  We consider here the question if it is possible to recover cosmic censorship
when a transition is made to higher dimensional spacetimes, by studying the
spherically symmetric dust collapse in an arbitrary higher spacetime dimension.
It is pointed out that if only black holes are to result as end state of a
continual gravitational collapse, several conditions must be imposed on the
collapsing configuration, some of which may appear to be restrictive, and we
need to study carefully if these can be suitably motivated physically in a
realistic collapse scenario. It would appear that in a generic higher
dimensional dust collapse, both black holes and naked singularities would
develop as end states as indicated by the results here. The mathematical
approach developed here generalizes and unifies the earlier available results
on higher dimensional dust collapse as we point out. Further, the dependence of
black hole or naked singularity end states as collapse outcomes, on the nature
of the initial data from which the collapse develops, is brought out explicitly
and in a transparent manner as we show here. Our method also allows us to
consider here in some detail the genericity and stability aspects related to
the occurrence of naked singularities in gravitational collapse.
