The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, Second Edition is the seminal reference in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, which, in recent years, has transcended academia to capture the imagination of the general public. The handbook provides a roadmap for the psychology needed by the majority of the population--those who don't need treatment, but want to achieve the lives to which they aspire. The 65 chapters summarize all of the relevant literature in the field, and each of the international slate (...) of contributors is essentially defining a lifetime of research. The content's breadth and depth provide an unparalleled cross-disciplinary look at positive psychology from diverse fields and all branches of psychology, including social, clinical, personality, counseling, school, and developmental psychology. Topics include not only happiness--which has been perhaps misrepresented in the popular media as the entirety of the field--but also hope, strengths, positive emotions, life longings, creativity, emotional creativity, courage, and more, plus guidelines for applying what has worked for people across time and cultures. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology is the seminal reference in the field of positive psychology, which in recent years has transcended academia to capture the imagination of the general public. The handbook provides a roadmap for the psychology needed by the majority of the population -- those who don't need treatment but want to achieve the lives to which they aspire. These 65 chapters summarize all of the relevant literature in the field. The content's breadth and depth provide an (...) unparalleled cross-disciplinary look at positive psychology from diverse fields and all branches of psychology, including social, clinical, personality, counseling, school, and developmental psychology. Topics include not only happiness but also hope, strengths, positive emotions, life longings, creativity, emotional creativity, courage, and more, plus guidelines for applying what has worked for people across time and cultures. (shrink)

Lily Ross Taylor in an interesting recent article on the proportion of freedmen to freeborn in the sepulchral inscriptions of Imperial Rome discusses the increasing omission of status nomenclature by freedmen in the first and second centuries A.D. and the consequent difficulty of determining the status of persons whose names appear in the epitaphs. One contributory factor to this decline in the traditional nomenclature which she mentions is the growing numbers and importance of the freedmen of the emperor, the Augusti (...) liberti. While non-imperial freedmen were anxious to record their acquisition of citizenship, but not their inferior status in the citizen body, the emperor's freedmen, on the other hand, increasingly formalized their status nomenclature so that the formula ‘Aug. lib.’ proclaimed not only the fact of their manumission within the Familia Caesaris but also the higher social status which they enjoyed. An examination of the nomenclature of the Imperial freedmen might help to throw some light on this process, particularly on the problem of dating. (shrink)

The status nomenclature of the Imperial slaves, as that of the Imperial freedmen, is important mainly for its bearing on the difficult problems of dating slave sepulchral inscriptions, but also as a means of determining who were Imperial slaves belonging to the Familia Caesaris with the significant social status this implied. Bang's careful but brief treatment of the subject, published in 1919, was not based on a complete collection of the material—admittedly difficult to obtain—and much has appeared in the interval. (...) Moreover, a deeper analysis of the evidence necessitates some revision of his conclusions. (shrink)

Lily Ross Taylor in an interesting recent article on the proportion of freedmen to freeborn in the sepulchral inscriptions of Imperial Rome discusses the increasing omission of status nomenclature by freedmen in the first and second centuries A.D. and the consequent difficulty of determining the status of persons whose names appear in the epitaphs. One contributory factor to this decline in the traditional nomenclature which she mentions is the growing numbers and importance of the freedmen of the emperor, the Augusti (...) liberti. While non-imperial freedmen were anxious to record their acquisition of citizenship, but not their inferior status in the citizen body, the emperor's freedmen, on the other hand, increasingly formalized their status nomenclature so that the formula ‘Aug. lib.’ proclaimed not only the fact of their manumission within the Familia Caesaris but also the higher social status which they enjoyed. An examination of the nomenclature of the Imperial freedmen might help to throw some light on this process, particularly on the problem of dating. (shrink)

Coastal ecosystems are increasingly dominated by humans. Consequently, the human dimensions of sustainability science have become an integral part of emerging coastal governance and management practices. But if we are to avoid the harsh lessons of land management, coastal decision makers must recognize that humans are one of the more coastally dependent species in the biosphere. Management responses must therefore confront both the temporal urgency and the very real compromises and sacrifices that will be necessary to achieve a sustainable coastal (...) ecosystem, one that is economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sound. (shrink)

that Buddhism is best understood as a philosophy of practice-or a.

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

Ranking finite subsets of a given set X of elements is the formal object of analysis in this article. This problem has found a wide range of economic interpretations in the literature. The focus of the article is on the family of rankings that are additively representable. Existing characterizations are too complex and hard to grasp in decisional contexts. Furthermore, Fishburn (1996), Journal of Mathematical Psychology 40, 64–77 showed that the number of sufficient and necessary conditions that are needed to (...) characterize such a family has no upper bound as the cardinality of X increases. In turn, this article proposes a way to overcome these difficulties and allows for the characterization of a meaningful (sub)family of additively representable rankings of sets by means of a few simple axioms. Pattanaik and Xu’s (1990), Recherches Economiques de Louvain 56, 383–390) characterization of the cardinality-based rule will be derived from our main result, and other new rules that stem from our general proposal are discussed and characterized in even simpler terms. In particular, we analyze restricted-cardinality based rules, where the set of “focal” elements is not given ex-ante; but brought out by the axioms. (shrink)

In this paper weak utilities are obtained for acyclic binary relations satisfying a condition weaker than semicontinuity on second countable topological spaces. In fact, in any subset of such a space we obtain a weak utility that characterizes the maximal elements as maxima of the function. The addition of separability of the relation yields the existence of semicontinuous representations. This property of the utility provides a result of existence of maximal elements for a class of spaces that include compact spaces. (...) However, we offer a negative result that continuity may not be reached under such hypotheses. (shrink)

‘Mysticism means to isolate the eternal from the originated.’ This is not my definition of the word ‘mysticism’ but that of the founder of the ‘orthodox’ school of Muslim mysticism, Al-Junayd of Baghdad who flourished in the ninth century a.d . In actual fact it is not a definition of mysticism at all but of the Arabic word tawḥīd which means primarily ‘the affirmation of unity’; and that surely is an essential ingredient of any form of mysticism: it is the (...) affirmation through personal experience of unity either absolutely or in some qualified sense. (shrink)

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for (...) a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)