Shahn Majids philosophy of physics is critically presented. In his view the postulate that the universe should be self-explaining implies that no fundamental theory of physics is complete unless it is self-dual. Majid shows that bicrossproduct Hopf algebras have this property. His philosophy is compared with other approaches to the ultimate explanation and briefly analyzed.

In any probabilistic theory, we say that a bipartite state ω on a composite system AB steers its marginal state ω B if, for any decomposition of ω B as a mixture ω B =∑ i p i β i of states β i on B, there exists an observable {a i } on A such that the conditional states $\omega_{B|a_{i}}$ are exactly the states β i . This is always so for pure bipartite states in quantum mechanics, a fact (...) first observed by Schrödinger in 1935. Here, we show that, for weakly self-dual state spaces (those isomorphic, but perhaps not canonically isomorphic, to their dual spaces), the assumption that every state of a system A is steered by some bipartite state of a composite AA consisting of two copies of A, amounts to the homogeneity of the state cone. If the state space is actually self-dual, and not just weakly so, this implies (via the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem) that it is the self-adjoint part of a formally real Jordan algebra, and hence, quite close to being quantum mechanical. (shrink)

The relationship between self-consciousness, Aristotelian ontology, and Cartesian duality is far closer than it has been thought to be. There is no valid inference either from considerations of Aristotle's hylomorphism or from the phenomenological distinction between body and living body, to the undermining of Cartesian dualism. Descartes' conception of the self as both a reasoning and willing being informs his conception of personhood; a person for Descartes is an unanalysable, integrated, self-conscious and autonomous human being. The (...) claims that Descartes introspectively encounters the self and that the Cartesian extent of inner space is self-contained are profound errors, distortions through the lenses of modern theories. (shrink)

Inquiry into the felt dimension of experience can be deeply transformative, but more than promoting transcendence it can help us make contact with the intricacy of our open and embodied self-….

This article problematizes the way of thinking schooling in discourse of sign system, which involves opposition, and double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on two fundamental texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, this article puts forward the seemingly passive Non-Word and Non-Self to resist the hierarchy ordering of conceptions and man, and to undo duality of binary opposition. It links the history of assessment and PISA to the rethinking of evidence and sign in contemporary movements. (...) The second section proposes teaching as wandering (you, 游), the transcendence into Non-Self with response to men’s natural inquiry, but not artificially manipulating and shaping man by privileging certain knowledge, value, and thoughts over other. Instead of making categories of race, gender, and normal/abnormal, Taoist provides a way of reconsider the self operating on assessing, standardizing, normalizing, correcting and predicting others in school accountability. It is built on the ontology of considering individual as belonging to an ultimate sameness, the oneness. The article concludes with underlying assumption that students are subjected to change, and their difference must be eliminated through standard test. It further questions tactics of reason that educational reform face in the current regime of school accountability. (shrink)

This article problematizes the way of thinking schooling in discourse of sign system, which involves opposition, and double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on two fundamental texts of Taois...

Non-Duality Questions, Non-Duality Answers is an organic, interactive exploration of non-duality--the understanding that in life there is no separation, only seamless Oneness. Designed to answer questions as they arise, this book invites readers to participate in the argument for non-separation, inquire about the nature of the self and the experience of liberation, and understand how non-dual awareness can impact our lives. With a unique blend of patience, compassion, respect, provocation, and humor, author Richard Sylvester helps frustrated (...) spiritual seekers gain clarity on what non-duality is--and what it isn't. (shrink)

The great variety of meditation techniques found in different contemplative traditions presents a challenge when attempting to create taxonomies based on the constructs of contemporary cognitive sciences. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Travis and Shear add ‘automatic self-transcending’ to the previously proposed categories of ‘focused attention’ and ‘open monitoring’, and suggest characteristic EEG bands as the defining criteria for each of the three categories. Accuracy of current taxonomies and potential limitations of EEG measurements as classifying criteria (...) are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Duality and Non-Duality in Christian Practice:Reflections on the Benefits of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue for Constructive TheologyWendy FarleyThe question before us is the desirability of Buddhist-Christian dialogue in the work of (what Christians call) constructive theology. As a feminist theologian whose work is ever more deeply shaped by such a dialogue, my immediate answer is an unequivocal yes.1 This dialogue fits a general pattern over two thousand years in (...) which theologians have drawn from the wisdom of other traditions or cultures to better understand the mysteries of human experience. Without neo-Platonism and Aristotle there could hardly have been anything we recognize as Christian theology. Without pre-Christian Irish religion, there would be no Saint Brigit or Celtic Christianity. Without phenomenology, process, and Marxist philosophy the greatest works of twentieth-century Christian thought would not exist. Christianity, like all religions, is a moving river changed by time and culture and nearly as interiorly diverse as its members. The dialogue with Buddhism might be seen as a contemporary example of Christianity's openness to exchange with other ways of thinking that broadens and deepens its best insights. It is perhaps analogous to Origen's reliance on neo-Platonism or Thomas Aquinas's inspiration by the rediscovery of Aristotle.2The porous boundaries between Christianity and its culture open it to wisdom beyond itself but they also open it to cruelty and ignorance. Nothing protects religions from participating in the human condition and thus the prejudices and power structures that mutilate human society. Consumer culture and oppressions by class, ethnicity, and gender are seamlessly incorporated into Christian identity. The tacit synthesis of a culture's values with those of a religion neutralizes possible critique and can elevate a society's oppressions to a sacred duty. For this reason, too, dialogue with Buddhism is important to call Christianity back to its ethical moorings in the ideal of universal love and compassion.Religions are porous to the world around them, but they tend to conceal this from themselves and often imagine themselves to be not only untainted but also uniquely [End Page 135] qualified to mediate salvation. Religions provide human beings with language and practice through which dimensions of reality that cannot simply be read off of nature or experience are (in some sense) encountered. This is their great gift. The difficulty of religions is that tradition can become an end in itself. Because a tradition really does offer meaning and tools for transformation it is easy to slip into the existential posture of so idealizing a tradition that it seems in some direct and exclusive way to correlate to ultimate truth. The curvature of the ego onto itself, so attached to its own pain and pleasure that everything else seems a mere shadow, moves from the microcosm of the self to the macrocosm of religious tradition. The particular religion—or that element within it with which I identify—becomes identical with sacred reality. In the hostility to other religions characteristic of many Christians we see the illusion of egocentrism in its religious form. Paul Tillich described this tendency to absolutize itself as the demonic distortion of religion.3 Religious dialogue is a potent medicine against this overattachment to one's own tradition.These different senses in which a religion integrates into itself the wisdom and illusions of its time and place create enormous diversity within a religious tradition. Root concepts within Christianity concerning soteriology, divinity, and suffering do not have any agreed upon meaning. That is, there is no "Christian" view of salvation. Gregory of Nyssa's ideal of theosis, Luther's emphasis on salvation by grace through faith, an evangelical's experience of being born again, a liberal Protestant's commitment to social justice are so diverse that they seem to represent almost different religions.In light of the malleability and interior diversity of traditions, dialogue may not be between two self-sufficient religions but between participants who inhabit their tradition in a variety of ways.4 With this in mind, I would like to experiment with practice as a basis for some kinds of dialogue. Practice is concretely located in a religious tradition and yet reflects... (shrink)

Quantum complementarity is interpreted in terms of duality and opposition. Any two conjugates are considered both as dual and opposite. Thus quantum mechanics introduces a mathematical model of them in an exact and experimental science. It is based on the complex Hilbert space, which coincides with the dual one. The two dual Hilbert spaces model both duality and opposition to resolve unifying the quantum and smooth motions. The model involves necessarily infinity even in any finitely dimensional subspace of (...) the complex Hilbert space being due to the complex basis. Furthermore, infinity is what unifies duality and opposition, universality and openness, completeness and incompleteness in it. The deduced core of quantum complementarity in terms of infinity, duality and opposition allows of resolving a series of various problems in different branches of philosophy: the common structure of incompleteness in Gödel’s (1931) theorems and Enstein, Podolsky, and Rosen’s argument (1935); infinity as both complete and incomplete; grounding and self-grounding, metaphor and representation between language and reality, choice and information, the totality and an observer, the basic idea of philosophical phenomenology. The main conclusion is: Quantum complementarity unifies duality and opposition in a consistent way underlying the physical world. (shrink)

This book explores an experience-based learning model, the Phenomenal Patterning approach for personal transformation. Rather than traditional prescriptive learning, methods of personal discovery help us understand how the human mind actually functions. Dr. Koziey introduces two modern Zen skills, watching and catharsis, to increase self-awareness.

This paper starts from a nonlinear fermion field equation of motion with a strongly coupled self-interaction. Nonperturbative quark solutions of the equation of motion are constructed in terms of a Reggeized infinite component free spinor field. Such a field carries a family of strongly interacting unstable compounds lying on a Regge locus in the analytically continued quark spin. Such a quark field is naturally confined and also possesses the property of asymptotic freedom. Furthermore, the particular field self-regularizes the (...) interactions and naturally breaks the chiral invariance of the equation of motion. We show why and how the existence of such a strongly coupled solution and its particle-family, wave duality forces a change in the field equation of motion such that it conserves C, P, T, although its individual interaction terms are of V-A and thus C, P nonconserving type. (shrink)

In this study, we present a cost-sharing rule for cost-sharing problems. This rule prescribes the same allocations in a problem and in its dual one. Moreover, in some specific problems it gives the same allocations as the serial cost-sharing rule (Moulin and Shenker, Econometrica, 60, 1009–1037, 1992) does in a related problem. That is why we call it as the self-dual serial cost-sharing rule. We give two axiomatizations of this new rule and another one for the serial cost-sharing rule.

This research explores the carnal, experienced self as processual and becoming, situating life as zoe (as per Braidotti) in the context of the Western culture, characterized by alienation (Fromm, Foucault). The study first addresses the ontological disposition of the carnal self and then turns to the concepts of life and death (Freud, Fromm), to explicate the tie between materiality and discourse conditions. Erich Fromm’s classical distinction of having and being is restated as a distinction of having and becoming, (...) which are then explored as complimentary ontological, cultural, and characterological directionalities. A genealogy of their mutual dynamics then allows situating the relations of carnal bodies and inorganic prosthesis (e.g. technologies) in the light of life considered as the necessary synthesis of forces of preservation and perpetual change, beyond subject-object duality. (shrink)

The concept of hypodox is dual to the concept of paradox. Whereas a paradox is incompatibly overdetermined, a hypodox is underdetermined. Indeed, many particular paradoxes have dual hypodoxes. So, naively the dual of Russell’s Paradox is whether the set of all sets that are members of themselves is self-membered. The dual of the Liar Paradox is the Truth-teller, and a hypodoxical dual of the Heterological paradox is whether ‘autological’ is autological. I provide some analysis of the duality and (...) I search for modal hypodoxes as duals to known paradoxes. I also try to continue this search further by mapping the relations between some paradoxes and hypodoxes in duality squares. This investigation increases the known extension of the concept of hypodox, and the duality relation between paradoxes and hypodoxes assists in finding some of these. (shrink)

This paper uses certain of Michel Foucault's ideas concerning modern consciousness (from The Order of Things) to illuminate a central paradox of the schizophrenic condition: a strange oscillation, or even coexistence, between two opposite experiences of the self: between the loss or fragmentation of self and its apotheosis in moments of solipsistic grandeur. Many schizophrenic patients lose their sense of integrated and active intentionality; even their most intimate thoughts and inclinations may be experienced as emanating from, or under (...) the control of, some external being or mysterious foreign soul (‘I feel it is not me who is thinking’; ‘I have been programmed’). Yet the same patients may also experience the self as preeminent, all-powerful or all-knowing (‘My thoughts can influence things’; ‘This event happens because I think it'). Here one may feel confronted with the very paradigm of irrationality: profound contradictions suggesting regression to primitive ‘primary-process’ thinking or utter collapse of the higher faculties of mind. I argue, however, that these dualities so basic to schizophrenia can best be understood very differently: as consequences of a kind of alienation and hyper-self-consciousness (‘hyper- reflexivity') that is closely analogous to what occurs in the post-Kantian era of Western intellectual history. The parallel dualities of modern thought have been most extensively discussed by Foucault, who describes paradoxes, tensions and other dilemmas central to what he calls the modern ‘episteme'; these result from what Foucault sees as the modern human being's introverted and ultimately self-deceiving preoccupation with, and overvaluing of, the phenomenon of his own consciousness. Parallels between these contradictions and those characteristic of several withdrawn schizophrenic individuals are described and analysed. The paper concludes with an Afterword in which some possible neurobiological underpinnings of these schizophrenic experiences are discussed. (shrink)

The Liar paradox is the directly self-referential Liar statement: This statement is false.or : " Λ: ∼ T 1" The argument that proceeds from the Liar statement and the relevant instance of the T-schema: " T ↔ Λ" to a contradiction is familiar. In recent years, a number of variations on the Liar paradox have arisen in the literature on semantic paradox. The two that will concern us here are the Curry paradox, 2 and the Yablo paradox. 3The Curry (...) paradox demonstrates that neither negation nor a falsity predicate is required in order to generate semantic paradoxes. Given any statement Φ whatsoever, we need merely consider the statement: If this statement is true, then Φor: " Ξ: T → Φ" Here, via familiar reasoning, one can ‘prove’ Φ merely through consideration of statement Ξ and the Ξ-instance of the T-schema.Interestingly, the Liar paradox can be viewed as nothing more than a special case of the Curry paradox. If we define negation in terms of the conditional and a primitive absurdity constant ‘⊥’: 4" ∼ Ψ = df Ψ → ⊥" then the Liar paradox is simply the instance of the Curry paradox obtained by substituting ‘⊥’ for Φ.The Yablo paradox demonstrates that circularity is also not required in order to generate semantic paradox. 5 The paradox proceeds by considering an infinite ω-sequence of statements of the form: S 1: ) S 2: ) S 3: ) : : : : : S i: ) : : : : : :– that is, the set of …. (shrink)

A fascinating compilation of the life stories of perfectly ordinary people, all of whom have been through extraordinary experiences leading to amazing new perceptions. Some have been seekers from a very young age, whilst others had previously never even thought in terms of seeking. Nevertheless, all shared a common sense of dissatisfaction with their lives. This collection of stories explores the remarkable means by which each individual went about achieving an end to their suffering.

_ Source: _Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 117 - 148 The paper examines the problem of self-knowledge from the perspectives of Plotinus and the Indian Advaita school. Analyzing the subject-object relation, I show that according to both Plotinus and Advaita thinkers, full self-knowledge demands complete absence of otherness. Plotinus argues that if self-consciousness is divided into subject-object relation then one will know oneself as contemplated but not as contemplating and no real self-knowledge obtains in this case. (...) Śaṅkara, who constitutes an important representative of Advaita thought, points out that the self cannot know itself as an object because what is called an object to be known becomes established when it is separated from the self, the subject. I argue that at the level of the One, similar to the state of _ātman_ consciousness in Advaita framework, the soul experiences itself in expansive non-dual consciousness. Lastly, I examine the role of non-duality as the foundation of knowledge. (shrink)

A deductive system is said to be structurally complete if its admissible rules are derivable. In addition, it is called hereditarily structurally complete if all its extensions are structurally complete. Citkin (1978) proved that an intermediate logic is hereditarily structurally complete if and only if the variety of Heyting algebras associated with it omits five finite algebras. Despite its importance in the theory of admissible rules, a direct proof of Citkin’s theorem is not widely accessible. In this paper we offer (...) a self-contained proof of Citkin’s theorem, based on Esakia duality and the method of subframe formulas. As a corollary, we obtain a short proof of Citkin’s 2019 characterization of hereditarily structurally complete positive logics. (shrink)

In a number of standard introductory textbooks on Indian philosophy, classical Sāṃkhya is described as a Hindu philosophical school based on a fundamental dualism between a plurality of selves, or spirits and the material, or phenomenal world, whereas Buddhism, on the other hand, is most often described as a system based on the radically different position of "no-self" or selflessness.1 However, such depictions, although not entirely inaccurate, often obscure strong structural homologies between the two systems, which highlight the fundamental (...) duality at the heart of both systems' ontologies and their inherent pessimism toward conventional reality. Building on... (shrink)

I focus on an early article by Francisco Varela, 'Not One, Not Two' (1976), to argue that his non-dualistic epistemology entails a paradigm shift towards a fundamentally co-embodied, and thus social, view of self. Varela argued that the mind–body duality could be resolved by understanding the mind as embodied. Both Varela and Evan Thompson have later elaborated on this and suggested an enactive, essentially embodied view of the self in terms of selforganized, organismic autonomy. I will argue (...) that the enactive view of the self remains ambiguous with regards to the role of social interactions: are they constitutive for the minimal self-organization of the self or do they only play a shaping, secondary factor? I rely on Varela's epistemology in 'Not One, Not Two' to support my argument that the minimal self-organizational network that is the human self entails both individual bodily and joint co-embodied processes so that the self is already and constitutively social. (shrink)

The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is (...) to address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered. (shrink)

Borrowing from evolutionary biology, existentialism, developmental psychology, and social learning theory, an integrated model of human behavior is applied to several forms of self-destructive behavior, to include anorexia nervosa, suicide, substance abuse, and pathological gambling. It is argued that self-destructive behavior is a function of how the individual psychologically construes survival and copes with perceptions of isolation and separation from the environment. The paradox of self-destructive behavior in organisms motivated by self-preservation is resolved by taking note (...) of the fact that self-destruction stems from peopleís efforts to survive psychologically and resolve the subjectóobject duality, even when this places their physical well-being in jeopardy. (shrink)

인도 철학에 나타난 독특한 개념인 비지각(non-perception)은 특정대상의 부재를 알아차리는 인식을 가리킨다. 인도 학파들 간에는 이 비지각적 인식에 대한 다양한 철학적, 개념적 논쟁들이 있어 왔지만, 비지각적 앎이 의식의 진화와 성숙, 최후의 깨어남을 유도하는 중요한 인식 작용이라는 점은 아직 충분히 강조되지 않았다. 인식 주체, 인식 대상, 인식 작용이라는 인식의 3요소가 출현하는 현상 세계에서 인식은 감각 기관을 통한 특정 대상의 형질이나 형체를 알아차리는 감각 인식과 심상들을 상대하는 사유 인식으로 나눌 수 있다. 현상 세계에서 의식은 감각되는 대상들과 그 감각의 주체를 모두 실체인 것으로 본다. (...) 그런데 의식의 궁극적 차원에서는 이 대상 지향적 인식은 착각이라고 할 만한 강력한 의식의 조작이라고 말한다. 즉 인식되므로 당연히 존재한다고 생각되던 개체 의식들, 대상들은 단지 실제로 존재하는 것처럼 경험된다는 것이다. 주체와 대상이라는 존재들은 경험되는 현상, 인식되는 현상 안에서만 그 존재성이 드러난다고 하겠다. 이 사실을 증명하고 확인하는 방법은 대상 없이 일어나는 비지각적 앎을 통해서이다. 주체와 대상들의 비실체성을 완전하게 깨치는 자각 현상이 일어나기 전까지 비지각은 의식의 전환과 성숙을 이끄는 결정적인 앎으로 작용한다. 자각은 의식이 존재와 세계의 실상을 깨닫고, 의식 자체의 본성을 직증하는 현상이다. 이는 곧 궁극의 진리인 불이일원(advaita)을 깨닫는 현상이기도 하다. 우빠니샤드를 비롯한 여러 인도 고대 문헌들에서는 지각과 비지각적 앎을 거쳐 자각에 이르는 과정을 일상에서 경험하는 의식의 상태인 깨어있는 상태, 꿈꾸는 상태, 깊은 잠의 상태의 과정으로 설명하고 있다. 개체 의식내면에서 비지각적 앎이 의식의 실제 경험으로 알려지기 시작할 때, 그 내면 의식의 성숙과 전환이 일어난다. (shrink)

Since many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful, it would be wise to be ambivalent about at least some of its forms.1 It is open-eyed ambivalence that acknowledges its own dualities rather than ordinary shifty vacillation that we need. To be sure, self-deception remains dangerous: sensible ambivalence should not relax vigilance against pretence and falsity, combating irrationality and obfuscation wherever they occur.

This essay attempts to show how a particular view of the self and the mind has ignored its Other-related, world-related and thus embodied character. This view, whose origins in the history of ideas can be traced back to René Descartes, has led to important theories of mind and language. It has also generated a certain hegemony of binaries, such as the inner and the outer, the mind and the world, the self and the other, the subjective and the (...) objective, or the intrinsic and the extrinsic. This picture of the self and the mind thus portrayed as epistemologically insulated entities has begotten serious problems in the philosophies of mind and language as well as in the cognitive sciences. It is a view that has pervaded many recent developments in these fields and bears the name of Representationalism. The essay therefore starts with a critique of the Cartesian conception of the mind and the ensuing inner/outer or self/other dualities that it creates, then turns to Representationalism as found in the analytical philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This essay considers some meta-ethical questions that emerge from a consideration of the phenomena of terrorism in the context of Buddhist metaphysics: what, in the Buddhist view, ultimately causes terrorism (and its subsidiary effects)? What resources do the Buddhist metaphysical claims of no-self, karma, emptiness and related concepts bring to a meta-ethical understanding of terrorism and its effects?

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of (...) why we should not become passive members of the herd. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. (shrink)

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of (...) why we should not become passive members of the herd. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. (shrink)

The duality of attention is explored by turning our focus to the political and cultural conceptions of automatic attention and deliberate attention, with the former being associated with animality and “uncivilized” behavior and the latter with intelligence and self-mastery. In this article, I trace this ongoing dualism of the mind from early race psychology in the late nineteenth century to twentieth century psychological models including those found in psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neo-behaviorism, and behavioral economics. These earlier studies explicitly or (...) implicitly maintained a deficiency model of controlled attention and other mental processes that were thought to differ between racial groups. Such early models of attention included assumptions that Black and Indigenous peoples were less in control of their attention compared to whites. This racialized model of attention, as seen in the law of economy in the nineteenth century, with similar manifestations in psychoanalysis and neo-behaviorism in the twentieth century, can now be seen in present-day dual-process models as used in current psychological research and behavioral policy. These historical connections show that attention is not a value-neutral term and that attention studies do not stand outside of race and structural racism. (shrink)

In his commentary on Plato's Parmenides, Proclus critiques an unnamed predecessor for attributing self-constitution to the One, claiming that the notion necessitates duality in its subject. Proclus almost certainly has in mind Plotinus in Ennead VI.8.13-22, where the latter attributes self-causation and determination to the One. However in the latter context, Plotinus is rather attempting to show how the One's unity entails that it is the cause of such self-determinative activity manifested in Intellect (as in the (...) earlier Enn. VI.8.1-7). One could conclude, as does John Dillon, that Proclus is giving up an unfair criticism of Plotinus. In this dissertation I offer some support for Proclus' critical stance with an analysis of both figures' positions, starting with a look at (1) self-constitution and its conceptual origin in self-motion; (2) Plotinus on the One's causality; (3) Proclus on the One's causality; and (4) an analysis of Enn. VI.8.13-14 in light of Proclus' critique. While it could be that Proclus takes little account for Plotinus' careful construction in the language of Enn. VI.8.13-22, still Proclus' critique hinges on a different view of causation for the One than Plotinus'. The different stance lies in the background for why Plotinus allows for self-constitution in the One, even if with metaphorical language, while for Proclus such language pertains only to the intermediate level below the One (with e.g. Being, between the One and Intellect) and not up to the One-itself. (shrink)

This article is devoted to one of the most important discoveries of Jerzy Grotowski, the total act, a specific kind of action and experience. It was created as part of theatrical practice, but apart from the function related to the dramaturgy of performances, it had a higher purpose, associated with the search for the essence of humanity and sources of experience of reality. Jerzy Grotowski sought to transform actors and observers, open them to what is authentic, alive and present. This (...) achievement was a kind of experience in which the sacrum and the profanum are overcome. The total act allowed "to become watched” and, paradoxically, allowed to participate in the duality of passive action, in which man becomes an observer and agent at the same time. My goal is to describe the role of the principle of coexistence of opposites in the work of J. Grotowski. I am describing the total act as an opportunity to reach an experience of reality in which the mind and the body merge with each other. Man as a psychophysical unity precedes all differences in this archetypal experience, he is able to reach the very center of his own self, that which Jung called Selbst. (shrink)

Inquiry into object happiness -- What is enlightenment? -- The means of knowledge -- Qualifications -- The self -- Obstructions -- Inquiry into karma and dharma -- Inquiry into practice -- Love -- The assimilation of experience -- Lifestyle -- Knowledge yoga -- Meditation -- After enlightenment -- The teachings of Ramana Maharshi -- Neo-Advaita.

Maturity, that is often gained under the hammer of suffering, sooner or later will force us to remove the Eye of intelligence from things that are not (world of duality) and direct it toward the splendor of one's own essential nature. Undoubtedly, this implies an overturning of values, a psychological revolution, tending no longer toward the ineffective and unfruitful horizontal line, but toward the vertical one leading to awakening, to the unveiling of marvellos potentialities, the prerogative of the human (...) soul. (shrink)

John Russon offers an engaging analysis of Hegel’s notion of embodiment, which, though not given priority in the Hegelian corpus, affords an enriching understanding of Hegel’s notion of sociality. Admittedly, Hegel does not offer those attempting to derive from his work a philosophy of embodiment a wealth of resources. Moreover, his few remarks on the body do not seem to fulfill his own philosophic criteria and aims, and so fail to offer an entirely self-developing position concerning human embodiment. However, (...) Russon casts Hegel as being an heir to the Aristotelian notion of personhood as a confluence of soul and body, and argues for the notion of Geist as the Idealist analogue to Aristotle’s concept of soul/psychology. Russon portrays Hegel as not only furthering Aristotle’s psychology, but also as emerging from the Scholastic and Enlightenment duality of mind or soul and body to act as a precursor of the postmodern account of discursivity as performativity. Embodiment remains, according to Russon, an explication of numerous levels of expression, socialization and habituation. Hegel’s concept of embodiment parallels Aristotle’s in abiding by an internal principle of self-explication, in which personal identity requires and is defined by self-expression. Russon argues that embodiment and self-expression are coextensive; embodiment is discursivity, in which our nature, habits, and express communication reflect and build upon our inherited and internalized culture and institutional relationships. (shrink)

We argue that the projective geometrical component of the Projective Consciousness Model can account for key aspects of pre-reflective self-consciousness and can relate PRSC intelligibly to another signal feature of subjectivity: perspectival character or point of view. We illustrate how the projective geometrical versions of the concepts of duality, reciprocity, polarity, closedness, closure, and unboundedness answer to salient aspects of the phenomenology of PRSC. We thus show that the same mathematics that accounts for the statics and dynamics of (...) perspectival character also accounts for PRSC. More generally, we argue that introducing higher-level geometrical concepts into the theory of PRSC, and into the theory of consciousness broadly, as the PCM does, promises to break longstanding theoretical impasses and dialectical stalemates. (shrink)

Concerned with the issue of the I-thou encounter and the question of how to overcome the problem of the confrontation that occurs in the worldly existence among individuals, the Japanese philosopher Ueda Shizuteru (1926-), a leading member of the Kyoto School, addressed this issue in his phenomenology of the self. Ueda develops his ideas as a hermeneutical practice in the reading of the well-known Zen classic parable Ten Ox-Herding pictures, given that Zen Buddhism is the main tradition upon which (...) he critically and creatively draws. In accordance with Zen, Ueda argues that the emptied self is a non-self self boundlessly open and compassionate. As a result, the selfless self is open to the other in such a way that a genuine encounter with the other can take place. In the encounter, the closed ego realizes that its self-identity includes also its self-negation, such that, for the selfless self the other’s concerns are one’s concerns. The main aim of this contribution is to look at Ueda’s understanding of the interpersonal relations in what he conceives as a twofold world, that is, the worldly existence and the infinite openness that imbues this existence. In the infinite openness, the fundamental difference between self and other disappears into the state where the individual becomes emptiness while maintaining their “otherness” as separate and distinct. It means that the nullified self still preserves its identity, the other is accepted as different, and at the same time both share this common selfless ground. Thus, a particular conception of identity arises in which we can trace its roots back to Nishida Kitarō’s notion of “self-contradictory identity” (矛盾的自己同一 mujunteki jikodōitsu) and Nishitani Keiji’s “non-duality of self and other” (自他不二 jitafuni). According to the first, each of us, as individual bodies, also contains absolute negation within. The latter refers to a mode of being where self and other are one and simultaneously each one remains what it is in itself, probably inspired in Mahāyāna Buddhist logic whereby two different things are neither one nor two and yet both one and two. Given that the identification of the subject with its context and the emphasis on the sameness can entail the risk of suppressing other’s alterity and subordinating the individual to the whole, these views have been regarded as ambivalent. Therefore, the criticism and implications of this standpoint of “contradictory identity” are also examined. However, the assumption here is that due to the ethical import of this standpoint, it could certainly be of interest if applied to social and intercultural relations. (shrink)

This study aims to address the problems, obligations and value judgments that the modern individuals encounter while endeavoring to shape their own identities with the emergence of the new era in general. It examines the conflicts of the individuals within themselves, their senses of belonging, lifestyles, moral problems and the relationship between not only city and countryside but also tradition and modernity, one of the dichotomy in the modern era, in the context of Turkey in particular. More specifically, the study (...) emphasizes extreme individualism, the trivialization of traditional values owing to modernity, the loss of sense of belonging as a result of a shift to a consumption-oriented lifestyle as well as individuals’ sense of conscience and morality. In this sense, the issue of morality might be construed as the focal point of the present study. In the modern communication era, cinema has played a pivotal role in reflecting the realities of life. Therefore, film-oriented social life studies are particularly important. In this study, the effects of fundamental changes and transformations in Turkey, and the issues in the realms of social life, education, religion, profession and family in the modern era are examined through the film ‘The Wild Pear Tree’. The script of the film is written on the story of Akın Aksu, who is the son of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's uncle and one of the screenwriters. Nuri Bilge Ceylan deals with human nature and social problems in depth in his films. He attempts to depict the reality in his films directly by portraying many aspects and details of it. Ceylan's films could be delineated as critical films including meta-fiction. The Wild Pear Tree is one of his long winded works in which he displays the consumer society, the capitalist lifestyle and its reflections on the individual with satire and subtle irony. The film was analyzed in terms of Sinan's relationships with the characters he encountered during his search for himself. The findings of the study indicates that Nuri Bilge Ceylan addressed not only the traces of modernity, but also the problems of post-modernity boldly and presents his criticisms clearly through dialogues. The film was shot in the post-modern period and touches on the social problems of Turkey as well as the problems of the era. The individual’s dragging into an unconnected, discontinuous and fragmented way of life during his search for his ‘self’ with modernity has led to identity crises. Even though this situation is personal, it also highlights the intervention in social memory. Although the traces of the transition from the countryside to the city became blurred over time, the duality of tradition and modernity has stood out. In the study, the changes in the family and society along with the individual change were examined. The necessity of the rapid life increasing with modernity and the depressions caused by the sense of being out of date were also discussed. It has become evident in the last century that the individual feels stuck, lonely, and unstable in his behavior. Within this framework, the loneliness of Sinan, the main character and his being stuck between not only the country and the city but also his dreams and living conditions in the Wild Pear Tree started with his escaping from the country and resulted in his finding his ‘self’ in the country. A perspective of continuity in change is seen in the character Sinan, who escaped from his own reality and returned to the countryside where his father lived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Losing the Self:Detachment in Meister Eckhart and Its Significance for Buddhist-Christian DialogueCharlotte RadlerThe purpose of this article is to probe Meister Eckhart's concepts of self—or, rather, no-self—detachment, and indistinct union, and their positive implications for Buddhist-Christian dialogue. I will examine potential affinities between Eckhart and Buddhist thought with the modest hope of identifying areas in Eckhart's mysticism that may present themselves as particularly ripe for Buddhist-Christian (...) conversations.On April 15, 1329, Pope John XXII issued the bull "In agro dominico" that condemned tenets of Meister Eckhart's teaching. Pope John XXII, who had also dealt harshly with the spiritual Franciscans, was truly concerned about Eckhart's seductive impact on the uneducated in the pews.1 Eckhart's claim that every human's true identity, attainable through detachment, is divine must have created dreams in some of an unmediated experience of and union with the divine, and nightmares in others of the bypassing of the Church's structures, sacraments, and hierarchies.Eckhart, a University of Paris teacher and a preacher, bases his mysticism in part on Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite. Similarly to Proclus, Eckhart proposes that the soul's circular journey runs from the nothingness of the God beyond God, the God beyond the Trinity, into the somethingness of the world, and back to the nothingness of the God beyond the God. There is a firm ontological link between the One, the Trinity, and creation, which means that creation in its core is Trinitarian and One. In his interpretations of Job 22:14 and Ps. 61:12, Eckhart demonstrates that God is never static as One or Three or creation, but God is at once dialectically One and flowing out into the persons of the Trinity and flowing over into creation.2 This continuity between the Creator and creature, time and eternity, sanctifies creation and transience in all its grittiness and overcomes a duality between Creator and creature similar to the interpretation of samsara and nirvana (conditioned reality is Boundless Openness in Mahayana thought). Furthermore, Eckhart maintains that the One, as transparent and transcendent nothingness, encompasses and penetrates all. The wondrous truth, for Eckhart, is that we are truly all in all, just like the center of the circle is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.3 [End Page 111]To his audience, Eckhart repeatedly underscores that the soul is ontologically rooted in the nothingness of the divine unity and is thus in its deepest essence divine. In fact—and here we find profound resonances with tenets of Buddhist thought such as the concept of no-self (anatta or anatma)—the self's only true existence is the divine nothingness. Contrary to such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart focuses on the principal existence of things in the godhead and maintains that the human being does not possess a true substantial existence or "I" apart from God.4 Hence, the "I" or self can never constitute the foundation of reality. Because of the human being's absolute ontological dependence on God, Eckhart can assert that "where God is, there is the soul, and where the soul is, there is God."5 In his writings, Eckhart therefore differentiates between the true existence that creatures have in their original cause, the esse virtuale, and the particular and ephemeral existence that creatures possess in themselves, the esse formale.6 Thus, instead of autonomy and possessive individualism, "theonomy" implies the realization of the human being's full potential.While the autonomous, individual self is a form of negative nothingness or no-self, it paradoxically constitutes the greatest attachment for the human being. The clinging to the self causes what David Tracy refers to as an individual and cultural terror of transience.7 In the journey toward union, the soul must carefully release itself from all its attachments and detach itself from all its possessiveness. Eckhart's existential letting-go and letting-be imply the profoundest respect for existence itself as well as recognition of the ontological interconnectedness of all life.One of the foremost representatives of the apophatic tradition, Eckhart hooks up the praxis of apophasis to the notion of detachment, the stripping away of... (shrink)

We study the appearance of genetic information starting from a system where self-reproductive and enzymatic functions are supported by the same sort of molecules. In a first phase, the information must have arisen in the form of rate independent sequences as records of enzymatic functions. Although this stage must have played an important role in evolution, it will be shown how its evolutive capacities were blocked by the impossibility of appearance of geno/phenotype duality. Finally, a logical scheme is (...) proposed for a transition process toward a system with a code offering a simplification of the conditions required from the assumption of a maximum use of the double RNA capacity, both reproductive and enzymatic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Literature Self-Referential?Eric MillerIIs literary language necessarily self-referential? And does this put paradox at the heart of literature? For at least two decades now, affirmative answers to both questions have been articles of faith among critics in the structuralist and poststructuralist mainstream. Literature’s ineluctable paradoxicality attracts us so because a paradox suggests that there are limits to human rationality, and thus strikes a blow for literature and (...) against science. Paradox ensures literature its own special realm, safe from the culturally imperialistic inroads of science’s orderly, rational-empirical constructions. Literature thus gets to be seen as “bigger” than reason, because only literature can live with paradox, and thus only literature reveals those “deeper” truths of contradiction-ridden human existence, whereas science can never penetrate beyond rational manipulations of phenomenal surfaces. Indeed, for anyone who holds all human existence to be fundamentally paradoxical, this special capacity makes literature the only genuine, demystified species of human knowledge. In the war between C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, a war humanists are now losing badly, we like to regard paradox as our ultimate weapon.Belief in the paradoxicality of literature may also be found among the New Critics, 1 and in fact goes back at least to the Romantics, 2 but they did not derive this belief from a necessary self-referentiality of literary language. This newer way of deriving paradox appears to offer several competitive advantages. Self-reference seems to be the ultimate version of “art for art’s sake”: if all literary language is necessarily self-referential, then literature must be something totally self-contained, and is thus legitimized solely in and through itself. In addition, deriving [End Page 475] literature’s paradoxicality from self-reference seems to ground it in the same conceptual realm as mathematical logic, and thus tempts us to claim for literature a “rigor” normally conceded only to logic, mathematics, and theoretical physics. Self-referentiality would thus seem both to protect literature’s autonomy and to raise its cultural status into the company of mathematics and science.But it is a trap. For behind this new strategy lurks a capitulation to the underlying conceptual scheme of natural science, and literature thus comes to be conceived, in effect, as a science. Self-reference is, after all, still a kind of reference; paradox is still a kind of truth-relational construction;—and truth-relations built around reference constitute the correspondence theory of truth. From such a foundational commitment to reference and correspondence-truth, flows the rest of the scientific worldview: the dualism of referring expression and referent, word and object, sentence and fact, theory and data, language and world, culture and nature. The presentation of literature as a quasi-negation of this ontology changes nothing. The dualism of reference still functions as literature’s conceptual starting point, as its arche. We only appear to be defining a peculiar and radically distinct sphere for literature when we insist on its self-referentiality, on the (recursive) identity, for it, of referring expression and referent. For, this is still to treat the conceptual distinction between the two as foundational, and literature thereby tacitly assimilates science’s fundamental categorial division: the referential language-world duality of correspondence truth. Indeed, literature thus comes to live even more completely in the margins of science: it will have no essence of its own; it will differ at most in being a photo-negative image of science’s positiv(istic) project. In Snow’s war, self-reference is a Trojan horse.With self-reference as the essence of literature, we are thus staking our reputations on literature’s being a special field of formalizable “knowledge about...,” rather than, say, a quality or kind or realm of possible experience—which is to adopt science’s understanding of what is important. Matters are only made worse by that other attempt to define literary studies as a negation of the theory-data dualism of natural science: the poststructuralist denial of the distinction between criticism and literature. For the institutional need professional critics have to be seen as a discipline with a method and a subject, as a form of “knowledge about,” hardly disappears with... (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] richness and originality of Thomas Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge has been underappreciated no less by his admirers than his critics. The former consider it secondary to his teaching on cognition in general, and the latter dismiss it as scholastic triviality. Cory wishes to restore Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge to (...) its rightful place, and to do so she must provide both its historical context and the theoretical implications it has for Aquinas’ anthropology and epistemology.Cory's basic premise is that Aquinas needed to maintain both that the intellect can know itself only by cognizing something else and that it has no explicit awareness of anything outside itself without implicit awareness of itself. To elaborate this ‘fundamental duality’ of conscious thought,... (shrink)

Since the publication of Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science in 1975, critical realism has been evolved as one of the new developments in the areas of philosophy of natural and social science which offers an alternatively fresh view to the existing theories including positivism and post-modernism. Bhaskar's intellectual movement, which is now fully international and multi-disciplinary, and continues to influence the philosophies of natural and social science, has transformed into 'Dialectical Critical Realism' and the philosophy of 'meta-Reality.' MinGyu (...) will conclude that his anti-anthropic Non-duality continues through all the steps of Bhaskar's thought, maintaining the consistency of his scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual journey. The anti-anthropic motif is fully realized in the philosophy of Non-duality - the 'constellational identification of dualism, duality and non-duality' in his meta-Reality. Defending Bhaskar against Collier, Agar, and Morgan, MinGyu tries to show how its anti-anthropic and non-dualistic foundation is sustained through the whole of Bhaskar's journey, involving a transformation of its subject matters from reality, to the dialectic of reality, to the real truth underlying the former stages. This book provides an indispensible resource for all students of philosophy and the human sciences. (shrink)