OAE: The Ontology of Adverse Events.Yongqun He,Sirarat Sarntivijai,Yu Lin,Zuoshuang Xiang,Abra Guo,Shelley Zhang,DesikanJagannathan,Luca Toldo,Cui Tao &Barry Smith -2014 -Journal of Biomedical Semantics 5 (29):1-13.detailsA medical intervention is a medical procedure or application intended to relieve or prevent illness or injury. Examples of medical interventions include vaccination and drug administration. After a medical intervention, adverse events (AEs) may occur which lie outside the intended consequences of the intervention. The representation and analysis of AEs are critical to the improvement of public health. Description: The Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE), previously named Adverse Event Ontology (AEO), is a community-driven ontology developed to standardize and integrate data (...) relating to AEs arising subsequent to medical interventions, as well as to support computer-assisted reasoning. OAE has over 3,000 terms with unique identifiers, including terms imported from existing ontologies and more than 1,800 OAE-specific terms. In OAE, the term ‘adverse event’ denotes a pathological bodily process in a patient that occurs after a medical intervention. Causal adverse events are defined by OAE as those events that are causal consequences of a medical intervention. OAE represents various adverse events based on patient anatomic regions and clinical outcomes, including symptoms, signs, and abnormal processes. OAE has been used in the analysis of several different sorts of vaccine and drug adverse event data. (shrink)
Physical ‘strength’ of the multi‐protein chain connecting immune cells: Does the weakest link limit antibody affinity maturation?RajatDesikan,Rustom Antia &Narendra M. Dixit -2021 -Bioessays 43 (4):2000159.detailsThe affinities of antibodies (Abs) for their target antigens (Ags) gradually increase in vivo following an infection or vaccination, but reach saturation at values well below those realisable in vitro. This ‘affinity ceiling’ could in many cases restrict our ability to fight infections and compromise vaccines. What determines the affinity ceiling has been an unresolved question for decades. Here, we argue that it arises from the strength of the chain of protein complexes that is pulled by B cells during the (...) process of Ag acquisition. The affinity ceiling is determined by the strength of the weakest link in the chain. We identify the weakest link and show that the resulting affinity ceiling can explain the Ab affinities realized in vivo, providing a conceptual understanding of Ab affinity maturation. We explore plausible evolutionary underpinnings of the affinity ceiling, examine supporting evidence and alternative hypotheses and discuss implications for vaccination strategies. (shrink)
A Defense of Aristotelian Justice.DhananjayJagannathan -2024 -Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (33):890-910.detailsAristotle’s account of the virtue of justice has been regarded as one of the least successful aspects of his ethics. Among the most serious criticisms lodged against his views are (i) that he fails to identify the proper subject matter of justice (LeBar 2020), (ii) that he wrongly identifies the characteristic motives relevant for justice and injustice (Williams 1980), and (iii) that his account is parochial, i.e., that it fails to correctly recognize or characterize our obligations of justice to those (...) outside our community (Annas 1995; Curzer 2012). Indeed, Mark LeBar has recently argued that, although Aristotle’s eudaimonist framework remains the most promising metaethical strategy to ground justice as a virtue of individual human beings, the normative content of his theory is so flawed that neo-Aristotelians ought to adopt a Kantian theory of justice that centers on according respect to persons (LeBar 2020). My aim in this paper is to defend Aristotle’s views from these criticisms in order to show that it holds promise as an account of justice as a virtue. Notably, neo-Aristotelians have generally neglected the topic of justice, despite its centrality to Aristotle’s ethics and to our own social lives. I argue that they ought to take Aristotle’s account seriously as a starting point for their own theorizing, while recognizing that it needs modification on some points. (shrink)
Every Man a Legislator: Aristotle on Political Wisdom.DhananjayJagannathan -2019 -Apeiron 52 (4):395-414.detailsI argue that Aristotle’s unmodern conception of politics can only be understood by first understanding his distinctive picture of human agency and the excellence of political wisdom. I therefore undertake to consider three related puzzles: why at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE] is the human good said to be the same for a city and for an individual, such that the NE’s inquiry is political? why later on in the NE is political wisdom said to be the same (...) state of soul as practical wisdom? why in the Politics does Aristotle identify practical wisdom as the peculiar excellence of rulers when deliberation was said to be the common work of all citizens insofar as they are genuinely citizens? While these puzzles have individually received treatment in the literature, they have seldom been treated together. Taken independently, the passages in question can seem to express a more familiar conception of politics. In particular, each of the sameness claims made in and has too easily been assimilated to a more modern conception of the relation of ethics to politics and thereby domesticated. As I hope to show, in Aristotle is not simply asserting that the human good in a city supervenes on the good as achieved by its inhabitants ; and in he is not claiming only that political wisdom is a species of practical wisdom, but is rather asserting a more thoroughgoing identity between various types of deliberative excellence that are conventionally distinguished and assigned different names. Working through these passages will provide a sufficient basis for tackling, the question about the respective excellences of rulers and citizens. I will show that, despite his restriction of the exercise of practical wisdom to rulers, Aristotle imagines that non-ruling citizens will also exercise their political agency and thereby require a distinct rational excellence. More precisely, for Aristotle, there are two forms of political agency, deliberation on behalf of one’s community, which is perfected by practical-political wisdom, and the comprehension exercised by citizens on the basis of the view of life preserved by their character-virtues. Understood this way, the division of labor between rulers and citizens does not generate two spheres of activity, political and private, which could have unrelated excellences or concern distinct goods. (shrink)
Decasticization, Dignity, and ‘Dirty Work’ at the Intersections of Caste, Memory, and Disaster.Ramaswami Mahalingam,SrinathJagannathan &Patturaja Selvaraj -2019 -Business Ethics Quarterly 29 (2):213-239.detailsABSTRACT:In this qualitative study we examine the role of caste, class, and Dalit janitorial labor in the aftermath of floods in Chennai, India, in 2015. Drawing from a variety of sources including interviews, social media, and news coverage, we studied how Dalit janitors were treated during the performance of janitorial labor for cleaning the city. Our study focuses on two theoretical premises: caste-based social relations reproduce inequalities by devaluing Dalit labor as ‘dirty work’; and Dalit subjectivities, labor, and sufferings including (...) occupational hazards become invisible and ungrievable forcing Dalits to provide a counter narrative to preserve the memory of their trauma and dignity injuries. We find that the discursive construction of janitorial labor as dirty work forced Dalit janitors to work in appalling and unsafe working conditions. Janitors suffered several dignity injuries in terms of social exclusion and a lack of recognition for their efforts and accomplishments. Specifically, we examine various ways through which caste, dirty work, and dignity intersected in the narrative accounts of Dalit janitors. We also explore memory and how processes of remembering and forgetting affected the dignity claims of Dalit janitors. (shrink)
Narrative Worlds of Frugal Consumers: Unmasking Romanticized Spirituality to Reveal Responsibilization and De-politicization.SrinathJagannathan,Anupam Bawa &Rajnish Rai -2020 -Journal of Business Ethics 161 (1):149-168.detailsExtant literature romanticizes frugality as a lifestyle trait that helps in the spiritual evolution of consumers, which in turn enables them in overcoming the negative consequences of materialism and over-consumption. Extant studies have not paid attention to cultural contexts, such as caste and gender, which could outline the non-volitional enactment of frugality in societies such as India. We draw from the work of the political philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that frugality embodies non-volitional subjectivities and is linked to processes of (...) responsibilization and de-politicization. We engage with layered narratives from three story-sites and conceptualize frugality as a socio-political subjectivity that disenfranchises consumers and normalizes inequality. Our study provides evidence of how consumers are made to adopt frugality to conform to political conservatism and unequal orders of caste and gender. (shrink)
Reciprocity and Political Justice in Nicomachean Ethics Book V.DhananjayJagannathan -2022 -Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104 (1):53-73.detailsThe profusion of senses of justice in NE V.1–7 has left many readers with a general impression of chaos, but also gives rise to pressing questions about Aristotle’s conception of justice. Specifically, why does Aristotle claim that there are two parts to justice as equality, but go on to discuss three types of equality in the subsequent chapters? What is the relationship between political justice and the distinction between general justice and particular justice? I argue in this essay that the (...) notion of reciprocity, central to the first question, can also help us address the second. Specifically, I show that reciprocity is not a third species of particular justice, but rather a prior condition for political community and for political justice. Political justice is best understood as a redescription of particular justice that highlights how distributive and corrective justice maintain equality among citizens in an existing political community. In addition to explaining the unity of Aristotle’s thought in these chapters of NE V, I demonstrate a number of philosophical consequences for understanding Aristotle’s conception of justice. (shrink)
Aristotle's Practical Epistemology.DhananjayJagannathan -2024 - New York: Oxford University Press.detailsAristotle's ethical writings are among the most influential in the history of Western thought. Key to these writings is the idea that some people better understand how they should act in order to lead successful lives as part of their communities. Their knowledge is called practical wisdom (phronēsis). Some of what Aristotle says suggests that this kind of knowledge is intuitive or unreflective, but at other times it seems abstruse and theoretical. -/- Aristotle's Practical Epistemology presents a novel interpretation of (...) Aristotle's influential account of practical wisdom (phronēsis) by situating the topic within his broader theory of ethical knowledge. Interpreters have long struggled to make sense of the disparate features Aristotle seems to attribute to practical wisdom, particularly its role in bringing about individual choices and actions in the domain of ethical action, of theoretical wisdom (sophia) and craft (tekhnē). DhananjayJagannathan contends that these features can be united when we see that phronēsis is a distinctively practical form of understanding. (shrink)
On Making Sense of Oneself: Reflections on Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending.DhananjayJagannathan -2015 -Philosophy and Literature 39 (1A):106-121.detailsLife can be awful. For this to be the stuff of tragedy and not farce, we require a capacity to be more than we presently are. Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, poses a challenge to this commitment of ethics in his commentary on the instability of memory. But Barnes leads us past this difficulty by showing us that Tony’s real problem is his inability to make sense of himself—a failure of self-knowledge. Tony’s past (...) is tangled up with others he can scarcely see as people. Let us hope we can do better. (shrink)
Fear and Violence as Organizational Strategies: The Possibility of a Derridean Lens to Analyze Extra-judicial Police Violence.SrinathJagannathan,Rajnish Rai &Christophe Jaffrelot -2020 -Journal of Business Ethics 175 (3):465-484.detailsGovernments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida’s ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while police violence is aimed at constructing (...) safety for the cultural majority, in reality, it reveals discourses of anxiety and precariousness. The unethicality of police violence lies in the enlargement of recognition in vicariously blaming the person who has been killed for being involved in several terror attacks. We show that police violence is premised on the temporal structure of majoritarian nationalism, the prevalence of gender inequity, and the call to breach the secular framework of law. (shrink)
Divine Favour and Human Gratitude: A Study of Vedānta Deśikaṉ’s Upakārasaṅgraham.Suganya Anandakichenin -2024 -Journal of Indian Philosophy 52 (5):639-674.detailsAmong the many works that Vedānta Deśikaṉ—(traditional dates: 1268-1369), a most eminent theologian of all times—composed in his lifetime, his minor works—thirty in number and collectively known as the _Cillaṟai rahasyam_ (‘miscellaneous esoterica’)—stand out like guides meant to help those eager Śrīvaiṣṇavas who lack time to deepen their knowledge of Viśiṣṭādvaita by the study of longer and deeper texts. One such _rahasyam_ is the _Upakārasaṅgraham_, in which Deśikaṉ deals (almost exhaustively) with the theme of God’s countless acts of _upakāra_ (‘aid, (...) help, favour’) upon the individual souls. This beneficence of God’s forms the very basis of Viśiṣṭādvaita, as it involves a discussion of one the three _tattvas_ (‘realities’), namely, God, (and by extension, the sentient entity), as well as on _mokṣa_ (‘liberation’), which is the ultimate aim of the Śrīvaiṣṇava Ācāryas. In this article, which is ultimately meant to introduce to the reader an important but little-known text, I shall explore the topic of infinite divine _upakāra_ as elaborated upon by Vedānta Deśikaṉ in his _Upakārasaṅgraham_, which, according to this text, ought to inspire human gratitude. And in the process, we shall also examine the nature and object(s) of God’s acts of _upakāra_, and the means through which He proceeds to bestow them. (shrink)