The phenomenological goal of grounding the content of conceptual thought in the background understanding of everyday, skillful coping was approached using evolutionary autonomous agent methodology. The behavior of an EAA evolved to perform a specified motor task was identified with skillful coping. Changes in the dynamics of the EAA controller occurred when the EAA encountered an unexpected obstacle with loss of longer time scale components in its hierarchical temporal organization. These temporal changes are consistent with the phenomenological changes which we (...) experience with breakdown during equipment use with our adoption of a more immediate, determinate stance. Since this latter experience is the basis of conceptual thought, the EAA paradigm goes some way in providing a naturalized explanation for the grounding of the content of conceptual thought in everyday, skillful coping in a manner that is physiologically plausible and phenomenologically accurate. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Academia is a competitive environment. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are limited in experience and resources and especially need achievements to secure and expand their careers. To help with these issues, this book offers a new approach for conducting research using the combination of mindsponge innovative thinking and Bayesian analytics. This is not just another analytics book. 1. A new perspective on psychological processes: Mindsponge is a novel approach for examining the human mind’s information processing mechanism. This conceptual framework is used (...) to construct models in studies. The framework is highly flexible and widely applicable for many different types of information processes. The mindsponge approach can help researchers discover interesting ideas or even formulate their very own theories when investigating psychosocial phenomena. This approach brings a fresh wind to the current landscape of social sciences and humanities (SSH). 2. Easy-to-follow analysis protocol: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF analytics) is useful in terms of computing and visualizing power but also easy to learn and apply. Contrary to being intimidating, the Bayesian analytics section of this book is presented in a reader-friendly manner with a detailed yet clear step-by-step procedure. Examples are from published BMF articles, allowing readers to immediately practice the method and quickly create their own applications. With educational purposes in mind, the book is very suitable for ECRs who are looking to innovate their research methods. 3. Advocating for low-cost, high-quality research: Doing science can be very costly. Mindsponge innovative thinking and BMF analytics help produce impactful studies using openly available data on online repositories. This is based on the authors’ previous works and experiences. The book presents examples of employing the open R package bayesvl on secondary data from different sources. With less financial constraints, researchers can have more freedom of thought to pursue their curiosity and creativity. ECRs in low- and middle-income countries may find this aspect crucial in their careers. 4. Support and collaboration: The authors share their insights from experiences in the academic publishing system to help readers get through the processes of manuscript writing and peer-reviewing more easily. The authors are also ready to support other researchers with further inquiries and collaboration opportunities at the following website, mindsponge(dot)info. This book is for: a) ECRs whose only abundant resources are their innovation capacity and strength of will; b) Researchers in SSH who want to explore a novel approach to thinking and study conducting; c) Low- and middle-income countries’ researchers looking for a cost-effective research protocol; and, d) Innovative thinkers who want to turn their interesting thoughts into good publications. (shrink)

The computation of both Scalar Implicatures (SI) and Association with Focus (AF) is characterized with reference to sets of alternatives. However, it has generally been assumed that the relevant alternatives are determined in different ways for the two processes. Specifically, it has been assumed that the alternatives for SI – scalar alternatives – are computed by a special procedure specifically designed for implicatures, whereas the alternatives for AF – focus alternatives – are determined by the general theory of association with (...) focus – focus semantics. As far as we know, the only attempt to connect the two is Krifka (1995), under which scalar alternatives and focus alternatives are identical and determined by focus semantics. However, Krifka’s result is based on a specific stipulation about scalar items, which he borrows from Horn and incorporates into focus semantics, namely that scalar items are inherently focused and have their Horn Scale as their lexically specified focus values. (shrink)

The book examines the psycho-religious mechanism behind the violent extremism of suicide attacks in the post-9/11 world. It employs the mindsponge concept, an original dataset, and original research results obtained from the authors' statistical investigations using the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo technique. It provides insights and implications for policymakers and strategists in their efforts to engage in peace talks and reduce violent conflicts worldwide.

Climate change has become one of the most pressing problems that can threaten the existence and development of humans around the globe. Almost all climate scientists have agreed that climate change is happening and is caused mainly by greenhouse gas emissions induced by anthropogenic activities. However, some groups still deny this fact or do not believe that climate change results from human activities. This essay discusses the causes, significance, and skeptical arguments of climate change denialism, as well as the roles (...) of scientists and science communication in addressing the issues. Through this essay, we call for the active participation of scientists in science communication activities with the public, the opening of new science communication sectors specified for climate change, and more attention to social sciences and humanities in addressing climate change issues. (shrink)

The article examines the compatibility of agonistic democracy and populism as well as their relationship to the idea of constitutionalism. The first part shows that Chantal Mouffe’s recent attempts to reconcile her normative approach of an agonistic pluralism with a populist style of politics are not fully convincing. Although there are undeniable commonalities between an agonistic and a populist understanding of politics – the appreciation of conflict, the rejection of moralistic and juridical modes of conflict resolution etc. – the populist (...) mode of the construction of the people (and the denunciation of political opponents as enemies of the people) risks impeding the transformation of antagonistic into agonistic modes of political contest. The tensions between agonism and populism are especially evident in matters of constitutionalism. This topic is examined in the second part of the article, which provides some ideas for reducing the normative and institutional blind spots of contemporary theories of agonistic democracy. It focuses on elementary principles for an agonistic concept of democratic constitutionalism that differs from the populist view of the relationship between politics and law, especially in respect of its interpretation of the concept of ‘resistibility’ of legal norms. (shrink)

There is ample discussion of MBA self-serving values in the corporate social responsibility literature, and yet empirical studies regarding the corporate manifestations and consequences of those values are scant. In a comprehensive study of major US public corporations, we find that MBA CEOs are more apt than their non-MBA counterparts to engage in short-term strategic expedients such as positive earnings management and suppression of R&D, which in turn are followed by compromised firm market valuations.

In this paper, the process for firms to decide whether or not to invest in corporate social responsibility is treated from a real option perspective. We extend the Husted framework with an important extra parameter that allows us to understand the timing of CSR investment and explain why some companies drag their feet over CSR investments. Our model explicitly allows for the impact of the opportunity cost of delaying the CSR investment decision, providing firms with tools to determine the optimal (...) moment of exercising the CSR investment option. We illustrate our timing model through a case study and analyze governmental support strategies for CSR from a real options perspective. (shrink)

Words not only define our reality, they reveal and direct our attitudes toward that reality. This feature of language is especially problematic when it comes to our treatment of animals. In this supple, thoughtful, and closely argued work, Vietnamese-American scholar Hanh Nguyen examines the words we use in English and other languages to justify our abuse of other-than-human world. Reframing our metaphors, categories, and descriptions of animals we love, hate, and eat allows us to break long-standing habits and see (...) our obligations and connections to non-human animals more clearly. (shrink)

Dit boekt brengt negen opstellen samen van Gentse filosofen en godsdienstwetenschappers. Etienne Vermeersch, Freddy Mortier, Johan Braeckman met Stefaan Blancke, Rik Pinxten, Patrick Loobuyck, Balagangadhara Rao met Sarah Claerhout, Benjamin Biebuyck, Nel Grillaert, en Danny Praet leveren, elk vanuit hun eigen interesses en expertises, kritische bijdragen over de complexe relatie tussen christendom en filosofie: wijsgerige kritiek op het christendom en christelijk gebruik van de filosofie. Vanuit het ruimere perspectief van de interactie tussen wijsbegeerte, wereldbeeld en wetenschappen bestrijken de elf (...) auteurs de volledige periode van het vroege christendom tot het hedendaagse fundamentalisme. Het boek bevat zowel historische als theoretische benaderingen. Drie bijdragen hebben het werk en de impact van Nietzsche tot thema, drie bespreken verschillende aspecten van het fundamentalisme. Thema’s zoals het geloof in een hiernamaals, de relatie tussen christenen en niet-christenen, de impact van het christendom op het westerse wereldbeeld en de benadering van andere culturen, en de radicale kritiek van filosofen op het theïsme en de christelijke moraal maken van deze bundel een uitzonderlijk rijke collectie die lezers met diverse interesses zal aanspreken. (shrink)

This first anthology of the most important writings by Danny Siegel, spanning and modernizing fifty years of his insights, Radiance intersperses soulful Jewish texts with innovative Mitzvah ideas to rouse individuals and communities to transform our lives, communities, and world.

Every person always experiences life changes. Positive or negative life changes cause stress. Retirement represents one of life changes which can cause stress. Stress is an organism’s phyciological and psychological responses that can cause unpleasant situation and make mental and emotional dysfunction. Resilient people are more to see changes as opportunity to grow rather than as stressors. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back quickly from misfortune and successfully adapt in a smart way to adverse with more power. This quantitative (...) research represents a non-experimental method using questionnaires with Likert scale as the instrument to find correlation between resiliency and stress in the preparatory phase of retirement. There were 32 participant (male & female) from various tribes and religions. Result indicates that there is no correlation between resiliency and stress.  . (shrink)

This book provides a succinct, student-friendly outline of the principles, approaches, and issues in participant observation. An examination of these basic tenets is important for clarifying the philosophical rationale for conducting participant observation, making important research decisions, and appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches within the method. Participant observation as a formal means of inquiry is developed in close relation with the competing approaches of reality (ontology), truthfully apprehending reality (epistemology), and formal research (methodology). In this volume Jorgensen (...) discusses the resulting methodologies of positivism, humanism, and most recently postmodernism in relation to principles, approaches, and issues in participant observation. Specific features of participant observation, as exemplified in a wide range of classic and contemporary studies, are examined by way of these methodological approaches along with the troublesome complexities of values, politics, ethics, and contemporary debates over appropriate representations of the resulting findings about human life. This concise primer is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines such as anthropology, religious studies, sociology and nursing. (shrink)

Environmental activism is crucial for raising public awareness and support toward addressing the climate crisis. However, using climate change mitigation as the cause for blockage, vandalism, and harassment activities might be counterproductive and risk causing negative repercussions and declining public support. The paper describes a dataset of metadata of 89 blockage, vandalism, and harassment events happening in recent years. The dataset comprises three main categories: 1) Events, 2) Activists, and 3) Consequences. For researchers interested in environmental activism, climate change, and (...) sustainability, the dataset is helpful in studying the effectiveness and appropriateness of strategies to raise public awareness and support. For researchers in the field of security studies and green criminology, the dataset offers resources to study features and impacts of blockage, vandalism, and harassment events. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed to validate the dataset. Consequently, the estimated result aligns with the Mindsponge Theory’s theoretical reasoning. (shrink)

The literature on the interplay between geographic communities and organizations has largely ignored the role of individual residents. In adopting a meso-perspective, we examine a potentially vital relationship between corporate conduct and pro-social behavior demanding sacrifice from individuals. Drawing on Weber ), we theorize that organizations in a community legitimize personal social conduct in three ways—by serving as role models, imparting norms and values, and routinizing forms of interaction. We study the relationship between corporate social responsibility behavior by local firms (...) and the social distancing of citizens in US counties during the Covid-19 pandemic, a core ethical outcome. We argue and find that the residents of communities in which firms exhibit higher levels of CSR engaged in more SD during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was true when firms were long-established, isomorphic in their CSR, and major employers and vendors. Moreover, CSR relating to the treatment of employees as well as positive and negative extremes in CSR bore especially strong relationships with SD. Implications are drawn for the study of business ethics, as modeled by CSR, as a force for ethical personal behavior and public health in communities. (shrink)

Epidemiological models of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 played an important role in guiding the decisions of policy-makers during the pandemic. Such models provide output projections, in the form of time -series of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths, under various different parameter and scenario assumptions. In this paper I caution against handling these outputs uncritically: raw model-outputs should not be presented as direct projections in contexts where modelling results are required to support policy -decisions. I argue that model uncertainty should be handled (...) and communicated transparently. Drawing on methods used by climate scientists in the fifth IPCC report I suggest that this can be done by: attaching confidence judgements to projections based on model results; being transparent about how multi-model ensembles are supposed to deal with such uncertainty; and using expert judgement to ‘translate’ model-outputs into projections about the actual world. In a slogan: tell me what you think (and why), not (just) what your models say. I then diffuse the worry that this approach infects model-based policy advice with some undesirably subjective elements, and explore how my discussion fares if one thinks the role of a scientific advisor is to prompt action, rather than communicate information. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...) the scope of negation and a universal quantifier. (shrink)

We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or (...) the prejacent, a relationship that we refer to as symmetry. Due to this constraint on contextual restriction, discriminating between alternatives in cases of symmetry becomes the task of focus values. This conclusion is incompatible with standard type-theoretic definitions of focus values, motivating our structure-sensitive definition instead. (shrink)

Building on previous works which argued that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions, this paper proposes a constraint on exhaustification which restricts the conditions under which an exhaustivity operator can be licensed. We show that this economy condition allows us to derive a number of generalizations, such as, in particular, the ‘Implicature Focus Generalization’: scalar implicatures can be embedded under a downward-entailing operator only if the scalar term bears pitch accent. Our economy condition also derives specific predictions regarding (...) the licensing of so-called Hurford disjunctions. (shrink)

As the world’s population grows and urbanization continues, the global waste crisis is becoming more severe, especially in developing countries. Without proper waste management, they may encounter various environmental and health risks. Biological technologies are regarded as promising waste management and recycling approaches in developing countries due to their cost-effectiveness and capability to handle diverse waste categories. One prominent technology in this aspect is the vermicomposting of organic waste utilizing the black soldier fly larvae. Nevertheless, significant financial resources are still (...) necessary to advance and expand biological waste treatment, which requires the participation of businesses. By examining waste management companies listed on the Vietnamese stock market, we highlight two challenges that hinder the adoption and scaling of the waste treatment system using black soldier flies and potentially other biological technologies in Vietnam. Specifically, the business regards the environmental services they offer primarily as a means to generate profit rather than as a genuine commitment to environmental preservation, and the values of companies operating in the environmental sector, particularly in waste management, have been significantly undervalued by the Vietnamese investing public. Therefore, we advocate for societal shifts toward the eco-surplus culture and apply the semiconducting principle of monetary and environmental values exchange to address the problem. (shrink)

The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of (...) both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition. (shrink)

Scientific discourse is rife with passages that appear to be ordinary descriptions of systems of interest in a particular discipline. Equally, the pages of textbooks and journals are filled with discussions of the properties and the behavior of those systems. Students of mechanics investigate at length the dynamical properties of a system consisting of two or three spinning spheres with homogenous mass distributions gravitationally interacting only with each other. Population biologists study the evolution of one species procreating at a constant (...) rate in an isolated ecosystem. And when studying the exchange of goods, economists consider a situation in which there are only two goods, two perfectly rational agents, no restrictions on available information, no transaction costs, no money, and dealings are done immediately. Their surface structure notwithstanding, no competent scientist would mistake descriptions of such systems as descriptions of an actual system: we know very well that there are no such systems. These descriptions are descriptions of a model-system, and scientists use model-systems to represent parts or aspects of the world they are interested in. Following common practice, I refer to those parts or aspects as target-systems. What are we to make of this? Is discourse about such models merely a picturesque and ultimately dispensable façon de parler? This was the view of some early twentieth century philosophers. Duhem (1906) famously guarded against confusing model building with scientific theorizing and argued that model building has no real place in science, beyond a minor heuristic role. The aim of science was, instead, to construct theories, with theories understood as classificatory or representative structures systematically presented and formulated in precise symbolic.. (shrink)

Climate change, primarily driven by human activities, is becoming one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. Despite lingering doubts about climate change in some research documents, strong consensus within the scientific community still affirms that global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. Over the past decade, significant efforts have been made by humans to address the climate change crisis, resulting in certain impacts in combating climate change and raising awareness about its consequences. However, the question remains: (...) Are we heading in the right direction to effectively address this crisis, or do we need to reconsider our approach? This essay will examine some of major achievements in the fight against climate change, the increasing awareness of its impacts, the escalating severity of the climate crisis, and whether our actions are on the right track or require reevaluation. (shrink)

Focusing on Correspondence from the Double-Cassia Studio (Shuanggui xuan chidu 雙桂軒尺牘), a collection of letters by a gentlewoman named Ding Shanyi 丁善儀 (1799–after 1861), this paper examines how elite women in mid-nine- teenth-century China applied epistolary conventions in their social life. Com- pared to other literary collections of individual women in late imperial China, Ding’s letter collection is exceptional in recording the life of its author through the epistolary genre and in revealing the sociopolitical dynamics that underlay elite women’s epistolary (...) gentility. Ding’s letters are indicative of the noticeable concerns shared by gentlewomen in mid-nineteenth-century China and provide specific contexts for understanding some of the epistolary techniques used by lit- erary women to facilitate social networking. This paper uncovers Ding’s life and explores three major themes in her epistolary collection: her responses to crises, concerns about health, and cultivation of friendship. Ding’s letters show how elite women evinced sophistication and erudition in their epistolary composition, which was an important way for them to express themselves and demonstrate their mas- tery of language and rhetorical tradition. (shrink)

Desde a sua génese, a Arqueologia encontra-se entre as ciências naturais e as ciências sociais e humanísticas. Esta posição partilhada e a procura de uma maior compreensão dos seus objetos de estudo específicos, criou nos profissionais de Arqueologia uma necessidade de recorrerem a várias metodologias (e tecnologias) originárias de outras disciplinas. De forma similar a outras ciências, a Arqueologia é uma área permeável à experimentação e aplicação de conceitos teórico-práticos exógenos que levou, inclusive, à formação de diversas especialidades que unem (...) a Arqueologia e outras áreas, como a Zooarqueologia. Como aconteceu ao longo da sua história, o meio académico está perante um momento de mudança na forma como se processa a aquisição de conhecimento. O fato de estarmos na Era Digital da globalização faz com que a adaptação do meio académico a esta realidade seja mais continuada, não sendo a Arqueologia alheia a esta transformação. Após uma breve introdução ao novo "paradigma digital" das humanidades, revemos alguns dos principais usos de tecnologias relacionadas com o uso da Internet no apoio à investigação em Arqueologia (e.g., bases de dados enriquecidas), e descrevemos algumas questões relacionadas com o uso de novas ferramentas e técnicas, seus principais obstáculos e tendências. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning Through ServingDanny ReedI am a male CNA currently registered in Wisconsin since 1991, having worked as such since 1980 when I left high school. I have worked with ten different employers and many precious people I remember very well.I remember virtually everyone I have cared for in my over 30 years of work and yet there is not one person, place or moment that characterizes them all except (...) perhaps, May. She died within 24-hours of admission and we never spoke, except with the eyes. May had end-stage nerve and muscle wasting disease that left her mind intact but her body immobile and in pain. Her boyfriend brought her in after taking care of her at home, but he was wasted on some kind of drug, maybe her pain medication, feeling he needed it more than her. We ordered morphine and got her settled and she finally relaxed. She was gone by morning.May reminded me of Mary, another woman with a similar disease. Mary's husband Harold came to visit drunk. She could just point to a letter board similar to an Ouija board and spell out words and phrases with her right hand and then use her eyes to indicate if we were correct. Mary was a refined woman but very patient with me because I was an 18-year-old boy trying to be a man, sensitive but having a lot to learn. Mary taught me how to communicate without words—just using the eyes.These women are the core of understanding the meaning of what I have done for 30 years. Whether imprisoned by hearing loss, loss of sight or mobility, failing bodies and minds or simply being alone—the challenge was the same, to know when to reach into another's soul and touch them, to stay out of the way, and have the good sense to know the difference. Can I honestly say I fell in love with the woman that quietly said, "I'm tired of being old?" These were largely rhetorical questions without an answer.The men and women of this generation were far superior to me. I could only stand by and watch them die. Oh, I did the necessary things like I was paid to do, trained to do, but they were the ones patiently trying to teach me. I will spend the rest of my life trying to decipher their encrypted message because I am trapped here, too. Imprisoned by the ignorance of believing I understand what my eyes have seen, what I have heard, and experienced. That it can all be regulated and catalogued in journals of medicine.Is it not ironic that primary caregivers struggle to stay alive while money movers make millions, even billions tax free, moving money from here to there and acquiring the power and influence to change the world, but will not lift a finger unless they can make more money doing it? Ironic because I have taken care of them in their final hours and they would give me it all had I the power to give them more life. Yes, I have turned down a fortune because in their grief they wanted to pay me money for an hour of genuine kindness that in reality they could not afford. If you must ask how much it is worth you cannot afford it. Sincere kindness is priceless so I don't charge for it.It is not my intent to humiliate the achievements and status of professionals and others fallen upon hard times due to aging and disease because no one deserves these indignities. Indeed, I delight in restoring dignity to every human in need of it regardless of cause. I do not wish such suffering upon my worst enemy. Bill wanted one more hour. The cancer was sudden, painful, and terminal. Being sidetracked into a cozy hospice in the country is hardly comforting when given less than six months to live just when retirement promised the rewards earned from a life of hard work and sacrifice. Bill had spirituality and strong beliefs but it seemed to make matters worse because he cried every day begging God... (shrink)

Recently there has been a lively revival of interest in implicatures, particularly scalar implicatures. Building on the resulting literature, our main goal in the present paper is to establish an empirical generalization, namely that SIs can occur systematically and freely in arbitrarily embedded positions. We are not so much concerned with the question whether drawing implicatures is a costly option (in terms of semantic processing, or of some other markedness measure). Nor are we specifically concerned with how implicatures come about (...) (even though, to get going, we will have to make some specific assumptions on this matter). The focus of our discussion is testing the claim of the pervasive embeddability of SIs in just about any context, a claim that remains so far controversial. While our main goal is the establishment of an empirical generalization, if we succeed, a predominant view on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics will have to be revised. A secondary goal of this paper is to hint at evidence that a revision is needed on independent grounds. But let us first present, in a rather impressionistic way, the reasons why a revision would be required if our main generalization on embedded SIs turns out to be correct. In the tradition stemming from Grice (1989), implicatures are considered a wholly pragmatic phenomenon and SIs are often used as paramount examples. Within such a tradition, 㳊 semantics is taken to deal with the compositional construction of sentence meaning (a term which we are using for now in a loose, non technical way), while pragmatics deals with how sentence meaning is actually put to use (i.e. enriched and possibly modified through reasoning about speakers’ intentions, contextually relevant information, etc.). Simply put, on this view pragmatics takes place at the level of complete utterances and pragmatic enrichments are a root phenomenon (something that happens globally to sentences) rather than a compositional one.. (shrink)

Solidarity is a valuable tradition of Vietnam Communist Party and Vietnamese people and Ho Chi Minh is the personification of the great national Solidarity. Ho Chi Minh Solidarity is reflected by tolerant, which is not tight in national matter but also extends to the contemporary world. This is the foundation of national Solidarity as well as international Solidarity to the liberating, building and developing carier of a country. It is difficult to reach a common point between 54 minority ethnics in (...) all around Vietnam with different culture, custom, religious beliefs. However, Ho Chi Minh, by his thinking and action, he was successful in establishing a great united bloc of all the minority ethnics in Vietnam. It leads to a happy, comfortable and peaceful life. That is the reason why people said that: “In the past, there were few men could be a part of legend when he was still alive, but Ho Chi Minh extremely did it”. (shrink)

abstract: This article compares and contrasts the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause with the Zen Buddhist concept of satori. The aim is to underscore a unique but not commonly recognized characteristic of Ignatian contemplation and promote interreligious understanding. I argue that Ignatian prayer methods, though primarily kataphatic in their approach, share common features with apophatic spirituality and Zen meditation, even though Zen does not make any reference to God. This article consists of three main parts: In the first (...) part, I delve into Ignatius's own religious experience, particularly the experiences he had during eleven months in Manresa, and interpret these experiences from the lens of the Ignatian consolation without previous cause. In the second part, I explore the overall goal of Zen, focusing on the discussion of Zen sunyata and satori. In the final part, I draw out points of contact and differences between the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause and Zen satori with an aim toward better appropriating the Ignatian consolation without previous cause from Zen satori. In doing so, I hope to make Ignatian spirituality more appealing and available to spiritual seekers across religious traditions. (shrink)

The article inquires about the role of language in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Panic Signs [Indicios pánicos]. The hypothesis of the work is that language, as a mimetic instrument of representation and creation, established itself as a way to upgrade the relations of power during the Uruguayan pre-dictatorship. Being a qualitative research based on a hermeneutical approach, the article has the following aims: i) reconstruct the background to the dictatorship leaded by Juan Maria Bordaberry, ii) frame the work within the tradition (...) of dictator novel following Lukács’ socio-critical approach and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, iii) explain how language works as an instrument of representation and power, iv) analyze Peri Rossi’s work in the light of the aforementioned framework. It concludes, first, that the work responds to a mimetic language of representation, which involves taking a stance that is based on the notions of hegemony or counter-hegemony; and, second, that provided the scarce studies concerning the circumstantial situations of the work, the article might be regarded as a significant contribution to literary criticism. (shrink)