Students with high motivation to learn English as a second language become efficient language learners and ultimately acquire second language proficiency. However, demotivation in learning English as a second language remains to be a serious challenge. Thus, research-based information is needed to shed light in unravelling the factors of demotivation among second language learners and to guide teachers in putting forward practical solutions to increase students’ motivation in second language learning. This study was conducted to find out the specific factors (...) that hinder students’ desire to learn English as a second language. The researcher used descriptive research design and involved 1,302 students of Palawan State University Cuyo Campus selected through random sampling. Demotivating factors were measured using a modified questionnaire with reliability index of 0.85. Students’ self-confidence, learning content and context, focus of teaching and school facilities are revealed as demotivation to second language learning. The findings of this study may guide English teachers in designing teaching-learning contexts that are interesting and can boost student’s confidence in using English as a second language. It is also beneficial to policymakers and curriculum developers so that necessary policies may be implemented to improve school facilities, teaching strategies, and learning content and context. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

As opposed to a ‘one size fits all’ approach, precision medicine uses relevant biological, medical, behavioural and environmental information about a person to further personalize their healthcare. This could mean better prediction of someone’s disease risk and more effective diagnosis and treatment if they have a condition. Big data allows for far more precision and tailoring than was ever before possible by linking together diverse datasets to reveal hitherto-unknown correlations and causal pathways. But it also raises ethical issues relating to (...) the balancing of interests, viability of anonymization, familial and group implications, as well as genetic discrimination. This article analyses these issues in light of the values of public benefit, justice, harm minimization, transparency, engagement and reflexivity and applies the deliberative balancing approach found in theEthical Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to a case study on clinical genomic data sharing. Please refer to that article for an explanation of how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. Our discussion is meant to be of use to those involved in the practice as well as governance and oversight of precision medicine to address ethical concerns that arise in a coherent and systematic manner. (shrink)

The Name Yahuah, is used frequently in the new article below. -/- A Slave Trade Commentary: eyes white open - Y`anah Kathath This article can be found at this address: https://evidenceforthename.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/a-slave-trade-commentary-eyes-white-open/.

Results: We analyzed 1,402 surveys and 15 in-depth interviews. Many (32%) CL participants reported greater difficulty refilling medications and a minority (14%) reported greater difficulty accessing HIV care during the pandemic. Most (99%) Opt4Mamas participants reported no difficulty refilling medications or accessing HIV/pregnancy care. Among the CL participants, older women were less likely (aOR = 0.95, 95% CI: 0.92–0.98) and women with more children were more likely (aOR = 1.13, 95% CI: 1.00–1.28) to report difficulty refilling medications. Only 2% of (...) CL participants reported greater difficulty managing FP and most (95%) reported no change in likelihood of using FP or desire to get pregnant. Qualitative analysis revealed three major themes: (1) adverse organizational/economic implications of the pandemic, (2) increased importance of pregnancy prevention during the pandemic, and (3) fear of contracting COVID-19. (shrink)

Given the sordid history of injustices linking genetics to race and ethnicity, considerations of justice are central to ensuring the responsible development of precision medicine programmes around the world. While considerations of justice may be in tension with other areas of concern, such as scientific value or privacy, there are also tensions between different aspects of justice. This paper focuses on three particular aspects of justice relevant to this precision medicine: social justice, distributive justice and human rights. We describe the (...) implications of each for the use of race and ethnicity in precision medicine, and also how they intersect and potentially conflict with each another. By attending to these intersections, we aim to enrich and add nuance to debates over how best to proceed with precision medicine initiatives. (shrink)

Due to the emergence of ICT in ELT sector, seasoned English teachers find it resistant to such a shift despite having a positive attitude towards its use. This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine the extent to which seasoned English language teachers developed their ICT skills through a Service-Learning Activity (SLA). Using a one-group pre- and post-test design, this study collected the data through a modified Needs Assessment Survey (NAS) distributed to fourteen purposively selected participants. It was administered to examine what (...) professional ICT development would greatly benefit them. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and themes according to the Service-Learning Activity (SLA) topics. A Post Evaluation Survey (PES) was administered, and its result was compared to the initial test. The results showed that the seasoned teachers gained significant learning gains in terms of (1) sharing of knowledge from other teachers; (2) being encouraged to use ICT tools; (3) training opportunities; (4) working with other colleagues; and 5) attending professional workshops which include SLA. However, this study unveiled that the English teachers had no significant difference in perceptions regarding the roles of computers in teaching before and after the intervention. Limitations and recommendations for future studies were discussed. (shrink)

Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-1991) was a Harvard-educated Indian philosopher best known for his contributions to logic, but who also wrote on wide variety of topics, including metaethics. Unfortunately, the latter contributions have been overlooked. Engaging with Anglo-American figures such as Gilbert Harman and Bernard Williams, Matilal defends a view he dubs ‘pluralism.’ In defending this view he draws on a wide range of classical Indian sources: the Bhagavad-Gītā, Buddhist thinkers like Nāgārjuna, and classical Jaina concepts. This pluralist position is somewhere (...) between relativism and absolutist realism. Unlike the relativist, he argues that there is a genuinely universal morality; unlike the absolutist, he argues that there are multiple, but often conflicting and incommensurable, moral frameworks and ideals. This paper will explain his objections to relativism, as well as flesh out his suggestive remarks about his own pluralistic account. (shrink)

Shirley Chan and twelve other established scholars prepared fourteen insightful, detailed textual analyses of several of the recovered ancient Chinese manuscripts. The book consists of a Preface, Acknowledgements, fourteen chapters, and a list of contributors. The five chapter titles that begin with Chinese are written in Chinese, with English abstracts. In the Preface Shirley Chan notes the diversity in unity of the essays. The authors use their respective areas of specialization and different disciplinary methods to explicate the philosophical, (...) philological, historical, and literary contents and contexts of the recovered texts. Their unifying focus is "how do these recovered texts shed new light on important works.". (shrink)

B.K.Matilal, and earlier J.F.Staal, have suggested a reading of the `Nyaya five limb schema' (also sometimes referred to as the Indian Schema or Hindu Syllogism) from Gotama's Nyaya-Sutra in terms of a binary occurrence relation. In this paper we provide a rational justification of a version of this reading as Analogical Reasoning within the framework of Polyadic Pure Inductive Logic.

To talk about ethics and the moral life in India, and whether and when Indians misunderstood each other’s views, we must know something about what Indians thought about ethical and moral issues. However, there is a commonly held view among scholars of Indian thought that Indians, and especially their intellectuals, were not really interested in ethical matters (Matilal 1989, 5; Raju 1967, 27; Devaraja 1962, v-vi; Deutsch 1969, 99). This view is false and strange. Understanding how it is that posterity (...) has managed to misunderstand ethics and the moral life in India so profoundly is not something that we can address without thinking about issues pertaining to scholarship, interpretation and translation. Most importantly, studying a culture demands a philosophical engagement with the categories against which one attempts to understand it. If one believes, as many scholars do, that it is a rigorous study of Sanskrit and other classical Indian languages alone that holds the key to understanding classical India, then there is apparently neither need nor room for such reflection. It is this very same failure to engage philosophically with the category of the ethical and its place in translation that has allowed many modern Indians to misunderstand Indians of yore. (This is a paper I wrote in 2008 for an edited volume by Jyotirmaya Sharma for Penguin India, which unfortunately did not come to fruition. Since then, a lot has changed with respect to Sharma’s relationship to Penguin India, so perhaps this was all just prescient karma. I have circulated it with friends, who want to refer to it, so I thought I would upload it. Please refer to it as an online source: PhilPapers being the placed published. SR). (shrink)

It has become a common-place to read the ‘no-self’ theory of the Buddhist philosophers as a reductionist account of persons. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit himself seemed to endorse the association, having learned of the Buddhist theory from his colleague at All Souls College, Bimal Krishna Matilal. The Buddha’s denial that there are real selves metaphysically distinct from continuous streams of psycho-physical constituents lends itself, to be sure, to a reductionist interpretation. I believe, nevertheless, that there are good grounds (...) for scepticism, and I think it is time for scholars of Buddhism to be more cautious about the identification than they have been up until now. Different Buddhist schools, not to mention different thinkers within particular schools, have given widely varying philosophical construals of the Buddha’s claim about ‘no-self’, and, while some thinkers and some schools might favor a reductionist reading of the claim, others, I would argue, do not. In this paper, I will examine the theory of persons of one such, the Mādhyamika Buddhist Candrakīrti. Candrakīrti’s interpretation of the “no self” slogan is, I believe, anti-reductionist but irrealist: persons are not reducible to psycho-physical streams, nor are they real existents distinct from the stream. How is it possible for him to say both these things? Let us see. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers have, since the pioneering work of B.K. Matilal, emphasized the contributions of Nyāya philosophers to what contemporary philosophy considers epistemology. More recently, scholarly work demonstrates the relevance of their ideas to argumentation theory, an interdisciplinary area of study drawing on epistemology as well as logic, rhetoric, and linguistics. This paper shows how early Nyāya theorizing about argumentation, from Vātsyāyana to Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, can fruitfully be juxtaposed with the pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation pioneered by Frans van Eemeren. I illustrate (...) the implications of this analysis with a case study from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s satirical play, Much Ado about Religion (Āgamaḍambara). (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)

Vedantas y budistas han llevado adelante una disputa acerca de los medios válidos para acceder al conocimiento (pramānas) que, como afrma Matilal, no puede dejar de ser considerada como parte de la historia global del conocimiento. La doctrina sistematizada por Gaṅgeśa en su Tattvacintamani, que originalmente admitía cuatro pramānas (percepción, inferencia, analogía y testimonio) fue sufriendo sucesivas modifcaciones y perfeccionamientos como respuesta a las objeciones realizadas principalmente por los budistas. Habiendo alcanzado su máximo esplendor en la escuela de la Navya-Nyāya (...) (nueva lógica). En este trabajo propondremos realizar una nueva lectura de esta disputa a partir de las concepciones epistemológicas de la analiticidad discutidas por Timothy Williamson en Te Philosophy of Philosophy y sus trabajos anteriores. Como caso de estudio tomaremos las consecuencias que estas diferentes posturas acerca de los medios válidos para el conocimiento tienen en el tratamiento del Problema Gettier, retomando consideraciones planteadas en trabajos anteriores. Buscaremos extender nuestra apreciación de que los contraejemplos de tipo Gettier no son posibles en el contexto budista Indo-Tibetano, afrmando que estos sí serían posibles en el ámbito Vedanta, y ensayando un esquema que refeje los mecanismos lógico/epistemológicos que justifcan dicha interpretación. (shrink)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, (...) nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

From the early eighteenth century onward, primacy for the invention of binary numeration and arithmetic was almost universally credited to the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Then, in 1922, Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980) noted that an unpublished manuscript of the English mathematician, astronomer, and alchemist Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) contained the numbers 1 to 8 in binary. Morley’s only comment was that this foray into binary was “certainly prior to the usual dates given for binary numeration”. Almost thirty years later, (...) John William Shirley (1908–1988) published reproductions of two of Harriot’s undated manuscript pages, which, he claimed, showed that Harriot had invented binary numeration “nearly a century before Leibniz’s time”. But while Shirley correctly asserted that Harriot had invented binary numeration, he made no attempt to explain how or when Harriot had done so. Curiously, few since Shirley’s time have attempted to answer these questions, despite their obvious importance. After all, Harriot was, as far as we know, the first to invent binary. Accordingly, answering the how and when questions about Harriot’s invention of binary is the aim of this short paper. (shrink)

This collection of new essays focuses on metaethical views from outside the mainstream European tradition. The guiding motivation is that important discussions about the ultimate nature of morality can be found far beyond ancient Greece and modern Europe. The volume’s aim is to show how rich the possibilities are for comparative metaethics, and how much these comparisons can add to contemporary discussions of the foundations of morality. Representing five continents, the thinkers discussed range from ancient Egyptian, ancient Chinese, and the (...) Mexica (Aztec) cultures to more recent thinkers like Augusto Salazar Bondy, Bimal Krishna Matilal, Nishida Kitarō, and Susan Sontag. The philosophical topics discussed include religious language, moral discovery, moral disagreement, essences’ relation to evaluative facts, metaphysical harmony, naturalism, moral perception, and the nature of moral realism. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in metaethics or comparative philosophy. (shrink)

The paper discusses peculiarity of the comparative method applied in philosophysince 1920s. It presents its basic foundations and objectives, as well as the early and most recent definitions of “comparative philosophy”. The author aims at reconsidering in terms of philosophy both the reasons for bias against this method and its advantages in the context of cross-cultural comparative studies. The crucial question is whether various incommensurate schemata of thought, including these which are determined by distinct cultural milieus, may be the subject (...) of comparison at all. To answer this question, she refers, among others, to Ludwik Fleck’s conception of a socially constructed “thought style” and“the truth”, being completely determined within a thought style. The author also consults the conceptions of Stanisław Schayer, Daya Krishna, Bimal K. Matilal and Jitendra NathMohanty who recommend the comparative method as highly useful for the on-going philosophical debates as long as it is not confined to tracing merely similarities between different intellectual traditions, i.e. analogical ideas and equivalent arguments. What seems to the present author the most valuable philosophical contribution to the comparative studies is the perspective of polilogue suggested by Franz M. Wimmer, and the metacomparative self-reference recognized by Wilhelm Halbfass and Robert W. Smid as precious enhancement and challenge for profound philosophical inquiry as such. (shrink)

This is a joint review of Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan's Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago, 2000) and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (Pantheon, 1999).