Because they differed on all of these points, they eventually found themselves avoiding appeals to biblical authority when trying to resolve their ethical and political differences. The reason was simple; the appeals did not work. So the differing parties increasingly tried to resolve their differences on other grounds. In this respect, their ethical discourse with one another became secularized. (Stout, 93-4) Muslims, including both scholars and the laity, are increasingly coming towards discussions on all issues, about the proper role of religious, pietistic and rational or secular reasons in deciding all kinds of moral and ethical questions, and increasingly in the 20th Century the Muslim world is going through a similar process, that Stout has described above. The increasingly diverse conclusions that interpreters have come to after reading the verses that relate to, or at least seem to relate to something analogous to Hijab, tells us that in order to come to any sort of consensus on the topic, the discourse among Muslims themselves will have to eventually become secular, in that it will have to employ a vocabulary that doesn’t always invoke religious argument. Now, whether between all these competing tendencies it manages to reach a harmonious conclusion or merely a modus Vivendi, will be there for us to see. Regardless, statist interventions will only stifle this process of churning. If anything, the debate needs to be nudged along, not stopped. Unfortunately, in this case, it appears that some secular voices, and not religion, are becoming the conversation-stopper. And that is just not the ‘liberal’ thing to do. References Benn, Stanley. A Theory of Freedom, 1998. Cambridge University Press. Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition, 2004. Princeton University Press ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Read other articles in this series: Ariba Zaidi -- A Word of Caution to 'the Uniformist' and 'the Reformist’ Danish Hamid -- Back to Liberal Basics Hina Mushtaq -- Can women decide for themselves? Sania Ismailee -- The Karnataka Hijab row is about Right to Education...

Response and Reply: Viśiṣṭādvaita's cosmopsychism Hari Narayanan V; Siddharth S Paper Review # Sep 5, 2026 This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors. Response from Prof. Hari Narayanan V (Professor, School of Liberal Arts, IIT Jodhpur) Siddharth's paper " The universe as aṁsá of Brahman: towards a Visíṣṭādvaita existence-cosmopsychism " is undoubtedly a significant contribution to the ongoing attempts to build a metaphysics of consciousness by harnessing insights from Indian philosophical traditions. I have the following questions about the paper: What independent reason do we have for thinking that human beings are only phenomenological monads rather than ontologically distinct subjects, apart from the fact that this move solves the decombination problem? Further the claim that phenomenological monads explain ontological privacy is not clear. Can't it be called phenomenological privacy? If we accept the possibility that we are monads only phenomenologically, does it entail that, at least in principle, we can have access to other people's mind and experiences? Further, at one point it is written that "Phenomenological unity (or phenomenology of any kind) entails that it is for an ontologically unified subject". The difference between ontologically unified subject and ontological monad is not clear. Can we reinterpret the notion that Brahman has all positive qualities but no negative qualities by holding that it is a matter of going beyond ordinary opposites? While undertaking a 21st century reconstruction of Ramanuja's position, how far can we be sympathetic to the practice of appealing to the scriptures? Is it similar to our current practice of appealing to peer-reviewed literature? Reply from Siddharth S (Assistant Professor, Sai University) I am thankful to Prof. Hari Narayanan for raising thought-provoking questions on my paper, which gives me an opportunity to clarify certain important points. Part of the motivation for positing individual selves as phenomenological monads (ultimately experienced by the only pure subject, Brahman) is the concern raised by the decombination problem that is discussed in contemporary panpsychism. However, the underlying issues go beyond this combination/decombination problem debates, and as I show in the paper, are acknowledged and dwelt upon by the Vedāntins themselves. The imperative for such an interpretation comes from having to balance and allow the following two commitments which seem to go against each other : a). The individual self is aṇu, or a 'monad'/unity of some kind, while b). The individual self is an attribute of Brahman, and inseparable from it. While the Visíṣṭādvaitins, as I show in my paper, seems to appeal to scriptures to reconcile the two, my aim in the paper was to raise and respond to the question of how the individual self (and its relation to Brahman) must be for this to be possible. Hence, the motivation for my thesis goes beyond the decombination problem (which nevertheless brings the issue into sharper focus). A phenomenological monad is such that its qualitative contents (say q1, q2…etc.) are experientially unified with each other, and not with the contents of another phenomenological monad (with its contents mutually unified, call them c1, c2….etc.). It is the fact that q1, q2…are unified with each other but not c1, c2…that makes them a phenomenological unity, such that q1, q2 etc. are private to one cluster and not another. Is it possible for q1, q2… and c1, c2…to become mutually unified with each other? It seems to me that in principle they could; whether this does happen among living selves is an empirical questions. This is an interesting question, and a line of thought that is worth exploring further. It is possible to appeal to Brahman having only positive and no negative qualities by appealing to a logic that goes beyond rational binaries; however, my attempt here has been to explore if this can be reconciled within the bounds of rational deliberation, and how the relation between Brahman and individual selves must be for this to be possible. Appeals to extra-rational means weakens my case dialectically—if this were allowed, the purported advantage of the view I defend would not be any better than various other solutions to the combination/decombination problem, or the hard problem of consciousness that face similar contradictions (that manifest as explanatory gaps). The question of the validity of the testimony of scriptures as sources of knowledge, and whether this is acceptable in contemporary, cross-cultural debates is a contentious issue; in this case, not least because it is unlikely to be acceptable to those beyond the Vedāntic umbrella (to whom it likely holds much greater validity and significance than peer-reviewed literature does for scholars today). While I note that the Visíṣṭādvaitins appeal to scriptures at certain junctures—often when they are in dialogue with other Vedāntins or schools that do accept them—my aim in the paper has been to explore of the inseparability yet distinctness of individual selves and Brahman/cosmic subject can be reconciled without appealing to scriptures or other to trans-rational means. The proposal, that individual selves are phenomenological monads that are ultimately experienced by the only subject there is (Brahman) is a step towards this end.

Academic writing support for philosophers in India IPN Lectures Lectures and seminars in academic philosophy in India are usually either introductions to specific topics or presentations of research carried out. There are few forums that discuss important questions about the 'doing' of philosophy itself, such as: How do we teach philosophy? How do we conceptualise and execute philosophy projects? How do we do research, write and publish our work? IPN Lectures aim to initiate conversation and deliberation on these dimensions of philosophy. The first set of IPN Lectures focuses on the theme of writing and publishing in philosophy. These lectures would be aimed at addressing some common questions that philosophy researchers are likely to have, such as: How do I prepare an article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, and what can I expect from the peer-review process? Which academic journal should I publish in? I have submitted/defended my thesis. How do I convert my thesis into a book? There is an interesting and fertile idea that deserves discussion from various stakeholders in the debate. How do I propose and work on an edited volume on this topic? I have an idea for a book. How do I build a book proposal, and approach publishers? How do I write non-academic articles for the public, and where can I publish them? Any queries regarding the lecture series on writing and publishing can be e-mailed to Sushruth Ravish (sushruth.ravish@gmail.com ) and Siddharth S (siddharth.nias@gmail.com ). If you would like to take the lead on organising lectures on a particular theme, please send an email to indianphilosophynetwork@gmail.com Upcoming and Past Lectures Publishing in Analytic Philosophy Prof. Anand J Vaidya San Jose State University 11 March 2023 From a Thesis to a Treatise Prof. Muzaffar Ali Malla Savitribai Phule Pune University 29 April 2023 Navigating Philosophy Journals: Steering Towards Acceptance Prof. Mitch Green University of Connecticut Editor-in-chief, Philosophia 28 July 2023 Editing Philosophical Writing Prof. Kranti Saran Ashoka University 10 August 2023 Paper Incubator Grants in God and Consciousness in Indian Traditions Prof. Ricardo Silvestre Federal University of Rio de Janeiro 4 Dec 2023

Response and Reply: Conciliation without command Mayank Bora; Tushar Chaturvedi; Abhishek Kashyap Paper Review # Jun 2, 2026 This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors. Response from Mayank Bora (Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal) Fabienne Peter thinks cases of peer disagreement demonstrate irreducibly second-personal imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in relations of mutual accountability. Chaturvedi and Kashyap (C&K) argue instead that a purely first/third-personal model of the nature of reasons to revise in such cases is explanatory superior to the second-personal model. I find a few things problematic with their critique: Firstly, C&K assume that the first/third-personal model being explanatorily superior only first/third-personal reasons to revise obtain in peer disagreement. But, as it goes for reasons, we can have different kinds of reasons for something and first/third-personal reasons and second-personal reasons can coexist. Secondly, C&K are against any second-personal and/or procedural value in peer disagreement cases. But, if heeding a peer's claims purely out of respect for their epistemic authority leads to a greater accrual of truth, than not following it, as aggregated over multiple instances in the long run, then this just is imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in a second-personal procedure. However, Peter is still wrong because such value is not irreducibly second-personal but a matter of the instrumentality of the procedure in leading to more truth, just not in each instance, but in the long run. Thirdly, C&K think that irreducibly second-personal epistemic value may obtain with the right conception of epistemic peerhood. With the accuracy conception Peter employs the second-personalist case fails, but if being an epistemic peer is a matter of entering into a collaborative epistemic practice then irreducibly second-personal epistemic obligations and values may indeed obtain. However, notions of peerhood do not seem to offer much help in understanding how second-personal procedures may derive value from truth without it being reducible to the value of truth. The irreducibly second-personal obligations that obtain with the enhanced notion of peerhood are best seen as promissory/contractual, and therefore moral, obligations. Reply from Tushar Chaturvedi and Abhishek Kashyap (PhD Scholar, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati; Assistant Professor, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati) We sincerely thank Mayank (Bora henceforth) for these probing responses. Here is our reply to the points raised by Bora: On the first, we grant that reasons can coexist and explanatory sufficiency does not entail non-existence. Our claim was only the weaker parsimony one that a second-personal reason is idle wherever the same evidential fact already explains the requirement. If two descriptions track identical procedural value via identical reliability facts then it leaves not two grounded reasons but one reason and a redundant relational redescription. On the second, we agree and the concession helps us. If imperfect procedural value is long-run instrumental value defeated the moment the procedure becomes unreliable then it reduces to truth-conduciveness. That is the swamping result we defend that procedural value is superfluous because it bottoms out in reliability. We never denied that the value exists only that it is irreducible and on this Bora is our ally against Peter. On the third, we accept that the obligations are not merely moral but neither are they irreducibly second-personal. On Fleisher's demarcation a norm is epistemic if it is the internal rule of a practice that reliably promotes truth (amongst others), so the norms of uptake and answerability qualify as epistemic. Yet their ground is instrumental. What a practice institutes is a reducibly grounded but operatively second-personal register (or so we would argue), that is, a rule to treat a peer's objection as a claim owed an answer, grounded in the practice's truth-promotion. Since truth being the sole fundamental epistemic value is third-personal, no enrichment of peerhood can manufacture irreducibility. We are developing this practice-based conception of peerhood (and to signal the departure, we might label it cognitive or social epistemic or scientific peerhood).

What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility? Bhaskarjit Neog Associate Professor, Centre for Philosophy, JNU Book Excerpt # Feb 7, 2024 An excerpt from Bhaskarjit Neog's book What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility: Intention, Agency and Emotions of Collective Entities (2024, Routledge, India). Published with permission from Routledge (India). Examples of collective wrongdoings abound across societies. The moral history of human society is full of such cases – the bloody wars, mob violence, racism, communal and ethnic riots, oppression by colonial powers, exploitation in the name of caste and class, and numerous incidents of coups, gang wars, corporate frauds, and terrorist activities. Their impacts on the moral community are so startling that we do not know how to reconcile ourselves to any punitive measures offered by any existing arrangements of a society. We go out in public and argue why the activities of such groups or collectives are reprehensible, and why we must excoriate them. In most cases, however, public rage dies down over a period of time without receiving much moral attention or condemnation. One of the reasons behind the disappearance of moral resentment from public memory is the fact that we do not always have a clear understanding of the simple question – who is responsible when a group or collective is held responsible? We do not seem to know much about the idea of moral responsibility for collective wrongdoings as much as we know about moral responsibility of individual wrongdoings. Although collective wrongdoings of this kind are ultimately carried out by individuals, it seems quite appropriate to first talk about the moral culpability of the whole organization or entity of which they are part. On the face of it, this idea of attributing moral properties to groups or collectives is uncomplicated and a matter of our everyday moral vocabulary. We can easily comprehend why a group or community deserves to be condemned for any action or omission, just the way any individual does. Non-philosophically speaking, the fact that, say, Nazi Germans are collectively blamed for their cruelty against the Jews is no more complex a matter to understand than it is to understand why Hitler is blamed for the same cruelty. As far as the normal comprehension of the meaning of blame is concerned, it hardly makes any difference whether the concept of blame is used in a collective or an individual context. The collective/individual contrast seems immaterial to the semantics of "blame" or other responsibility-bearing moral notions. But, to view it more analytically, there appears a serious conceptual problem. The idea of collective responsibility tends to become somewhat slippery and eludes our understanding when we try to understand it by following our easy grasp of the concept of individual moral responsibility. That Hitler is blamed for inhuman actions is easy enough to understand, because there is, or was, an individual human person in space and time that constituted the determinate target of our attitude of blame. In other words, there is a clear answer to the question: “Who is to be blamed?” or “Who experiences the feeling of guilt?” In contrast, there is no distinct identifiable target through which the idea of collective responsibility can be made sense of. Thus, when we talk about collective responsibility, one might bluntly respond with questions: What responsibility? And whose responsibility are you talking about? A collective – whether with a structure or without it – unlike its constituent individuals, does not seem to have any clear responsibility-bearing make-up. For it is not an embodied entity with its own consciousness and rationality required for being a moral agent. To track down its blameworthy character we need to know how and in what sense their actions and inactions are intentional or purposeful. Given that intentions and other responsibility-making psychological states are paradigmatically understood as a matter of minded entities, groups and collectives being non-minded, cannot be said to have such conscious states. Similarly, unlike their individual members, they cannot have or experience any moral emotions when they are made aware of their reprehensilizable behaviours. Neither can they sympathize or empathize with the victims of their actions in the way required of them. Nevertheless, it is a hard normative fact that we do talk about the moral responsibility of collectives, and we do hold them seriously morally accountable for many things. Many a time our responsibility statements about individuals are in fact grounded in a language of the responsibility of groups or collectives to which they belong. So, the questions that linger in our deliberative mind are: Is the phenomenon of collective responsibility really real, or is it metaphorical – a mere façon de parler , as many would like to call it? If it is real, is it a summation or incorporation of the moral responsibility of individuals, or is it something different from them – both in terms of its contents and meaning? And what gets added or obliterated in our standard understanding of responsibility when we see it through the prism of a collective framework? Besides, normatively speaking, how do we evaluate the moral status of individuals who stand up and raise their voice against the things that are done in the name of their group? For instance, how do we make sense of the moral status of those protestors who hit the streets with slogans such as NotInOurName or NotInMyName? This book offers a modest ground for judiciously responding to some of these questions. It aims to redeem collective responsibility by defending the consistency and legitimacy of collective intentions, collective agency, and collective emotions. It talks of collective moral responsibility as the responsibility of collectives without either reducing it to the moral responsibility of the collective members or making it a case where their exact moral positions are effectively made blurred. The ground for defending this account is thus a non-individualist or quasi-collectivist ground – a ground located in the contested space between two prominent approaches – collectivism and individualism. Three components may be considered for a standard justification of moral responsibility – intention, agency, and affective or reactive attitudes of the subject concerned. These components show why, how, and on what ground a subject may be taken to be an appropriate candidate of our moral evaluations. Intentions refer to the psychological state of a subject with which the action concerned is performed. Agency is the capacity that the subject has for being able perform a morally considerable action or omission. And affective or reactive attitudes are humane reactions of the relevant subject’s putative moral agency that is amenable for the attribution of moral responsibility. These components are important not just for the justification of moral responsibility of structured collectives but also for the less-structured collectives. To proceed on this path, I draw on the latest resources of two theoretically interconnected areas of analytic philosophy – first, collective intentionality, a newly developed area in the intersection of philosophy of action and mind, and the second, somewhat old but now a freshly rejuvenated field called social ontology with perspectives from psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences and other disciplines. Both these areas investigate the nature and functions of variety of cognitive and non-cognitive properties such as beliefs, desires, intentions, guilt, remorse, and others that underly the constitutions of collective affairs. While the justification of a substantive account of collective responsibility along this line has been in the know for quite some time, there has not been a systematic effort of bringing together two equally compelling approaches, namely the cognitivist and emotivist ways. I explore the possibility of combining them in a way that would elevate the debate of collective responsibility from the narrow confines of both individualism and collectivism. This is a book on morality of groups with a special focus on the concept of collective responsibility. So, naturally it is a book that can be catalogued under moral philosophy. But since it is a product of weaving and stitching resources of multiple areas of philosophy and other allied disciplines, its significance may also be seen in other fields of humanities and social sciences where the issue of collectivity is discussed and debated. The prospective audience of the book thus includes, but not restricted to, moral philosophers, political theorists, legal theorists, just war theorists, business ethicists, policy makers, and others who take interest in the general question of moral responsibility in collective contexts.

Academic writing support for philosophers in India IPN Writing Centre An important aspect of philosophers’ work is writing and publishing. It is also one of the areas that doctoral scholars and young researchers often find the hardest and have the least support for. IPN Writing Centre aims to address this gap through Writing Mentorship and Writing Rooms . Writing Mentorship This initiative is aimed at supporting researchers who would like to receive the guidance and feedback of peers on drafts of their written work (such as a research article or a thesis chapter). While many of us get feedback on our written work from our supervisors, advisory committee members and other senior faculty, it might be useful to have peers read and comment on them. For one, this provides a less ‘formal’ and freer environment, where Ph.D. scholars and others may feel more comfortable discussing their concerns and asking for feedback. How it works Interested people, who would like to have their work reviewed, will have to register and indicate the area in which their written work is situated. Based on the area of their work, each registrant will be assigned a mentor by the IPN coordinators. This would take approximately 1-2 weeks. The registrant will be introduced to the mentor, and can share their work with them.The mentor will read the registrant’s work and provide them written feedback within 3 weeks. Depending on the preference of the mentor and the registrant, they may want to meet and discuss the feedback and comments. The first round of feedback will be coordinated by the IPN coordinator. The registrant and mentor can have further rounds of discussion and feedback based on their requirement and preference. Who can apply : Philosophers in India (Ph.D. scholars and above) can apply. Even M.A. scholars who wish to work towards publication of their papers can also apply. Membership of IPN is not necessary. How to apply: Those who would like to receive feedback on their work, please register here . Coordinators : Siddharth S (siddharth.nias[at]gmail.com) and Varun Bhatta (varunsbhatta[at]gmail.com) IPN Writing Rooms This initiative aims at creating virtual meeting rooms for researchers who wish to write on a regular basis but haven't been able to execute it properly. IPN Writing Rooms will provide a shared space and would be of particular interest to those who like to have company while they are writing. Who can apply : Philosophers in India (Ph.D. scholars and above) can apply. Membership of IPN is not necessary. How to apply: Interested candidates, please register here . Coordinators : Jinesh Sheth (jineshrsheth13[at]gmail.com) and Siddharth S (siddharth.nias[at]gmail.com)

Academic writing support for philosophers in India IPN Colloquium This is a bimonthly colloquium, held every Saturday, 10.30-1200 PM, where a philosophy scholar (faculty or research scholar) will present their work, published or work-in-progress. Through this colloquium, we aim to build a platform through which philosophers become familiar with the works of their colleagues, and create a space where researchers can share early drafts of their work for comments and suggestions. The colloquium will be open to all philosophy scholars. If you would like to attend the colloquium, please write to colloquiumipn@gmail.com . If you would like to present at the colloquium, please fill this form and we will get back to you. The current moderators of IPN Colloquium are: R. Krishnaswamy (Jindal Global University), Shinod K (University of Hyderabad), Shruti Bhat (Thapar University), Siddharth S (Sai University), Sushruth Ravish (IIT Kanpur), Varun Bhatta (IISER Bhopal) and Vivek Radhakrishnan (Krea University). The below sheet lists the talks in IPN colloquium till now. (Click here to view the google-sheet.)

Reading groups in IPN Reading Groups IPN enables focused philosophy reading and research groups. The details of currently active groups are given below. Please get in touch with the respective moderators to join a specific group. Metaethics Reading Group Themes : moral epistemology, moral motivation, moral reasoning, moral judgement, moral normativity, moral realism/irrealism and history of metaethics Moderators : Sushruth Ravish (PhD Student, IIT-Bombay) and Vivek Kumar Radhakrishnan (PhD Student, Manipal Academy of Higher Education) Contacts: sushruth.ravish[AT]gmail.com or vivek.logos[AT]gmail.com Realism/Anti-realism and Philosophy of Mind Reading Group Themes : epistemological and metaphysical realism/anti-realism; scientific realism/anti-realism; Kantian transcendental idealism; epistemic humility; mind-body problem; mental causation; self-awareness. Moderators: Siddharth S (Sai University, Chennai) and Nishant Kumar (PhD Scholar, IIT Madras) Contacts: siddharth.nias[AT]g mail.com or nishant.iitmadras[AT]g mail.com