Os anos egípcios eram de 365 dias contados a partir da subida ao trono de cada rei. Esta contagem era independente das três estações em que se subdividia o ano solar, marcadas pelas necessidades agrícolas. As semanas iniciais de sete e oito dias, motivadas pelas fases lunares, cedo foram ultrapassadas por um sistema muito mais regular de meses de três décadas, cada uma marcada pelo aparecimento de um decano. Os decanos eram 36 estrelas visíveis por períodos de dez dias, completando-se (...) o ano com os cinco dias epagómenos. Sírio, a primeira, marcava outro início do ano. Em vez de utilizarem dois calendários, um baseado no Sol e na Lua, e outro na elevação helíaca de Sírio, reuniram os ciclos do Sol, da Lua e de Sírio num sistema único, um «grande ano», um sistema que anulava o atraso que o calendário tinha em relação ao tempo astral de um dia de quatro em quatro anos, ao fim dos 1461 anos do período sotíaco. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

Individuals with a balanced time perspective, which includes good thoughts about the past, awareness of present constraints and adaptive planning for a positive future, are more likely to report optimal wellbeing. However, people who have had traumas such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are likely to have less balanced time perspectives and lower overall wellbeing when compared to those with fewer or no ACEs. Time perspective can be improved viatime-travel narrativesthat support people in feeling connected to a wise and loving (...) future version of themselves, an approach that has until now only been provided in counseling contexts. Our team used an iterative inclusive design process to shape a scalable time-travel narrative tool – a responsive and progressive web application calledTime Machine.Among other functionalities, Time Machine allowed people to record and listen to messages as if they were from and to their past and future selves. Using pre-planned as well aspost-hocanalyses, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data from 96 paid design partners (participants) who were taken through a 26-day pilot study of the technology. Among other effects, the results revealed: (1) high engagement throughout the design process, (2) improvements in self-reported time perspective and overall wellbeing scores that were greater for those using Time Machine during an optional-use period, (3) twice as much improvement in overall wellbeing scores for design partners with high ACEs (16%) versus low ACEs (8%), and (4) feelings of unconditional love apparently mediating the relationship between scores on time perspective and overall wellbeing measures. We discuss the limitations of these results as well as implications for the future role of spiritually informed scalable time-travel narrative technologies in healthcare and wellness. (shrink)

Even a small percentage of missing data can cause serious problems with analysis, reducing the statistical power of a study and leading to wrong conclusions being drawn. In the case of monitoring a woman’s monthly cycle, missing entries can appear even in a woman experienced in fertility awareness methods. Due to the fact that in a system of controlling a woman’s fertility, it is the most important to predict the day of ovulation and, ultimately, to determine the fertile window as (...) much precisely as possible, much attention should be paid to the quality of the used data. This paper presents the results of handling missing observations as far as predicting the time during the cycle when a woman can become pregnant is concerned. Data taken from a multinational European study of daily fecundability was used to learn the quantitative part of the variety of a higher-order dynamic Bayesian network modeling a woman’s monthly cycle. The main goal of this paper is to examine whether omitting observations has an influence on the model’s reliability. The accuracy of comparison was examined based on two measures: the average percentage length of the infertile time during the monthly cycle and average percentage of days inside the fertile window classified as infertile. (shrink)

On the 3rd of March 380, Theodosius, moved by the qualitas (pro reverentia religionis) of the pre-paschal period, a special time of preparation for Easter,mandates the suspension during Christian Lent of all penal trials which normally resulted in torture (Cod. Theod. 9,35,4 = Cod. Iust. 3,12,5). Lent is a specifically Christian time which developed to a large degree in the course of the fourth century, but which varied in duration and organization in the various churches. The law adapts the judicial (...) calendar for the administration of justice to the rhythms of Christian liturgy. Theodosius in 389 (Cod. Theod. 9,35,5; 9,35,7) decrees that during Lent supplicia corporis could not take place, due to the sacredness of those days intended as a salutary penance which culminates in Easter reconciliation. Since the duration of Lent varied within the various churches, civil authorities of the provinces were to be informed by local Christians of the beginning and end of Lent. (shrink)

Much has been written and said about music's time, much less— at least in recent epochs—about time's music. Today this most subtle, yet most powerful form of music finds fewer and fewer listeners. It has become, in fact, harder and harder to listen to. The “congruent melodies,” i.e. “the rhythms of times which were given to us to alleviate our labors” (as the 13th-century music theorist had put it) have long since been silenced and drowned by subsonic noises.* In its (...) organization of time, Western civilization has, to an appallingly large extent, replaced rhythmic aliveness with abstract measures, reducing it to a “functional mechanism” (Baudrillard 1974). The main tools by which these measures are set, the clock as we know it and the modern calendar, are obviously, taken as such, remarkable achievements, but in their impact on our lives they are not so much companions enabling us to be “in harmony with things at the right moment” (see the Chinese shih, Larre 1976) as they are hostile guardians “watching our steps.”. (shrink)

One of the areas of study of tafsīr is the stories in the Qur’ān. In the stories of the Qur’ān, generally creation, man, the nature of man and different societies that lived in history are mentioned. Although the main theme in the stories is belief and disbelief, social structures and cultural features are explicitly and indirectly mentioned as well. But the mufassirs approached the stories mainly from the point of view of belief and disbelief. They did not declare an opinion (...) on cultural studies. Positive science applies the culture, science and technology that humanity has, only to the will and labour of man. However, when we look at the sacred texts, humanity has not only realized its development in the field of culture, science and technology, but also evolved by the presence of divine grace as well as the mind. In this evolution, the prophets were given a special task. This study covers the prophets and some inventions and professions attributed to them. The examination of the influence of divine grace and the Prophet’s fatānah (outstanding reasoning power) in the development of culture, science and technology is among the importance of the study. Because when scientific determinations are examined, it is seen that the first cultural events and civil developments occurred in the geography of the Prophets. Again, it can be seen that the explanation of culture and cultural developments with a positivist perspective and an empirical paradigm has some shortcomings. For this reason, the article aims to explain how cultural developments are formed based on sacred information data. In the study, the qualitative method was selected and the document examination technique was applied. Along with cultural activities, the prophets and their works were discussed; classical and modern tafsīr sources, as well as historical books, akhīlik (a guild system) works and futuwwatnāmas (rules and regulations of the guild) were addressed. Man was created by Almighty Allah with different and superior equipment than other beings. He has been taught all names. Names mean having the ability to recognize-classify-name the creature, to reason, to transform the nature and to transfer the culture. The meaning of the verse “he taught him all the names” is to teach the Prophet Adam the knowledge of things and the general knowledge of civilized life. The general knowledge was developed by people and various and different objects were produced; science and technique were constantly developed. Especially the prophets made a great contribution to these scientific and technological developments. Thus, the prophets guided people in the spiritual sphere such as faith, worship and morality, as well as in the scientific and material sphere. Throughout the history, the prophets have shed light on scientific developments directly or indirectly, showing the limits of the level of science that humanity can reach through their miracles. According to Islāmic Sciences, the process of domesticating seeds and taming animals began during the reign of the Prophet Adam. He produced dresses for himself and his wife. As a prophet, a religion and belief system was formed during his time. Along with Prophet Idrīs, more beautiful dresses began to be knitted and sewn, writing with pencil. In the era of Prophet Noah, besides agriculture, art was also developed; sculptures and ships were made. During Prophet Hoad period, there was progress in agriculture as well as urbanization activities, and villages and towns began to form. During the reign of Ṣāleḥ, cities were founded in a serious sense. For this reason, in Prophet Ṣāleḥ’s stories, emphasis is placed on the words dār and diyār, which means house or houses, and in particular the word medīna (city) is used. The inscription, which began to be mentioned with Prophet Idris in Islāmic Sciences, also began to be used in the Qur’ān along with Prophet Abraham/Ibrāhīm, and during the reign of Prophet Moses/Mūsā, it was referred to as the book. During the reign of Prophet Joseph, money was invented and the clock and calendar were used. Again, Islāmic sources also contain the information that Prophet Joseph/Yūsuf invented paper for the first time. During the period of Prophet Shu‘ayb, the knowledge of account, measurement and weighing were developed, and they began to be used extensively in trade. During the reign of Prophet David/Dāwūd, iron was very widely used, and Prophet David, made household items out of iron, as well as war tools and equipment. Prophet Solomon/Sulaymān, on the other hand, expanded the processing of iron further, making it widely in all areas of life. During the reign of Prophet Jesus/ʿĪsā and Luqmān, medicine also made progress; Prophet Jesus developed and treated methods of treatment for crippled patients. Along with Islām, this information has been included and developed in the most detailed way in the Qur’ān, the personality of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the Hadīth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hard Times:Philosophy and the Fundamentalist ImaginationRandall Everett Allsup"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this (...) is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!" So admonishes headmaster Gradgrind in the very beginning of Hard Times, Charles Dickens' prescient tale of education in the industrial world.1 Facts—"addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder"—Facts form the essence of Gradgrind's philosophy.2A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. I am particularly intrigued by the question Reimer posed in his opening. He asked us to consider, Who is philosophy of music education for? We will return to this question at the close of this brief reflection.For the moment, however, I would like to continue on to the second paragraph of Hard Times, where Dickens does something very interesting. Following Gradgrind's inglorious monologue, he casts the scene of a small schoolroom, a "plain, bare, monotonous vault."3 Headmaster Gradgrind stands in front; he is described with a "square wall of a forehead," his mouth is "wide, thin, and hard set," his voice "inflexible and dry."4 His hair "bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside."5 A square wall of a forehead, a lumpy head like the crust of a plum pie: these words give us more than "hard Facts"—they are more than mere descriptors. It seems that Dickens, through metaphor, mood, dynamic contrast—through the aesthetic imagination—has imbedded a quiet rebuke to the bold commonsense of Facts.The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be rooted out—basic skills make adults out of reasoning animals. "Children should be tested on basic reading and math skills every year, between grades three and eight. Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind."6 The speaker, of course, is George W. Bush whose call to basic skills and episodic testing appeals [End Page 139] to our sense of reason. Like Gradgrind suggests, it is the principle on which we brought up our own children, and this is the principle on which we will bring up today's children. Such a philosophy of education proudly combines folk beliefs about teaching and learning with the hard science of thorough assessment.The President further recommends that our children "must also be educated in the values of our civil society. Some people think it's inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me. We must be willing to draw a clear line between right and wrong. Those clear lines must be supported by political leaders, public schools, and our public institutions. Educating our children about their moral and civil responsibilities will serve them—and the nation—every bit as well as the academic learning they require."7 In addition to discipline-based standards of knowledge, Facts (in this view) govern the rules of citizenship, provide moral clarity, and as we will see shortly, inform the aesthetic. It is worth noting that such a linear equation—those clear straight lines—currently places skeptics in the category of unpatriotic, miseducative, and morally corrupt.8The fundamentalist philosophy of education is a governing philosophy—it is a philosophy for, not with, its initiates. Judgments are passed, not reached; answers are given, not argued. Teachers in this setting—whether willing accomplices or not—define what needs to be known and... (shrink)

This article is about a start-up problem in scientific practice. Specifically, it is about the problem of justifying paleontological correlation—the practice of using fossils to establish time relations among fossiliferous rocks. Paleontological correlation was the key to assembling a geological timescale during the nineteenth century and remains an important practice in stratigraphic geology to this day. Yet contrary to philosophical expectations, this practice lacked a robust theoretical justification during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines what this (...) lack of justification amounted to, as well as how the method of paleontological correlation was justified in practice. (shrink)

Indicators of food sovereignty and food democracy center on people having the right and ability to define their food polices and strategies with respect to food culture, food security, sustainability and use of natural resources. Yet food sovereignty, like democracy, exists on multiple and competing scales, and policymakers and citizens often have different agendas and priorities. In passing a ban on the use of genetically-modified seeds in agriculture, Jackson County, Oregon has obtained some measure of food sovereignty. Between 2016 and (...) 2017 ethnographic research was undertaken in rural Southern Oregon where local community and State of Oregon priorities regarding the use of GMO crops are in conflict. This article presents ethnographic research findings about the expression and negotiation of multiple food sovereignties by civil society in rural southern Oregon and the State of Oregon via democratic processes. In particular, these findings illustrate the effects of socio-political power dynamics on local and state acts of food sovereignty, democracy and agrifood policy by analyzing what the different expressions of food sovereignty reveal for its implementation at the local level. (shrink)

In March 1928, John Dewey responded to a request from Marie Meloney, editor of the New York Herald-Tribune Sunday Magazine, and offered his recommendations on recently published texts on education. Dewey wrote, "I think the best educational books of recent publication are Bode, Modern Educational Theories . . . Kilpatrick, Education for a Changing Civilization . . . & Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education".1 This was not the first time Dewey recommended Everett Dean Martin's book. In 1927, the (...) editors of the Journal of the National Education Association approached Dewey and asked, "What book have you recently found especially worthwhile? Something that you have read easily, eagerly, and with profit—either in .. (shrink)

The DSM characterizes major depressive disorder partly in temporal terms: the depressive mood must last for at least two weeks, and also must impact the subject "most of the day, nearly every day." However, from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology, the long-lasting quality of the condition hardly captures the distinctiveness of depression. While the DSM refers to objective time as measured by clocks and calendars, what is especially striking about depression is the distortions to lived time that it involves. But (...) is there any relation between a) these disruptions to temporal experience and b) the tendency for depressive symptoms to persist and endure? To explore the connection between lived time and objective time, I investigate the embodied and enactive nature of intentionality among subjects suffering from depression. What I call 'affective framing' is a spontaneous, pre-reflective way of filtering information that involves bodily attunement and allows subjects to focus their attention on what they feel is important. I will argue that affective framing ordinarily has a forward-looking temporal structure and a "teleological direction" that is rooted in our embodiment. However, depression involves a distortion in future-directed intentionality, so that a subject becomes temporally desituated and cut off from the future. This contributes to many of the characteristic features of depression, including apparent lack of motivation, inability to imagine future possibilities, alterations in lived time, and a sense that one is "stuck." To gain a better understanding of this disruption to the futuredirected structure of affective framing in cases of depression, I look to concepts from complex dynamic systems theory and the notion of 'habit.' My proposed account aims to shed light on how a disruption to future-directedness impacts bodily attunement and reinforces depression as a long-term condition. (shrink)

We propose that distinct leadership competencies differ in their development over time. Extending the integrative model of leader development (Day, Harrison, & Halpin, 2009), we further propose that leader identity will form complex relationships with leadership competencies over time. To test these propositions, we use longitudinal data (i.e., five month, four measurement points) of the 80 in total high-potential executives in a corporate leadership development program. We find significant difference in the initial levels and changes of eight distinct leadership competencies. (...) We also find that leader identity relates to the development of certain – but not all -- leadership competencies. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of developing leadership competencies by linking them to career advancement (i.e., job promotion). These findings are discussed in light of their theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hard Times:Philosophy and the Fundamentalist ImaginationRandall Everett Allsup"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this (...) is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!" So admonishes headmaster Gradgrind in the very beginning of Hard Times, Charles Dickens' prescient tale of education in the industrial world.1 Facts—"addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder"—Facts form the essence of Gradgrind's philosophy.2A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. I am particularly intrigued by the question Reimer posed in his opening. He asked us to consider, Who is philosophy of music education for? We will return to this question at the close of this brief reflection.For the moment, however, I would like to continue on to the second paragraph of Hard Times, where Dickens does something very interesting. Following Gradgrind's inglorious monologue, he casts the scene of a small schoolroom, a "plain, bare, monotonous vault."3 Headmaster Gradgrind stands in front; he is described with a "square wall of a forehead," his mouth is "wide, thin, and hard set," his voice "inflexible and dry."4 His hair "bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside."5 A square wall of a forehead, a lumpy head like the crust of a plum pie: these words give us more than "hard Facts"—they are more than mere descriptors. It seems that Dickens, through metaphor, mood, dynamic contrast—through the aesthetic imagination—has imbedded a quiet rebuke to the bold commonsense of Facts.The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be rooted out—basic skills make adults out of reasoning animals. "Children should be tested on basic reading and math skills every year, between grades three and eight. Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind."6 The speaker, of course, is George W. Bush whose call to basic skills and episodic testing appeals [End Page 139] to our sense of reason. Like Gradgrind suggests, it is the principle on which we brought up our own children, and this is the principle on which we will bring up today's children. Such a philosophy of education proudly combines folk beliefs about teaching and learning with the hard science of thorough assessment.The President further recommends that our children "must also be educated in the values of our civil society. Some people think it's inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me. We must be willing to draw a clear line between right and wrong. Those clear lines must be supported by political leaders, public schools, and our public institutions. Educating our children about their moral and civil responsibilities will serve them—and the nation—every bit as well as the academic learning they require."7 In addition to discipline-based standards of knowledge, Facts (in this view) govern the rules of citizenship, provide moral clarity, and as we will see shortly, inform the aesthetic. It is worth noting that such a linear equation—those clear straight lines—currently places skeptics in the category of unpatriotic, miseducative, and morally corrupt.8The fundamentalist philosophy of education is a governing philosophy—it is a philosophy for, not with, its initiates. Judgments are passed, not reached; answers are given, not argued. Teachers in this setting—whether willing accomplices or not—define what needs to be known and... (shrink)

Ultradian rhythms are those that cycle many times in a day and are therefore measured in hours, minutes, seconds or even fractions of a second. In yeasts and protists, a temperature‐compensated clock with a period of about an hour (30–90 minutes) provides the time base upon which all central processes are synchronized. A 40‐minute clock in yeast times metabolic, respiratory and transcriptional processes, and controls cell division cycle progression. This system has at its core a redox cycle involving NAD(P)H and (...) dithiol–disulfide interconversions. It provides an archetype for biological time keeping on longer time scales (e.g. the daily cycles driven by circadian clocks) and underpins these rhythms, which cannot be understood in isolation. Ultradian rhythms are the foundation upon which the coherent functioning of the organism depends. BioEssays 29:465–473, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

So wrote Mary McGrory, a perceptive columnist and long-time dove.[1] But Mayday was not designed to win accolades in the press; rather it was designed to help end the war, a different purpose. The demonstrators, Miss McGrory wrote, many of whom "had shaved and spruced up for Eugene McCarthy…hope that the people will eventually make the connection between a bad war and a bad demonstration and they think they've provided an additional reason for getting out. They've introduced the element of (...) blackmail into the situation. They know everyone wanted them to go away. All they ask is that people remember it was the war that brought them here.". (shrink)

Over the past seventy-five years, the UN has evolved significantly, often in response to geopolitical dynamics and new waves of thinking. In some respects, the UN has registered remarkable achievements, stimulating a wide range of multilateral treaties, promoting significant growth of human rights, and at times playing a central role in containing and preventing large-scale armed conflict. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that the organization has (...) been the most impactful in three areas: producing, shaping, and driving key ideas, particularly on development and rights; generating such effective operational agencies as UNICEF and the World Food Program; and, especially in the immediate post–Cold War period, addressing major conflict risks through the Security Council. Since then, however, the UN has struggled to meet emerging challenges on many fronts and been increasingly hampered by internal ossification and institutional sprawl as well as internecine dysfunction. The twenty-first century has confronted the UN with further challenges relating most notably to climate change; to risks arising from new technologies; and to the increasingly fraught relationships between China, Russia, and the United States. If the past seventy-five years can offer one lesson, it is that new thinking and new ideas will need to drive the organization to evolve still further and faster, or else risk irrelevance. (shrink)

Traditionally the the problem of time considered the contrast between time (associated with succession) and eternity (associated with simultaneity) (from Parmenides, and via Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kierkegaard up to Wittgenstein and what theologians presuppose without being aware of it). It may appear as if time measurement can help us to understand what time is. However, the historical development of time measurement alternatively explored different routes – such as counting the days, weeks, months and years, establishing relative positions (the (...) sundial), employing the constant movement of a pendulum (mechanical clock work), and using the irreversibility of radio-active decay (atomic clocks). However, our awareness of time exceeds the confines of physical time. Just think of the heterogenous life cycle of living entities (coming into being, growing, maturing, ageing and dying) that differs from (homogenous) physical time. Likewise emotional time is different from physical time, for an hour can feel like five minutes and vice versa. Since Hegel introduced the concept of “geschichtliche Zeit” (historical time) thinkers like Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and many others followed this characterization. It will be argued that physical time cannot be elevated to true or the only genuine time. In order to substantiate this perspective other modes of time will be discussed – such as jural time. Since it appears that all definitions of “time” are simply definitions of diverse facets or modes of time, the Augustinian question still remains to be answered: what is time really? A possible answer to this question finally explores the multi-dimensional nature of time – acknowledging that there are idneed multiple modes of time and concludes by highlighting the difference between the diverse concepts of time we may have and the concept-transcending nature of the underlying dimensions of cosmic time, that is, the fact that ultimately we can approximate time solely in a concept-transcending idea. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:China and Contemporary Millenarianism—Something New under the SunBenjamin I. SchwartzOne of the most obvious remarks one can make about contemporary China is that China has no reason to be excited about contemporary Western millenarianism. If by "millenarianism" one refers to an apocalyptic transformation of the entire human condition based on the Christian calendar, then there is no reason for Chinese, Jews, and Moslems, who have their own historic visions, (...) to find any significance in the history of the last millennium. At the end of the first millennium or the beginning of the second, China was at a high point in its civilization. To the extent that apocalyptic tendencies could be found in either its high or its popular culture, these tendencies were the focus of Buddhism or religious Daoism. They were not tied to specific calendars, and in an Indian spirit they spoke in terms of "kalpas," which might last for hundreds of millions of years—or might occur next week.In addition, it should be noted—as has been pointed out by Professor Landes and others—that the notion that there was an all-consuming preoccupation with an impending apocalypse in the year A.D. 1000 is highly debatable. Among the more scholarly members of the clergy in medieval times there were already modes of thinking that, under the influence of Islamic and Jewish philosophers, were pointing in the direction of a non-apocalyptic scholastic philosophy.In all cultures down through the ages, an apocalyptic vision of deliverance has promised relief from the vast burden of human suffering and despair—a vision that would be recognized as such even by those who sought no apocalyptic solutions and who continued to believe that our this-worldly life still promised compensatory satisfactions, limited as these might be. They would not accept the Theravada/ Hinayana Buddhist belief that even what we call our individual pleasures are a function of our individual sufferings. According to that belief, our love of our children or our wives is poisoned by our acute awareness of the transient nature of their existence. Release from the world of samsara can be attained only by escaping the world of individuated samsara into the ineffable world of Nirvana.Turning to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, we find that the author, who represents an amalgam of Greek and Hebrew wisdom, is not an apocalyptist and still hopes that we will garner certain satisfactions from our lives as individuals in this mundane existence. Yet his disappointment, suffering, and exasperation over human vanities and duplicities often correspond to the catalogue of sufferings in the Theravada scriptures. But, like the Theravada Buddhists, he believes that in this world of ignorance (avidya) there is also "nothing new under the sun." In the endless generations of individual human lives, every mode of human ignorance and suffering has certainly existed in the endless cycle of samsara. It is nevertheless true that in the total attention on every aspect of human life from the techno-economic side, [End Page 193] we find a totally new way of neutralizing the age-old causes of human suffering. Gautama Buddha regarded our ordinary individual pleasures as poisoned by suffering, by the realization that individual pleasures soon fade away. Yet Prozac seems to continue to work without producing anxiety. Here, indeed, we have something new under the sun!In fact, the new technological-economic millenarianism does indeed represent something different from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century technological and economic transformations that seemed to offer the possibility of a steady amelioration of the human condition. Nineteenth-century technological and economic meliorism could be related to older forms of what might be called "materialistic" improvement. Yet nineteenth-century materialistic progressivism continued to be linked to other ethical concerns not only by Christian beliefs but also by many of the secular ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe. There were entire ideologies of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, romanticism, nationalism, et cetera, which continued to be deeply distressed by the non-"materialistic," ethical consequences of techno-economic progress. Techno-economic progress has not, after all, prevented the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the horrors of two world wars. On the contrary, it has raised... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Medical Ethics in a Time of De-CommunizationRobert Baker (bio)Ethics is often treated as a matter of ethereal principles abstracted from the particulars of time and place. A natural correlate of this approach is the attempt to measure actual codes of ethics in terms of basic principles. Such an exercise can be illuminating, but it can also obscure the circumstances that make a particular codification of morality a meaningful response (...) to specific historic circumstances. This is particularly true of the codes of medical ethics beginning to emerge from the post-Communist societies of Eastern Europe, which are, perhaps, best understood as artifacts of an era, rather than as expressions of abstract principles.The era in question is post-Communist. It is an era informed by a reaction to decades of Communism, which, of course, was more than an economic system or even an ideology; it was a form of life that permeated every aspect of civil society—advertising, art, literature, music. Medicine was not exempt. I recall entering an oncology ward in East Berlin and finding the patients seated around a large table making posters. Wondering whether this was a form of art therapy, I asked the head nurse what the patients were doing. She replied: it is "Party time—the portion of each week every citizen donates to the people and the Party." I looked again at the posters and saw that they honored Karl Marx on the 100th anniversary of his death: "1883-1983, The Struggle Goes On." The Party, the struggle, the people, were everywhere, and they penetrated and informed daily life even for terminal patients on a cancer ward.The interweaving of Communist practices into the warp and woof of daily life has profound implications for the post-Communist era. It means that East Europeans cannot simply rebuild; they must unweave Communist thought patterns—what might be called the ideostructure of Communism—from the fabric of their lives through a deliberate process of deCommunization. What remains after de-Communization depends upon [End Page 363] the historical relationship each country had with Communism. In Russia, removing Communist ideostructure sets the conceptual calendar back to 1918. For the Czechs, the calendar advances to the 1930s, leaving them with thought patterns that are Western, industrial, and democratic. In the rest of Eastern Europe the conceptual clock also tends to turn back to the 1930s, but at that time the conceptual frameworks were nationalist, anti-Western, and frequently fascist, or even Nazi.In Poland the situation is different. World War II opened with the Nazi invasion of the country—which Hitler (later joined by Stalin) subsequently occupied. After the war, the Soviet army controlled the country, which became a captive player in the Soviet sphere of influence (aptly denominated, "the Warsaw Pact"). Poland's pre-Communist thought patterns are nationalist, West-leaning, accepting of parliamentary structures, but also of authoritarian government. They are also Catholic.Catholicism to Poles is not merely a religion, it is a posture of opposition to their German (Nazi, antichristian) and Russian (Orthodox or atheist) occupiers. I toured Polish hospitals several times during the Communist period —always accompanied by one or more "tour guides." (Westerners were not allowed to roam Communist countries unescorted.) Almost all of my guides wore little pins adorned with the face of Lenin (not the hammer and sickle—a symbol of Soviet occupation). Most doctors and nurses, however, adorned themselves with Catholic icons—typically a crucifix. Their conspicuously displayed crosses symbolized less their embrace of Catholicism than their rejection of Communism. Catholicism, in the Polish context, was thus an affirmation of individual and national independence.De-Communizing Polish Medical Ethics: The Abortion ControversyIn Poland, de-Communization was initiated through a series of negotiations between Lech Walensa's Solidarity and the Communist Government. The Polish Code of Medical Ethics is an indirect consequence of these negotiations, which stipulated the dissolution of Communist medical organizations. They were to be replaced by a Polish Medical Chamber—a type of quasi-governmental body, common in Eastern Europe, which combines the functions of a governmental licensing agency with those of a national medical association. Medical chambers also set standards of professional conduct and (unlike... (shrink)

The plant maintains a 24‐h circadian cycle that controls the sequential activation of many physiological and developmental functions. There is empirical evidence suggesting that two types of circadian rhythms exist. Some plant rhythms appear to be set by the light transition at dawn, and are calibrated to circadian (zeitgeber) time, which is measured from sunrise. Other rhythms are set by both dawn and dusk, and are calibrated to solar time that is measured from mid‐day. Rhythms on circadian timing shift seasonally (...) in tandem with the timing of dawn that occurs earlier in summer and later in winter. On the other hand, rhythms set to solar time are maintained independently of the season, the timing of noon being constant year‐round. Various rhythms that run in‐phase and out‐of‐phase with one another seasonally may provide a means to time and induce seasonal events such as flowering. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

This paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration (...) and deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience. (shrink)

This article examines an unstudied set of astronomical tables for the meridian of Cambridge, also known as the Opus secundum, which the English theologian and astronomer John Holbroke, Master of Peterhouse, composed in 1433. These tables stand out from other late medieval adaptations of the Alfonsine Tables in using a different set of parameters for planetary mean motions, which Holbroke can be shown to have derived from a tropical year of $$365\frac{1}{4} - \frac{1}{132}$$ 36514-1132 or $$365.\overline{24}$$ 365.24¯ days. Implicit (...) in this year length was a 33-year cycle of repeating solar longitudes and equinox times, which has left traces in other astronomical tables from fifteenth-century England. An analysis of the manuscript evidence suggests that Holbroke owed his value for the “true length of the year” to a certain Richard Monke, capellanus de Anglia, who employed this parameter and the corresponding 33-year cycle in an attempt to construct a perfect and perpetual solar calendar, leading to his Kalendarium verum anni mundi of 1434. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din KashaniKiki Kennedy-DayThe Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani. By William C. Chittick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 360. Hardcover.Are you tired of feeling that the scientifically quantifiable world is not all there is, but that most books about philosophy are airy-fairy or (...) pie-in-the-sky? Then The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani by William C. Chittick has something to say to you. Chittick succinctly analyzes the limitations of scientism in his preview of the ends of Islamic philosophy (especially pp. 34-37). One could not make a better argument for exploring the Real beyond appearances than Chittick does.As we look around ourselves in the wreckage of the world-abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, "ghost" prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, tens of thousands of refugees at Darfur-we may feel that the world could use more philosophy. Since traveling in our current direction is leading to spiritual bankruptcy in our souls, perhaps a solid spiritual understanding of the universe would help?The author's stated goals are to introduce the major themes of Islamic philosophy and to introduce the Persian philosopher Afdal al-Din Kashani in English translation. The book consists of two parts: part 1 an overview of Islamic philosophy and part 2 the writings of Baba Afdal. In part 1 Chittick moves from the particular to the general, here from Afdal al-Din Muhammad ibn Hasan Kashani (d. A.H. 610 / A.D. 1213-1214) to the perspective of Islamic philosophy and the perspectives of philosophy in general. Chittick sketches al-Kashani's life, moving from his tomb in Maraq, Iran, to recalling highlights of the philosopher's life. When one considers the near-contemporaries of al-Kashani they are so illustrious as to make one's head spin: Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-'Arabi, and Nasir al-Din Tusi. More than any other details, these scholars place al-Kashani in the intellectual major leagues. Chittick also mentions that al-Kashani believes in philosophy as a praxis, a way of life to be implemented as well as an exercise of reasoning. He sees philosophy as training the soul with the knowledge of the mind.Chapter 2 forms an excellent introduction to Islamic philosophy for the curious reader. He begins by nailing some of the current problems in studying Islamic thought. He mentions everything from considering the dogmas of religion beneath [End Page 180] study to the refusal to accept what philosophers say at face value. Basically it is our own prejudices and views that prevent us from being able to understand their perspectives. The specific issues of Islamic philosophers that Chittick discusses are understanding God, the meaning of prophecy, and the "Origin and Return"-how the world came to be and our return to God after death.Chittick also provides a much-needed antidote to the tendency of many modern scholars to over-Hellenize Islamic philosophy, while at the same time, failing to refer to either the Qur'an or Islamic civil society. He locates the problem with modern thought in an inability to grasp any notion that refers to quality rather than quantity. (This can be seen even more vividly in recent attempts by American economists to give a dollar value to happiness on the success chart.) While quantification is necessary in analytic science, it stifles thought in symbolic, metaphorical, or religious discovery.In part 2, the Writings section actually begins with relevant background texts, including Aristotle, pseudo-Aristotle (The Treatise on the Apple), Hermes, and Ghazali (The Alchemy of Felicity). Then we move on to the Baba Afdal's own writings, including quatrains, essays, letters, and others. These writings show the range of Afdal al-Din Kashani's interests: moving from the practical (chapter 5) to the theoretical (chapter 6). Among the writings in chapter 5 we find his letter to Majd al-Din. It shows al-Kashani's clear-sighted understanding of human nature when he says... (shrink)

This paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration (...) and deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience. (shrink)

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and (...) the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike. (shrink)

Many plants are adapted to flower at particular times of year, to ensure optimal pollination and seed maturation. In these plants flowering is controlled by environmental signals that reflect the changing seasons, particularly daylength and temperature. The response to daylength varies, so that plants isolated at higher latitudes tend to flower in response to long daylengths of spring and summer, while plants from lower latitudes avoid the extreme heat of summer by responding to short days. Such responses require a (...) mechanism for measuring time, and the circadian clock that regulates daily rhythms in behaviour also acts as the timer in the measurement of daylength. Plants from high latitudes often also show an extreme response to temperature called vernalisation in which flowering is repressed until the plant is exposed to winter temperatures for an extended time. Genetic approaches in Arabidopsis have identified a number of genes that control vernalisation and daylength responses. These genes are described and models presented for how daylength might regulate flowering by controlling their expression by the circadian clock. BioEssays 22:38–47, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Georg Henrik von Wright was not only the first interpreter of Wittgenstein, who argued that Spengler’s work had reinforced and helped Wittgenstein to articulate his view of life, but also the first to consider seriously that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his times makes him unique among the great philosophers, that the philosophical problems which Wittgenstein was struggling, indeed his view of the nature of philosophy, were somehow connected with features of our culture or civilization. -/- In this paper I draw inspiration (...) and courage from Von Wright’s insistence that trying to understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times is a philosophic task in its own right in order to probe into a relatively obscure region in Wittgenstein’s thought: his relation to the music of his times. It is a topic, on which Von Wright, and most other prominent Wittgenstein scholars, have said very little, but it is also one, which Wittgenstein himself attested was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. -/- I offer textual and historical evidence in support of my claim that, parallel to Wittgenstein’s exposure to Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1930, he was also introduced to the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, which helped him to articulate, partly by way of critique, a complex and unique position concerning the modern music of his times, which exhibits his rejection of what Von Wright later dubbed ‘the myth of progress’. As Von Wright observed in other regions of Wittgenstein’s work, he believed also with regards to the arts and to music in particular, neither in a brilliant future nor in the good old days. -/- I argue that Wittgenstein actually made a distinction between three kinds of modern music: (a) bad modern music, which is clearly a case of confusing means for ends, the hallmark of the myth of progress, as Von Wright observed; (b) vacuous modern music, which embodies some sort of diffidence, a difficulty to see through the omnipresence of what Von Wright called (following Habermas) a ‘colonialization’ of reified measures of progress; (c) good modern music, a paradoxical notion for Wittgenstein, which betokens the unlikely yet possible striving to penetrate through what appears as dissolution of the resemblances which unite this culture’s ways of life by rendering this condition as expressible and intransitively understandable. In the context of this third category, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s complex remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler, which palpably show that the problem of good modern music and the problem of philosophizing in the time of civilization were one and the same in Wittgenstein’s mind. -/- I conclude that, with regards to Von Wright’s own critical view of the modern myth of progress, we can learn from Wittgenstein that progress in the realm of art is closely aligned with the ideal of the perfection of man, yet transcending a social or political context. It is the ideal of cultural cohesion: affinity that the arts show to other human practices and cultural artifacts of its period. Wittgenstein’s tentative notion of good modern music (and its circumscription by his notion of the music of the future) may show its true colors when viewed in the context of Von Wright’s plea not to abandon work for progress as a critical task. (shrink)

The concept of 'liturgical year' indicates a reference to the meaning of the measuring units of civil time, and especially to the cosmic entities that determine the general rhythm of time - the sun and the moon. Interestingly, the liturgical time depends both on the structure of civil time, and, on the two discrete systems of the solar and lunar cycles, which have always been underpinnings of time measuring. The special importance and influence that the cosmical (...) rhythms exert on the entire human life are also felt in the structure and theology of the liturgical time, where it signals the attempt to merge and reconcile the cosmical solar and lunar cycles within the liturgical year. This leads to a unique theology, expressing the powerful synthesis of the variability of the lunar cycle compared to the structure of the solar year's fixed dates. CONTRIBUTION: This research reveals the unique orthodox perspective on both civil and liturgical time, expressing their profound theological meaning, as a conscious, permanent reflection upon the mysterious, yet real, presence of Christ in the divine services of the Church. (shrink)

Qutayba ibn Muslim al-Bāhilī is one of the leading soldier-bureaucrats of the Umayyads period. During the time he served as the governor of Khurāsān, he consolidated the Umayyad’s rule in Tokharistan and Transoxiana provinces, and expanded the borders of the state to China by conquering the Kashgar region. His activities for conversion of the people of the conquered regions have great importance in the history of Islam since the intense relations of the Turkish people with Islam fell upon the time (...) of his governorship. It is possible to argue that by introducing the religion to these people Qutayba had played an important role in their conversion to Islam. It is also known that he had sent a delegation to the emperor of China for the same purpose. However, despite all his achievements, it is seen that the academic studies about Qutayba in our country are very rare. Besides, some of the recent studies about him claim that he was a fraud, a trickster, and an untrustworthy person in his military activities; and had committed mass murders and massacres, persecuted innocent people, destroyed and burned the cities of conquered lands. In this article, it is examined that whether these claims and accusations have their justifications or not by consulting the main sources. In fact, what is expected from constructive criticism in this subject and every other area is to clarify the matter and make it more comprehensible of its context. However, it should not be forgotten that some conclusions over Qutayba in these studies might have been drawn to quickly in order to manipulate the conquest movements of the Umayyad period.Summary: The religious interaction and change taken place in the Arabian Peninsula with the emergence of Islam and with the political, military and cultural activities of the Muslims performed during the periods of Prophet Muhammad and the Rāshidūn (rightly guided) Caliphs had significant effects upon the lands of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Khurāsān where the ancient civilizations located.The success made by the Muslim-Arabs in such a short time is accepted of course as one of the important events of world history. The message of Islam spread rapidly with their extraordinary efforts, and reached quickly in the early days of Islam to the Amu Darya/Oxus River, which is considered to be the natural border between the Iranians and the Turks (Iran and Turan).Although the Turks who had been struggling to dominate the region for centuries gained an opportunity with the disappearance of the Sasanian Empire from history, they could not take advantage of this new situation because of their lack of political unity and a strong state, and the power held by the regional Turkish Sultans were not enough to make their dominance happen. In this conjuncture, the Muslim-Arabs who appeared in the stage of history in a relatively late period but had the ideal of being a regional and a global power had rapidly realised their political and military activities called “conquest” in the Islamic historical sources. When it comes to the period of Caliph ʿUthmān, it is seen that the conditions were very suitable for passing to the east of the Oxus River where the Turkish elements lived intensively. At the time, the absence of a strong Turkish state in the region, and China’s occupation with its own internal problems made an important contribution for the Muslim-Arab capture of the region. In this region, which is called as “Transoxiana” in the Arabic sources, it is seen that the Turks organized their political structures as city-states and regional sultanates. In the north-eastern parts of this region, there was a strong Turkish State called the Turgish State and it provided political and military support to the people of the region who rebelled occasionally the Umayyads.After solving the internal problems of the state largely and suppressing some dangerous revolts, the Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān became capable of initiating military activities beyond the borders of the state. Nevertheless, the period when the actual conquests were made was the period of his son Walīd (86/705-96/715). It is seen that the conquests made in his time were permanent, and the people who lived in the conquered lands accepted Islam to a large extent. The conquest made during Walīd’s time which extended from Kashgar to the Pyrenees, realised at an unprecedented pace. The most important name for the eastern side of the conquests is undoubtedly Al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf. Ḥajjāj (75/694-95/714) who acted as the supreme governor of Iraq for nearly twenty years, had achieved important successes in the regions of Transoxiana and Sindh located in the eastern part of the country by the hands of his appointed governors. However, many governors appointed by him to Khurāsān from 75/694 to 86/705 with the hope of reaching his goals in the east could not meet his expectations because of the political, social and economic problems that existed throughout the country, and because of the resulting rebellions in the regions that these problems caused.These unwanted conditions continued to be seen in the region until he appointed Qutayba ibn Muslim as the governor of Khurāsān (86 / 705-96 / 715) who was one of the young commanders and administrators educated by Ḥajjāj personally. Qutayba known as having a close relationship with Ḥajjāj and consulting him when taking important decisions acted in this direction throughout the time he stayed in this position.It is known that the internal conflicts in the region continued during the time when Qutayba was appointed as the governor of Khurāsān. However, he had brought together northern and southern Arabian tribes living in the region with religious, political and economical suggestions and had succeeded in persuading them for military activities that he decided to operate beyond the Oxus. For the Umayyads, these military operations were justified, because the regional sultans who ruled in the western and eastern sides of the Oxus repeatedly violated the agreements they had made before. The tendency of the people of Turkic, Iranian, and Tajik origin who were the real owner of these lands and lived in both sides of the rich Oxus basin for many centuries to violate these agreements was in fact result of a great concern. They now realized that the Muslim-Arabs who followed a systematic settlement policy in the region came to their lands this time without any intention of going back. Even though Qutayba followed a fair and reasonable policy towards them, they violated their agreements with him, formed alliances among themselves and waged military campaigns against Qutayba not to be the subjects of any change in their religion, worldview, and perception of existence.Qutayba, who is believed to have spent his its utmost efforts to make the religion of Islam and the Umayyad political cause permanent in the region under these unfavourable conditions, has been recently criticized by some researchers. The criticisms intensify around the claims that he persecuted people, committed massacres, and behaved unfaithfully by breaking his promises that he made with people. From the perspective of our own times, it is possible to think that sometimes he had taken extreme measures in punishing the sultans and the persons who raised armed struggles against him and caused riots by violating the agreements. However, when the period is compared with the others, it can be easily said that the Umayyads showed in these and other remote areas a considerable amount of tolerance that they had never shown it in their internal conflicts. It is a known fact that he generally clashed with the ones who disrupted agreements, sought help from external forces, established alliances against them, and refused to pay taxes. Based on historical sources, it does not seem to be possible to say that while doing these activities in the region, Qutabya did not behave entirely in a way that his behaviour could be classified as massacres committed against innocent civilians. On the contrary, it is known that Qutayba had given many chances to the people of the region in administrative and military affairs. As a matter of fact, he ruled the city of Bukhara for 20 years with a Turkish ruler whom he appointed and supported, and he included in his army a union of twenty thousand cosmopolitan soldiers assembled from the people of Bukhara, Baykend, Chach and Samarkand and paid a regular salary to them.The fact that his grave known as the “Imam Shaykh Qutayba Tomb” was turned later into a shrine and visited by the people even today despite the passage of long centuries after his death shows that he has been loved by the people of the region and that they have always considered him as a conqueror-bureaucrat who spent his life for the ideals of his religion. (shrink)

This study examined the extent to which individual differences in time perspective, i.e. habitual way of relating to the personal past, present, and future, are associated with sleep quality and daytime sleepiness in a sample of older adults. The participants (N = 437, 60-90 years) completed the Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ), a version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (S-ZTPI) and two ratings of SWB (life satisfaction, happiness). Based on established relationships between dimension of time perspective and other variables (e.g. (...) depression) and relations between negative retrospection (rumination) and negative prospection (worry) in prior studies, we expected higher scores on Past Negative and Future Negative to be linked to poor sleep quality and (indirectly) increased daytime sleepiness. Moreover, we examined the possibility that variations in perceived sleep and sleepiness during the day mediates the expected association between an aggregate measure of deviations from a so called balanced time perspective (DBTP) and subjective well-being (SWB). In regression analyses controlling for demographic factors (age, sex, work status), higher scores on Past Negative and Future Negative predicted poorer sleep quality and higher levels of daytime sleepiness. Additionally, most of the association between time perspective and daytime sleepiness was accounted for by individual differences in sleep quality. Finally, structural equation modelling yielded results consistent with the hypothesis that variations in sleep mediate part of the negative relationship between DBTP and SWB. Given that good sleep is essential to multiple aspects of health, future studies evaluating relationships between time perspective and adverse health outcomes should consider sleep quality as a potentially contributing factor. (shrink)

Like many, Michael Ignatieff recognizes that balancing civil liberties and national security in times of emergency seems to require us to infringe upon the liberties of some in order to preserve the liberties of others. In these cases, he argues we ought only to infringe upon civil liberties in light of adversarial review, placing strict limitations on our actions, using sunset clauses, and fully accepting that our actions will sometimes result in immoral behavior. He claims that this approach (...) to balancing civil liberties and national security in times of emergency is superior to those offered by staunch pragmatists and strict libertarians because it encompasses the benefits and avoids the pitfalls of both. I find, however, Ignatieff’s approach to be problematic because it fails to take seriously important substantive measures for achieving justice in times of emergency. I conclude that Ignatieff’s procedural measures coupled with the substantive measures of truthfulness, faithfulness, and solidarity result in a superior policy for balancing civil liberties and national security in times of emergency because they ensure the cases of those accused of wrongdoing meet the pedigree tests for procedural and substantive justice, even in times of emergency. (shrink)

The aim of the article. The aim of the article is to identify the components of social and economic systems life cycle. To achieve this aim, the article describes the traits and characteristics of the system, determines the features of social and economic systems functioning and is applied a systematic approach in the study of their life cycle. The results of the analysis. It is determined that the development of social and economic systems has signs of cyclicity and is explained (...) methodologically by the axiomatics, rules and laws. Understanding of circular patterns has been formed long ago and now is recorded by scientists monitoring the properties of natural and artificial environment of human activity. During the study, it was found out that in scientific literature there is no unified description of the life cycle elements of social and economic systems at personal, micro, meso, macro and global levels. The paper investigates the cyclical patterns in multilevel social and economic systems for a human, employee, family, product, company, city, industry, elite, macroeconomic indicators, humanity, global processes, global economic system and the Universe. It is noted that at grass-roots administrative levels of the global environment of a human life activity system, a thesis about the cyclicity of development and the stages of the life cycle is considered by a wide circle of scientists and is doubtless. On hierarchically higher management levels of the global environment of human activity system, the scientists noticed the similar patterns of the cyclical nature. Problematic and discussion questions about cyclic development of social and economic systems are identified: the uncertainty of the driving force source of repeated changes; the vague distinction between systemic (internal) and off-system (external) influence on development; the lack of a unified description of development nature at different managerial levels; the use of different descriptive terms for the same constituent elements of repeated changes (period, stage, phase, wave, cycle); the uncertainty of the number of repeated changes constituent elements; the absence of an identification mechanism of the exact time of changes in the constituent elements of repeated changes; the surface description of out-of-system period of the subjects activity («before-system» period of creation and «after-system» period of liquidation); attaching more importance to primary and less importance to ultimate component elements of the repeated changes; the lack of reliable mechanism for predicting and forecasting the dynamics of constituent components of repeated changes. It is noted that all social and economic systems are developed within repeated changes and they have the same attributes of cyclicity: the fluctuation of indicators is marked that characterize the condition of the subject; the presence of system (from creation to liquidation) and out-of-system (creation – «design» and liquidation – «disposal») periods are noted; the subjects are created by the actions of other subjects (that is, subjects do not arise «out of nowhere», but are the result of actions of other subjects – «constructors»); after cessation of subjects functioning, their resources are used by other subjects (that is, the subjects do not disappear «nowhere», and they are transformed into the resources of other subjects – «recovery»); a unidirectional life cycle from «birth» to «death» is observed in the subjects; the subjects do not have to undergo the whole life cycle (each time might be the last); the subjects display similar changes of the indicators during their activity; ascending, peak and descending fluctuations of indicators are observed in the subjects; minor fluctuations occur in the constituent elements; the subjects have individual nature of indicator fluctuations and duration of activity. Conclusions and directions of further researches. The scientific novelty of the study is identification structure of life cycle of social and economic system with definitions of: common («before-system state», «growth», «stabilization», «reduction», «after-system state») and specific («creation», «slow growth», «rapid growth», «growth stabilization», «short stabilization», «rapid reduction», «slow reduction», «liquidation») constituent elements of repeated changes; marginal borders of indicators; dynamics of constituent elements of life cycle; key points of changing nature of the indicators dynamics. Identification of the life cycle of social and economic systems characterizes potentially possible limits of their activity in time and provides the possibility of further research of aspects of the cyclical development for methodological basis formation and the development of applied measures of systemic development in the areas of marketing and management innovations. (shrink)

Restoring our biological cycles to heal ourselves, our culture, and our planet Shows how, just like the tides and the moon phases, both women and men have biological cycles of growth and renewal necessary for healthy bodies and minds. Explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offers a cleansing process for body and mind to awaken innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore harmony (...) between the divine feminine and divine masculine. Reveals how the need for sacred retreat was forgotten when the divine feminine was suppressed by patriarchal culture. All of life is interwoven into a living system of cycles, from Earth's seasons to the enzymatic pathways that provide energy to a cell. Waxing and waning from times of growth to times of rest, renewal, and healing, cycles map the most auspicious time for everything in life. Both women and men have biological cycles of active growth and quiet renewal, led by our hormones. By understanding how everything in life moves in cycles, you can become more aware of and comfortable with your own cyclic nature, something that has been forgotten by the modern world's linear views of time. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient cultures, the natural cycles of life, and her own groundbreaking research, Pia Orleane, Ph.D., offers a template for how we can restore balance to our emotions and health, ease tensions between the sexes, and heal our fractured culture by honoring divine feminine consciousness and re-embracing natural cycles, including our innate need for rest and retreat. She explains the biology of how our bodies operate by hormones released in cycles and shows how balanced hormones help eliminate anger, depression, insomnia, anxiety, and fatigue. Exploring ancient traditions and rituals surrounding blood and sacred retreat, she explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offered a cleansing process for body and mind, alone time to clear suppressed emotions, awaken our innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore harmony between the genders and balance between the divine feminine and masculine. Outlining the sacred retreat process, the author explores dream cycles, divine sexuality, and practices for reconnecting to nature, increasing creativity and intuition, and clearing suppressed emotions. She also looks at the benefits for women and men of separate sleeping during menstruation. Through this wisdom, we can restore our natural cycles, allow the divine feminine to once again blossom alongside the divine masculine, and, with the return of balance, heal our world and our hearts. (shrink)

Understanding the day/night cycle requires integrating observations of the sky (an Earth-based perspective) with scientific models of the solar system (a space-based perspective). Yet children often fail to make the right connections and resort to non-scientific intuitions – for example, the Sun moving up and down – to explain what they observe. The present research explored whether children’s gestures indicate their conceptual integration of Earth- and space-based perspectives. We coded the spontaneous gestures of 85 third-grade children in U.S. public schools (...) (Mage = 8.87 years) as they verbally explained the overall cause of the day/night cycle, the cause of sunrise, and the cause of sunset after receiving science instruction as part of a prior study. We focused on two kinds of gestures: those reflecting the Sun’s motion across the sky and those reflecting the Earth’s axial rotation. We found that participants were more likely to produce Earth rotation gestures for a topic they explained more accurately (the overall cause of the day/night cycle), whereas Sun motion gestures were more common for topics they explained less accurately (the causes of sunrise and sunset). Further, participants who produced rotation gestures tended to provide more accurate verbal explanations of the overall cause. We discuss how gestures could be used to measure – and possibly improve – children’s conceptual understanding and why sunrise and sunset may be particularly difficult topics to learn. (shrink)

Suetonius says that Augustus was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of October , in the year when Cicero and Antonius were consuls , a little before sunrise,1 and also that he was born under Capricorn.2 Mr. H. W. Garrod, in his recent edition of Manilius,3 maintains that the date which Suetonius gives belonged to the pre- Julian calendar, and corresponded with December 20 of the Julian. Remarking that, ‘ according to our present reckonings,’ the sun enters Capricorn (...) on December 22, he adds that ‘the astronomers of Cicero's time placed the beginnings of the sign some 7 degrees in advance of our reckonings. If, therefore,’ he concludes, ‘ Augustus was born on Sept. 22 paulo ante solis exortum, Capricorn was his natal sign.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 555-575 [Access article in PDF] Measurer of All Things:John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology Zur Shalev [Figures]Writing from Istanbul to Peter Turner, one of his colleagues at Merton College, Oxford, John Greaves was deeply worried: Onley I wonder that in so long time since I left England I should neither have received my brasse quadrant which I (...) left to be finished for my journey thither, nor any notice of it [...]. I agreed with mr. Allen upon price and the time that he should finish it, if he hath failed me he hath done me the greatest injury that can be. 1A great injury indeed, because Greaves's journey to Italy and the Levant was all about measuring—luckily the instrument did reach him at some later stage. The thirty-six-year-old Professor of Geometry at Gresham College was taking the measurements of countless monuments and objects in the locations he visited. In Rome he measured, among many other ancient structures, Cestius' Pyramid and St. Peter's basilica. In Lucca, deeply impressed, he counted his paces around the beautiful city walls. In Siena he observed together with a "Mathematical Professor" one of the Sidera Medicea using "a glass." In Egypt he even hurt his eyes gazing at the sun, looking for sunspots and measuring its diameter. 2 His measuring mission, however, culminated in the fixing of the [End Page 555] latitudes of Istanbul, Rhodes, and Alexandria. As Bishop Juxton wrote before the trip to Greaves's employers at Gresham College (apparently using Greaves's own promotional language): This worke I find by the best astronomers, especially by Ticho Brache [ sic ] and Kepler, hath beene much desired as tending to the advancement of that science, and I hope it wil be an honour to that nation and prove ours if we first observe it. 3A mathematician-Orientalist, commanding the ancient and modern astronomical and geographical literature of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian authors, Greaves was arguably the best qualified European at the period to perform the task. That he miscalculated the latitude of Rhodes is of less consequence for his present-day readers. 4 However, one of the most obscure and therefore telling of his measurement activities was the survey of the Pyramids of Giza, which resulted in the Pyramidographia (1646). 5 This remarkable learned treatise and travel account hybrid, which is at the focus of the present study, gives us a glimpse into the rich and complex world of scientific antiquarians.Greaves is most conveniently remembered today as an Orientalist. While we must be thankful to Edward Said for broadening the meaning of Orient-alism—from an academic discipline, accumulating objective knowledge of the East, into a much wider cultural discourse, his emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the European colonial mindset is less useful for making historical sense of what early modern Orientalists were doing—physically and culturally. We can understand Greaves's "Oriental" enterprise in its [End Page 556] depth and variety only within long established European traditions of scholarship and keeping the intellectual concerns of his time in mind. 6But beyond articulating for us the nature of early Orientalism, the Pyramidographia, as well as Greaves's entire scientific career, situated in their wider European context, provide a fine entry point into a foreign world of learned practices and methods. It teaches us how well into the seventeenth century astronomy and philology, observation and bookishness, could coalesce in one figure, in one enterprise. 7 We still lack a modern biography of Greaves, a complex protagonist of a complex period, and even a full evaluation of his intellectual work. While this paper surely cannot compensate for that, I do attempt here a brief exposition of Greaves's Pyramidographia. 8Modern historians of archaeology and Egyptology, preoccupied mostly with the disciplines' progress and development of scientific standards, have noted the Pyramidographia in passing and praised its precise language and rigorous research... (shrink)

The aim of the study was to compare the acute effects of traditional resistance training and superset training on training duration, training volume and different perceptive measures. Twenty-nine resistance-trained participants performed a whole-body workout traditionally and as supersets of exercises targeting different muscle groups, in a randomized-crossover design. Each session was separated by 4–7 days, and consisted of eight exercises and three sets to failure. Training duration and number of repetitions lifted were recorded during the sessions. Rate of perceived (...) exertion for effort, rate of perceived exertion for discomfort, session displeasure/pleasure, and exercise enjoyment were measured 15 min after each session. Forty-eight hours after the final session participants reported which session they preferred. The superset session led to significantly higher values for RPE and RPD and tended to be higher for sPDF, i.e., more pleasurable, compared to the traditional session. There was no difference in EES. The traditional session led to significantly increased training volume and lasted 23 min longer than the superset session. Eighteen of the participants preferred the superset session, while 11 preferred the traditional session. In conclusion, performing a whole-body workout as a superset session was more time-efficient, but reduced the training volume and was perceived with greater exertion for effort and discomfort than a traditional workout. (shrink)

Times of heightened risk to the physical safety of their citizens inevitably cause democracies to recalibrate their institutions and processes and to reinterpret existing legal norms, with greater emphasis on security, and less on individual liberty, than in "normal" times. This article explores the ways in which the American courts have responded to the tension between civil liberties and national security in times of crises. This history illustrates that courts have rejected both of the two polar positions that characterize (...) public discourse on these issues. Civil libertarians argue that political bodies are too easily gripped by passions, hysteria, and self-interest in these times and that courts therefore ought to play a central role in protecting liberty. Executive unilateralists argue that the qualities that uniquely characterize the executive branch, such as decisiveness, access to information, and efficiency, must become so dominant in these moments that few checks, if any, should constrain executive prerogatives. Oddly, civil libertarians and executive unilateralists find implicit consensus in the view that, in times of war, courts have tended not to play a significant role in overseeing executive power. We argue to the contrary: historically, a significant constitutional tradition of judicial scrutiny in the United States during times of war does exist. But this scrutiny does not take the form of courts making first-order substantive judgments about the content of liberty or other claimed constitutional rights. Nor does it take the form of judicial assessment of how significant or credible the national security claims of the executive branch might be. Instead, judicial oversight has been focused on preserving the institutional structures and processes through which decisionmaking on these issues takes place. The judicial role has centered on the second-order question of whether the right institutional processes have been used to make the decisions at issue, rather than on what the content of the underlying rights ought to be. This approach has historically rejected or resisted most claims of executive unilateralism. When courts have upheld the government's actions, they have done so only after a judgment that Congress, as well as the executive, has endorsed the action. This approach has also rejected the civil libertarian framework. When courts find bilateral institutional endorsement, they have typically accepted the joint political judgment of how liberty and security tradeoffs ought to be made. By focusing on congressional endorsement of emergency measures, the courts have created a broad-based political accountability for the actions taken in the name of national security. We suggest that even if congressional endorsement is more apparent than real in some of these contexts, the judicial maintenance of this structure of rhetorical justifications sustains desirable understandings of political structure. Because the President and Congress draw from different political constituencies in a presidential rather than a parliamentary system, we also raise questions about whether the American judicial approach to these questions should be limited to political systems with separated executive and legislative powers. (shrink)

Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions and in other societies certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation (...) chained the new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to define the sources of crisis affecting civilization, and to define a solution by the development of a Universal-Complementary Civilization. The study’s conclusion is that neither Western nor Global Civilization can improve the order of civilization. Even worse, these civilizations threaten sustainability by depleting strategic resources at a fast pace, driven by the market forces only. World Civilization at this time is driven by two conflicting civilizations, Christianity and Islam, and is hurdling towards a (...) huge disaster. Neither Christianity nor Islam has the right to impose its own values upon the other. To avoid wars and conflicts among civilizations one must break the human history of permanent negations and integrate eight autonomous civilizations and a global one by a set of Common-Complementary Universal Values, selected by each autonomous civilization and accepted by all the others as common values. Theimplementation strategy of this new civilization may take several centuries, but to start this civilization one must create a group of pioneers and “show cases” as soon as possible. (shrink)

Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a "historicist" viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no longer historicist. (...) Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the "closed future" and "ever-available past" (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an "ever-broadening present of simultaneities." This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world. (shrink)

This article concerns the distinction between memory-time and information-time, which appeared in Wittgenstein’s middle-period lectures and writings, and its relation to Wittgenstein’s career-long reflection about musical understanding. While the idea of “information-time” entails a public frame of reference typically pertaining to objects which persist in physical time, the idea of pure “memory-time” involves the totality of one’s present memories and expectations that do now provide any way of measuring time-spans. I argue that Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine notion of pure (...) memory-time entails ipso facto a critique of an influential idea of musical motion, which has been recurring in the work of some major philosophers of music up until the present day. The article connects Wittgenstein’s critical remarks on the confused foundations of such “Augustinian Picture of Music” with his emphasis on the notion of phrasing or characterization in language and music. Wittgenstein’s reversal of Augustinian priorities regarding musical time brings to surface the particularity of expression and the aesthetically “right” in music, evoked by Wittgenstein’s remarks on simultaneity and tempo in music and language. Wittgenstein renders musical simultaneity as enabled by a “protocol” which inheres in musizieren, in the aptly collaborative quest for drawing in significance by means of the phrasing and re-phrasing of a passage in order to characterize it, enabling by means of such comparative investigation meaningful distinctions between right and wrong. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables for 1340 by Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils who flourished 1340–1365, based on four Hebrew manuscripts. We discuss the relation of these tables principally with those of al-Battānī, Abraham Bar Ḥiyya, and Levi ben Gerson, as well as with Bonfils’s better known tables, called Six Wings. An unusual feature of this set of tables is that there are two kinds of mean motion tables, one arranged for Julian years from 1340 to 1380, months, (...) days, hours, and minutes of an hour, and the other arranged in the Hebrew calendar for the times of conjunctions and oppositions of the Sun and the Moon only, with subtables for 19-year cycles, single years in a 19-year cycle, and months. The latter arrangement is found in Bonfils’s Six Wings for solar and lunar motions only, whereas in his Tables for 1340, this arrangement applies to all planets. Notably absent are tables for the trigonometric functions, etc., that are generally found in such sets of astronomical tables. (shrink)

Background: Screen time among adults represents a continuing and growing problem in relation to health behaviors and health outcomes. However, no instrument currently exists in the literature that quantifies the use of modern screen-based devices. The primary purpose of this study was to develop and assess the reliability of a new screen time questionnaire, an instrument designed to quantify use of multiple popular screen-based devices among the US population. -/- Methods: An 18-item screen-time questionnaire was created to quantify use of (...) commonly used screen devices (e.g. television, smartphone, tablet) across different time points during the week (e.g. weekday, weeknight, weekend). Test-retest reliability was assessed through intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs) and standard error of measurement (SEM). The questionnaire was delivered online using Qualtrics and administered through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). -/- Results: Eighty MTurk workers completed full study participation and were included in the final analyses. All items in the screen time questionnaire showed fair to excellent relative reliability (ICCs = 0.50–0.90; all < 0.000), except for the item inquiring about the use of smartphone during an average weekend day (ICC = 0.16, p = 0.069). The SEM values were large for all screen types across the different periods under study. -/- Conclusions: Results from this study suggest this self-administered questionnaire may be used to successfully classify individuals into different categories of screen time use (e.g. high vs. low); however, it is likely that objective measures are needed to increase precision of screen time assessment. (shrink)

Calls to ?build civil society?, ?create active citizenship?, ?empower communities?, or ?widen political participation? are growing by the day. They are heard in academia, the private sector, among NGOs and increasingly in government. In short, the rhetoric of self?government, that ideal dear to republicans, is back on the political agenda. This time, however, it is increasingly tied to the category of civil society. Yet can the programme of ?more power to civil society? really achieve democratic autonomy in (...) the way that many neo?republicans want it to? This article pursues this question, first, by reconstructing an ideal?type model of republican civil society from the writings of Hannah Arendt and Vaclav Havel ? two influential theorists of self?organisation in civil society. Second, it asks, sceptically, where such a civil society will come from, whether it can be fully reconciled with modernity and how ? if at all ? it can meet the charge of voluntarism. These critical interrogations are followed by a further three, focusing on the problematic absence of the market in the republican account of civil society, its under?theorised ? even Utopian ? notion of power and, finally, its likely complicity in the ongoing exclusion of women from the public sphere. The article concludes by calling for a more ambitious, wide?ranging vision of republican autonomy than the narrow emphasis on civil society will allow. (shrink)

The day is one of the fundamental experiences of our natural existence. The obvious cycle of the sun, the alternation of sleep and being awake provide a link between the life of the body and the great regularity that assigns their successive moments to light and to darkness. Only a simplified abstraction allows us to consider time lived as an homogeneous flow. Our existence, in its proper substance and in its larger environment, is dominated by the rhythm of days (...) and nights. Our very experience of the reality of objects is subject to it: the universe of things depends on the light of day that reveals it. It shrivels and becomes uncertain when night falls, with terror and dreams taking its place. The evidence that appears with the clarity of day is not of the same order as apparitions that arise from the depth of darkness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? Professor Ann (...) Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of the development of civility in Chinese societies. Although some social scientists and political philosophers have discussed civility, none has defined it as an analytical tool to systematically measure attitudes and behavior, and few have applied it to a non-Western society. By comparing the development of civility in mainland China and Taiwan, Civility and Its Development: The Experiences of China and Taiwan analyzes the social conditions needed for civility to become established in a society. (...) Schak argues that the attempts to impose civility top-down from the state are ineffective. Civility appeared in Taiwan only after state efforts to impose it ceased at the end of the 1980s when Taiwan began to democratize, and the PRC government civility campaigns have so far had only limited success. The book concludes with an examination of various differences between Taiwan and the PRC relevant to Taiwan’s having become a society with civility while the PRC still encounters difficulties in doing so. The essential factor in developing civility in Taiwan, Schak contends, was its evolution from a place composed of myriad small, inward-looking communities to a society in which everyone shares a strong identity and civic consciousness, and people consider others as fellow members, not anonymous strangers. “This book represents the most thorough review of what social scientists once called ‘the civilizing process’ in Chinese society. David C. Schak builds on the earlier studies on this issue and goes well beyond the established literature.” —James Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “This is a topic that people talk about all the time, and David C. Schak draws a lot of material together in a systematic and comprehensive way that can stimulate important discussions beyond the academy.” —Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. (shrink)