The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change poses some difficult ethical quandaries for non-anthropocentrists. While it is hard to deny that climate change is a substantial moral ill, many types of non-human organisms stand to benefit from climate change. Modelling studies provide evidence that net primary productivity (NPP) could be substantially boosted, both regionally and globally, as a result of warming from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases. The same holds for deployment of certain types of climate engineering, or large-scale, technological modifications of the global (...) environment in order to prevent or slow anthropogenic climate change. For example, solar radiation management with stratospheric aerosol injections could benefit plant life by promoting enhanced photosynthesis, increasing diffuse radiation, and reducing heat stress. This has a surprising implication: from some non-anthropocentric perspectives, certain scenarios of climate change and climate engineering might bring about morally better states of affairs when compared to emission-mitigation baselines. (shrink)

Concerns about the risks of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions are growing. At the same time, confidence that international policy agreements will succeed in considerably lowering anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is declining. Perhaps as a result, various geoengineering solutions are gaining attention and credibility as a way to manage climate change. Serious consideration is currently being given to proposals to cool the planet through solar-radiation management. Here we analyze how the unique and nontrivial risks of geoengineering strategies pose fundamental questions at (...) the interface between science and ethics. To illustrate the importance of integrated ethical and scientific analysis, we define key open questions and outline a coupled scientific-ethical research agenda to analyze solar-radiation management geoengineering proposals. We identify nine key fields of coupled research including whether solar-radiation management can be tested, how quickly learning could occur, normative decisions embedded in how different climate trajectories are valued, and justice issues regarding distribution of the harms and benefits of geoengineering. To ensure that ethical analyses are coupled with scientific analyses of this form of geoengineering, we advocate that funding agencies recognize the essential nature of this coupled research by establishing an Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program for solar-radiation management. (shrink)

As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, (...) our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth. (shrink)

According to the seventh-century C.E. philosopher Kumārila Bhat.t.a, epistemic agents are warranted in taking their world-presenting experiences as veridical, if they lack defeaters. For him, these experiences are defeasibly sources of knowledge without the agent reflecting on their content or investigating their causal origins. This position is known as svatah prāmāṇya in Sanskrit (henceforth the SP principle). -/- As explicated by the eleventh-century commentator, Pārthasārathi Misŕa, this position entails that epistemic agents know things without simultaneously knowing that they know them, (...) or being in a position to know that they know. In contrast, some contemporary Anglo-analytic philosophers argue for the “knows-knows principle” (KK principle), in which if someone knows that p, then that person also knows that they know that p, or that person is in a position to know that they know p. Despite some apparent similarities, the SP principle is not a version of the KK principle, nor would Pārthasārathi’s Kumārila have held the KK principle. -/- Recently, Daniel Immerman (2018) has argued that the SP principle is a position-to-know version of the “knows-knows principle” (KK-pos principle). By examining Kumārila’s response to his Buddhist opponent, who challenges the veracity of Vedic testimony, we will see that Kumārila understands higher-order knowing as involving an independent check on one’s epistemic processes, through an epistemic instrument known as postulation (arthāpatti). This precludes him from holding the KK-pos principle. (shrink)

This paper examines Swami Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s unique interpretation of smṛti as “mindfulness” (samanaskatā) in Patañjali’s Yogasūtra I.20. Focusing on his extended commentary on Yogasūtra I.20 in his Bengali magnum opus, the Pātañjaljogdarśan (1911), I argue that his interpretation of smṛti is quasi-Buddhistic. On the one hand, Hariharānanda’s conception of smṛti as mindfulness resonates strongly with some of the views on smṛti advanced in classic Buddhist texts such as the Satipaṭṭhānasutta and Buddaghośa’s Papañcasūdanī. On the other hand, he also builds into (...) his complex account of the practice of smṛti certain fundamental doctrines of Sāṃkhyayoga—such as mindfulness of the Lord (“īśvara”) and mental identification with the Puruṣa, the transcendental “Self” that is wholly independent of nature—which are incompatible with Buddhist metaphysics. I will then bring Hariharānanda’s quasi-Buddhistic interpretation of smṛti of Yogasūtra I.20 into dialogue with some of the interpretations of smṛti advanced by traditional commentators. Whereas many traditional commentators such as Vācaspati Miśra and Vijñānabhikṣu straightforwardly identify smṛti of I.20 with “dhyāna” (“concentration”)—the seventh limb of the aṣṭāṇgayoga outlined in Yogasūtra II.28-III.7—Hariharānanda argues that smṛti is the mental precondition for the establishment of dhyāna of the aṣṭāṇgayoga. (shrink)

In the Nyāyasūtras (NS), the fundamental text of the Nyāya tradition, testimony is defined as a statement of a reliable speaker (āpta). According to the NS, such a speaker should possess three qualities: competence, honesty and desire to speak. The content of a discourse, including the prescriptions, is also considered reliable due to the status of a given author and the person that communicated it. -/- The Polish philosopher J.M. Bocheński similarly stresses the role of a speaker; he holds that (...) an authoritative source (whose discourse is called testimony) should be competent and truthful. The conditions of trust and superiority also apply. According to Bocheński, being an authority entails a special relation—it has a subject, object and field. Notably, Bocheński develops his own typology of testimony by distinguishing between what he calls epistemic and deontic authority. He asks questions such as: Who can be the subject of an authoritative statement? Which features should the speaker possess? How is authority recognised? Is there a universal or an absolute authority? What is the field of authority? Moreover, which qualities should the listener possess? -/- The Nyāya philosophers, both the ancient ones, like Akṣapāda Gautama, Vātsyāyana, Vācaspati Miśra, and the contemporary scholars of Nyāya, such as B. K. Matilal and J. Ganeri, were also concerned with these issues. -/- The aim of this paper is to discuss the above points in a comparative manner. I will argue that both Bocheński’s and the Nyāya accounts share very similar perspectives and encounter analogous problems. (shrink)