A argumentação desenvolvida no presente artigo se propõe a defender a interpretação austera do construtivismo em Kant das objeções a ela levantadas por Jeremy Schwartz (2017) em seu artigo _Was Kant a ‘Kantian Constructivist’?_. Tendo isso em vista, primeiramente, procede-se à reconstrução da interpretação de Schwartz para a distinção analítico-sintética na esfera prática a partir da caracterização por contradição e à indicação de objeções para sua aceitação. Na sequência, apresenta-se a caracterização de analiticidade por continência e como esta pode ser (...) transposta para o caso dos imperativos sem resultar em conflitos com a interpretação austera do construtivismo. Por fim, delineiam-se considerações quanto à formalidade dos princípios constitutivos da razão prática e seu escopo, chegando à conclusão de que não se pode estabelecer uma identidade entre construtivismo austero e logicismo prático. (shrink)

Analgesia and amnesia represent two complimentary pillars of anesthesia directed, respectively, at mitigating the experience of pain and the processes of encoding that experience into memory. These elements are typically combined in modern anesthetic techniques, but some circumstances exist – such as conscious sedation – in which the conditions of amnesia are satisfied while analgesia plays an auxiliary and often incomplete role. These activities reflect a widely held yet underrecognized belief in clinical practice that although pain experiences may be short-lived, (...) their representation in memory and its subsequent effects on thought and emotion can have enduring consequences for patients. In this exploratory article, we delineate phenomenal and abstract ontological categories of pain experience; advance a claim that they are treated by analgesic and amnestic agents, respectively; and describe how each class of experience is uniquely able to bring about individual harm. Beginning with the question of how it can be permissible to allow any preventable experiences or memories of pain, we identify that both phenomenal and abstract pain manifest on a spectrum of severity, each with an enigmatic threshold – unique to circumstance and individual – that determines whether or not pain will translate into harm, and what permissions therefore surround its treatment. Ultimately, we find that there are compelling physiological reasons for the concurrent use of analgesics and amnestics when pain experience exceeds these thresholds, while the treatment of “sub-threshold” experience in either class is a purely ethical imperative to be balanced with considerations of the potential harms posed by the treatments themselves. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

The article analyzes the phenomenon of national self-determination in terms of evolution and functioning. The authors aim to determine the general characteristics and evolution of this phenomenon in both conceptual and applied versions. In the evolution’s context of national self-determination as a theoretical concept and a political and legal principle, several stages were identified and considered. According to the authors, each stage of the phenomenon’s evolution was inevitably accompanied by its qualitative transformations, both in political and legal terms. The first (...) stage (from the end of the XVIII c. till the First World War), according to the authors, is characterized by the emergence of the idea and the formation of the socio-political concept of national self-determination, and the applied aspect of the phenomenon of national self-determination is filled with concrete content based on the ever-expanding political practice of its application. The second stage (from the First World War and the post-war reconstruction) is characterized by the transformation of self-determination from a concept into a political principle. The authors associate the third stage of the evolution of the phenomenon of national self-determination (the period after the Second World War) with the development of international relations and the formation of a global bipolar system. National self-determination turned into a principle of positive international law and laid the foundations for the future political instability of the newly independent states. Finally, the last period (the early 90s to this day) is characterized by the search and crystallization of new approaches to the principle of national self-determination and the emergence of new theories, the authors of which are trying from a political and legal point of view to substantiate the legitimacy of an expansive interpretation of this principle. The analysis allowed us to conclude that the qualitative transformations of the principle of national self-determination presented in the article did not lead to the formation of the phenomenon of national self-determination as an integral, complete, and universally recognized international political and legal norm. (shrink)

A formal sequent system dealing with Menelaus' configurations is introduced in this paper. The axiomatic sequents of the system stem from 2-cycles of Δ-complexes. The Euclidean and projective interpretations of the sequents are defined and a soundness result is proved. This system is decidable and its provable sequents deliver incidence results. A cyclic operad structure tied to this system is presented by generators and relations.

The idea is considered that T. Hobbs’s “Leviathan” is not only a particular example and a representation of classical Western European thinking, but turns out to be some “metatheoretical” place, in which the very potentiated field of the opportunity of clarification, and very production of a social order problem, and, ambivalently – all socio-theoretical discourse is formed. According to the author, after T. Hobbes problems which are “strategic” for all modern theoretical sociology and which, at the same time, are constitutive (...) for her can be put. What “art” – which is in the middle of the life, in the middle of human reality – can collect particular human existence in the uniform and coordinated been, acting for the benefit of all? How does it turn out in such a way that creation which “master”, according to Hobbes, is the person gains universal dimension? How is transition owing to which individual free figures get the lives unified way which substantially is represented the general state is carried out? Whether such a transition is possible? How to think of it? By what force on what basis, according to what principles, by the action of what algorithm, due to what structure small figures keep in borders of a body of the Leviathan? The solution which is proposed by Thomas Hobbes for a problem of social order – that is the public contract on the utilitarian basement – has, on the belief of the author, secondary value in the face of opening by Hobbes the matrix of the social-theoretical thinking. Thus, contradictions and discrepancies which can be found in the text by Gobbes, the author seeks to consider as “a point of growth of a discourse” and as fixing and registrations of potential opportunities of the discourse of social order, as well as the phenomenon of society itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Out of an Old Toy ChestMarina Warner (bio)The Soul of the ToyIn Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor (...) to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life.That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn... (shrink)

Citation:Christodoulou, Marina. “Technopolis as the Technologised Kingdom of God. Fun as Technology, Technology as Religion in the 21st Century. God sive Fun.” Cahiers d'études germaniques N° 74, 2018. La religion au XXIe siècle - Perpectives et enjeux de la discussion autour d'une société post-séculière. Études reunites par Sébastian Hüsch et Max Marcuzzi, 119-132. -/- -------- -/- Neil Postman starts his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)1 with a quote from Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: “Whether or not (...) it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” (Postman 1993: motto; Goodman 2010: 40). I would extend Postman’s Technopoly to Technopolis, to give it more of a presence in time and space. Hence, I will use the term Technopoly when I am referring to Postman; the term Technopolis is my own. -/- In his book From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour, Russel Heddendorf argues that humour is a technology (Heddendorf 2009: 32-34), as it is understood and theorized by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Russel Heddendorf also argues that “Technopoly” is a term correlated with Wittgenstein’s use of the term “worldview” (Weltanschauung) (Heddendorf 2009: 11). -/- I would like to draw on these thoughts to propose that Technopoly (or Technopolis) could be the secularized Kingdom of God, namely that Technology is the Religion of the 21st century, and that Fun is a paradigm of such a Technology / Technique. God is yet another technique or Technology of and in Technopoly. -/- The godless individual in the 21st century, I will argue, is as much a believer as the faithful in the Sacred Religion (term used in opposition to Secular or rather Technological or Technologized Religion, which is Fun). He believes in Fun (as a post-modern form of pleasure), as much as the believer believes, or more accurately, believed in God. In the 21st century, the faithful in Sacred Religion believes in a fun God, as opposed to the serious God of the past. Fun is turning into the Technologized Religion for all; for the faithful in Godly / Sacred Religion, as well for as the unfaithful. Fun (pleasure, humour) is the definitive qualia of 21st century pleasure. The mechanics of Fun make it absolutely functional for controlling people; as Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, people “are controlled by inflicting pleasure” (cited in Heddendorf 2009: 158). Now, indulging in pleasure is having Fun. In the 21st century, nobody is unfaithful, nobody disputes God, because God has been manufactured into Fun. We are living in the most religious century of all. -/- The commodity of God, now inextricably blended into work and leisure ethics and culture, is as unavoidable as survival. You don’t work, you don’t survive, you don’t exist. You work, you are entitled to leisure, or free time – the time (“busy-time”) when you are busy is work. The free time of leisure (“fun-time”) is a time for fun (pleasure). The time dedicated to Fun is culturally (capitalistically) pre-defined; no moment is actually free, each moment that is sold as free is to be bought with Work Time tokens –which is money. Believe is Enjoy. Happiness, achieved through pleasure, and pleasure through Fun, and Life as Play, is the recipe for Teleology in the 21st century. -/- The Technological God (Fun), as the Sacred God before him, is sovereignty’s technique or a social “mode of release”: demonstrations, marches, petitions, freedom of speech, citizen and human rights vindications, are “modes of release”, so that the next day, feeling relieved and released that you are working for a better life and a better world, you can wake up cheerfully to walk to your workplace, feeling it will change because of your marching, or your petition, or your speech, or the mass you attended, or the prayer you said yesterday. Thus life continues unchanging, through postponing hope; the tension of the tragedy is always released (lysis) in catharsis: refreshment for the next day of work. Art, especially cinema, (namely, simulated life) follows the same cathartic principles as real life. Thus, you can keep coping, and hoping in the meantime is of much help. Religion, Art, Science, Therapy, and Technology are all technologies used to market life, sell it or lend it, and humans are buying it back. Fun is free to produce, and expensive to buy. (shrink)

Théodule Ribot est l’un des premiers à penser les rapports entre mémoire et émotions. Au sein de ce qu’il appelle la « mémoire affective », il décèle une mémoire spécifique des émotions. Il s’ensuit un débat sur l’existence, la définition et le contenu de cette mémoire. Après les propositions initiales de Ribot, on observe l’émergence progressive d’un consensus : même s’il est possible de distinguer la mémoire affective de la mémoire intellectuelle, tout souvenir présente à des degrés variables des éléments (...) intellectuels et des éléments affectifs. Si, dans le cadre académique, ces débats sont tombés dans l’oubli, on peut établir une continuité conceptuelle avec la recherche scientifique actuelle, qui gagnerait à relire cette littérature centenaire. (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood (...) of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

Th e basi c pu r pos e o f thi s w or k consist s o f eliminatin g som e o f th e m yth s an d paradigms tha t cu r rent ly info r m th e assessmen t o f scienti f i c e vidence . I n orde r t o accomplis h this object i v e , th e autho r sta r t s fro m th e (...) premis e tha t thes e m yth s an d paradigms , produce d with th e d ev elopmen t o f forensi c science , ar e minimizin g th e rol e o f judge s i n judicia l proceedings fo r th e bene f i t o f e xpe r ts . Thi s ca n lea d t o a violatio n o f du e proces s an d n e glectin g that judicia l processe s ar e aime d a t resolvin g conflicts . Th e autho r refer s speci f ical l y t o th e m yth o f in f allibilit y an d th e pa r adig m o f identi f ication , accordin g t o w hic h scienti f i c e vidence ca n posit i v e ly identif y a n ind i vidua l o r objec t throug h p h ysica l traces . B y ana l yzin g the recen t doctrin e o n th e assessmen t o f scienti f i c e vidence , th e autho r conclude s o n th e need t o adop t th e pa r adig m o f likelihood . Thus , th e judg e stil l hold s th e rol e i n th e ev aluation o f e vidence , an d guarantee s tha t th e goal s o f th e proces s wil l b e respected. (shrink)

In this Master's dissertation, I try to show that the causal theory of memory, which is the only theory developed so far that at first view seems more plausible and that could be integrated with psychological explanations and investigations of memory, shows some conceptual and ontological problems that go beyond the internal inconsistencies that each version can present. On one hand, the memory phenomenon analyzed is very limited: in general it is reduced to the conscious act of remembering expressed in (...) a propositional format: the idea of an agent who can control his memory reports, in contrast to a passive subject who merely retrieve his encoded memories, is not even considered. Furthermore, the representational function of memory is the only function taken into account; and all the diachronic changes that could entail a dynamic conception of memory are ignored, as is the consideration of context in a broad sense of the term. On the other hand, causal theories make some implicit assumptions that are obviously questionable (e.g., the difference between facts and events) and leave some of their key concepts unexplained, like the nature of the causality, the isomorphism between the memory trace and the memory event, etc. Nonetheless, the principal point that we criticized is the idea of a correspondence between a past event or representation of it, the correspondent memory trace and the memory representation of it. Psychological models of memory, with the exception of the spatial analogy, question some of these assumptions and suggest that memory information is organized in a way other than that implied by the causal theory. But it is distributed connectionism that actually challenges the causal theory of memory, not only through some of its basic postulates, like the superpositional conception of memory traces, their mutual influence and constant state of change, but also because it is compatible with a more situated approach to memory phenomena as well as with the idea that memory in reality accomplishes a variety of functions that go beyond the representational one. The explicit and implicit ideas provided by distributed connectionism, together with the previous criticisms that we made to of causal theory, clearly suggest the possibility of developing another kind of philosophical theory of memory, different from existing theories. This task, nonetheless, implies: (a) A much deeper study of connectionism principles and memory models, as well as of the rival candidate, symbolism, plus the evaluation of these models in the light of psychological and neurophysiological empirical research, which unfortunately I have not dealt with in this work. (b) An analysis of the metaphysical nature of events and facts, in order to see if we should decide in favor of a realist or a non-realist account. It is also clear that this decision can’t be taken without an examination of perception studies (and not exclusively philosophical ones) which would be crucial for determining what is encoded in memory, and studies devoted to language, which, I suspect, plays an important role in the segmentation of reality. (c) A clarification of the notion of causality, because we wouldn’t like to deny any kind entail the complete disappearance of boundaries between memory and imagination. And even if I suspect that my future work will question the existence of absolute boundaries between these two capacities, the notion of causality can’t be completely erase from the theory of memory without erasing the memory phenomenon itself. But this causality, as we’ve already showed, can’t consist in the naïve conception adopted by the causal accounts of memory, nor can it be explained in counterfactual terms. If we think of the reconsolidation concept, of the interdependence between all the memory system, and of the deciding influence of context, it’s almost sure that more than one notion of causality will need to be invoked in order to explain memory. (d) Because I do not want to reduce the study of memory exclusively to cases of remembering, it’s essential to analyze how memory intervenes not only in imagination, but also in perception, reasoning and future projection, for example. In this respect, we could quote the interesting articles of Atance & O’Neill (2001) and Bucker & Carroll (2006), the first concerning the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, the second concerning the relationship between episodic memory and all kinds of self-projection, such as navigation and theory of mind, relations that would also have to be explored from a philosophical perspective, in particular to overcome the tendency to suppose that representation is the only function of memory. I will also mention the necessity of combining the notion of metamemory with that of memory to some extent; as I have already remarked, it is implausible to suppose that a subject who consciously remembers something is unable to exert any kind of control over his memory reports. (e) Finally, in order to integrate a situated conception of memory into a philosophical account, it will also be indispensable to take into consideration what is known as “everyday memory research” as well as studies in social and collective memory. (shrink)

This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry (...) none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's workds, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the greatest propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The field of contemporary ethics has been dominated by two opposite but equally extreme positions regarding the function of rules in moral reasoning. According to the first of these positions, known as rule-based ethics, morality consists of obeying a set of rules. On the other hand, according to the opposite view, known as particularism, moral reasoning cannot be reduced to the application of rules to particular situations. The particularist argues that rules and rule-following cannot genuinely capture the nature of moral (...) reasoning. Instead, such reasoning must always involve context-based considerations of morally relevant factors that can and do vary from particular case to particular case. (shrink)

We present the model construction technique called Linear Realizability. It consists in building a category of Partial Equivalence Relations over a Linear Combinatory Algebra. We illustrate how it can be used to provide models, which are fully complete for various typed λ-calculi. In particular, we focus on special Linear Combinatory Algebras of partial involutions, and we present PER models over them which are fully complete, inter alia, w.r.t. the following languages and theories: the fragment of System F consisting of ML-types, (...) the maximal theory on the simply typed λ-calculus with finitely many ground constants, and the maximal theory on an infinitary version of this latter calculus. (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that contentment leads to personal freedom and autonomy and argues for a relational and exercise concept of de facto freedom in the Zhuangzi 莊子. I first review influential interpretations of freedom in the Zhuangzi that equate freedom with contentment and nonfrustration, starting with Guo Xiang's 郭象 (d. 312 CE). By putting these interpretations in dialog with contemporary social philosophy (Christman, Meyers, Pettit, Elster, and Khader), I reflect on the two seminal problems of the psychologizing causal (...) and procedural approaches that allow the interpretation of freedom as contentment: the “happy slave” problem and the “sour grapes” problem. Proving this account of freedom inadequate, I argue for a different interpretation of freedom in the Zhuangzi that resembles a weakly substantive and constitutive account of freedom and autonomy in modern‐day social philosophy terms, such as Marina Oshana's. The theory of freedom that I analyze in the Zhuangzi, however, helps us correct the risk of material determinism of the constitutive account, offering a description of relational freedom and autonomy as constituted by socio‐material conditions but not determined by them. (shrink)

Abstract I argue that the two primary motivations in the literature for positing seemings as sui generis mental states are insufficient to motivate this view. Because of this, epistemological views which attempt to put seemings to work don’t go far enough. It would be better to do the same work by appealing to what makes seeming talk true rather than simply appealing to seeming talk. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-12 DOI 10.1007/s11406-012-9363-8 Authors T. Ryan Byerly, Department of Philosophy, Baylor (...) University, Waco, TX, USA Journal Philosophia Online ISSN 1574-9274 Print ISSN 0048-3893. (shrink)

Hume's discussion of the idea of space in his Treatise on Human Nature is fundamental to an understanding of his treatment of such central issues as the existence of external objects, the unity of the self, the relation between certainty and belief, and abstract ideas. Marina Frasca-Spada's rich and original study examines this difficult part of Hume's philosophical writings and connects it to eighteenth-century works in natural philosophy, mathematics and literature. Focusing on Hume's discussions of the infinite divisibility of (...) extension, the origin of the idea of space, geometry, and the notion of a vacuum, she shows that the central questions of Hume's 'science of human nature' - what does the 'science of human nature' reveal about the mind and its operations? what is experience? - underlie all of these discussions. Her analysis points the way to a reassessment of the central current interpretative problems in Hume studies. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has grown on the corporate agenda and is at the heart of today’s corporate culture. While much research has examined CSR strategies and effects, the effects of post-crisis CSR communication have received relatively little academic attention. Therefore, this paper uses two experimental studies to examine several key contingency factors that influence consumers’ responses to post-crisis CSR initiatives. Results suggest that consumers demonstrate more favorable responses when a company launches a CSR initiative congruent with the crisis issue, or (...) when the crisis is the result of an accident rather than a transgression. Further, the congruence between the crisis issue and the pre-crisis CSR initiative moderates the consistency effects between pre- and post-crisis initiatives. Such findings should be understood by considering the mediating role of corporate CSR motives’ consumer attributions, which was evidenced in this study. This study theoretically contributes to an improved understanding of the underlying mechanism of the post-crisis CSR information process and managerially contributes to the strategic development of effective post-crisis CSR initiatives given a particular situation. (shrink)

This study assessed the International Critical Thinking Essay Test (ICTET-A) for inter-rater reliability, internal reliability, and criterion validity. A self-selecting sample of participants (N = 100) completed the ICTET-A and a comparison test online. We found the ICTET-A items to have moderate to good levels of inter-rater reliability, and overall excellent inter-rater consistency for total test scores. The test had good internal reliability. There was a strong correlation between scores on the ICTET-A and the comparison test. Factor analysis showed that (...) scores were best explained with one factor, suggesting the test measures a single construct. The ICTET-A can therefore be considered a valid measure of critical thinking. Additionally, we propose a short form of the test. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:2005 International Lotus Sutra ConferenceLeo D. LefebureIn May 2005 Rissho Kosei-kai sponsored its annual conference on the Lotus Sutra for the first time in China, at the new conference center of Beijing Normal University. Chinese Buddhist scholars Zhang Fenglei and Wei Dedong of Renmin University participated, offering discussions of "Earthly Orientation of Tiantai Buddhist Doctrine" and "Zhanran's Doctrine about the Nature of Insentient Beings and Its Ecological Implications," respectively. (...) While the main focus of the discussions at the conference was on Buddhist interpretations of the Lotus Sutra in the T'ien T'ai and Tendai traditions, the organizers invited two Christian theologians, Ruben Habito and Leo Lefebure, to participate, thereby adding an interreligious dimension. An illness in his family prevented Habito from attending, but the paper he had prepared, "Ultimate Reality and Religious Praxis: The Lotus Sutra, T'ien T'ai, and Nichiren," was presented and discussed. On the morning of the first full day, Lefebure presented the paper "Wisdom, Compassion, and Charity: The Lotus Sutra and Augustine." In it he compared the rhetorical strategies of the Lotus Sutra and Augustine. The Lotus Sutra and Augustine articulate a dilemma of communication: the Sutra notes that only another Buddha can understand the wisdom of Shakyamuni Buddha, and Augustine warns that no human understanding is adequate to comprehend the mystery of God. According to the Lotus Sutra, the resolution of this difficulty comes through the use of upaya or, more specifically, upaya-kausalya, variously translated as "expedient" or "skillful" or "appropriate" means, including similes and parables. The wisdom of the Buddha that cannot be captured conceptually through pondering or analysis may nonetheless be conveyed in nonliteral form through concrete narratives, and the Lotus Sutra presents a number of celebrated examples. These narratives promise to transform human existence decisively, freeing humans from attachments and awakening them to wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna). Through [End Page 195] wisdom and compassion the Buddha establishes skillful means in order heal the suffering of human beings and to lead them into these virtues.During the same time that Kumarajiva and his companions were translating the Lotus Sutra into Chinese, Augustine of Hippo proclaimed that the gospel of Jesus Christ offered humans the possibility of victory over ignorance, sin, and death and supreme bliss in union with God in heaven. But he also insisted that God is strictly incomprehensible and the divine reality cannot be captured in any concept or image. Pondering and analysis cannot grasp the meaning of God, and so Augustine warned his congregation, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Despite the inadequacy of all human thought and language to comprehend God, Augustine trusted that God has used finite signs, like the narratives of the Bible, to communicate the saving knowledge of God's love. Signs point to realities; even though the signs posited by God never express the divine reality adequately and literally, they can nonetheless reorient human life away from untrammeled, self-destructive desire (cupiditas) and toward the self-giving love that Augustine calls charity (caritas). The wisdom and charity of God are the origin and content of the salvific signs, whose goal is to lead humans into the wisdom and charity of God.Other papers explored the journey of the Lotus Sutra on the Silk Road (Mariko Walter), Mind/Nature in Zhanran and Zhili (Brook Ziporyn), relative and absolute subtlety in Zhiyi and Jizang (Kanno Hiroshi), interpretations of the theory of Buddha-nature (Linda Penkower and Sandra Wawrytko), later Japanese Tendai interpretations (Paul Groner and Jacqueline Stone), and the making of vows in the Lotus Sutra (Shinozaki Michio). While Lefebure's paper was the only explicitly Buddhist-Christian discussion, comparisons between the traditions ran throughout many of the conversations.On the morning of the last day of the conference, Lefebure responded to Shinozaki's paper and to many of the themes that had been circulating throughout the week. He agreed strongly with Shinozaki's insistence that "how we read the sutra, where we read it, when we read it, and for whom we read it are quite important." There is no view from nowhere or from everywhere. Our contemporary horizon increasingly includes the situation... (shrink)

The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore (...) not be found in the physical world as characterized in experience or science. Instead, consciousness constitutes a subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and the physical world is a represented objective reality. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behaviour-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness, and suggest that a mature science of representation may help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon. (shrink)

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche (...) innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems. (shrink)

U ovom članku raspravljamo o hipotezi proširenog jastva Andyja Clarka i Davida Chalmersa, a osobito o prigovoru prema kojemu proširenom jastvu nedostaje stabilnost i kontinuitet koji su potrebni da bismo ga smatrali identičnim kroz vrijeme. Pokušavamo pokazati da je taj prigovor neodrživ. Raspravljamo i o gledištu prema kojemu se drugi tip jastva, to jest narativno jastvo, također može shvatiti kao prošireno, i tvrdimo da stabilnost i kontinuitet toga tipa jastva također nisu ugroženi ako ga proširimo izvan granica čovjekova tijela. Stoga, (...) barem što se tiče tih tipova jastva, kada razmišljamo o problemima osobnog identiteta, nije potrebno ograničiti se na internalizirano jastvo. (shrink)

(2004). Toward a Critical Deliberative Strategy for Addressing Ideology in Educational Policy Processes. Educational Studies: Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. null.

This discussion brings together five economists who address the major questions raised by the recent developments in the crisis of neoliberalism. The participants confront their respective definitions of neoliberalism, their understanding of the role played by financial mechanisms in the crisis and their interpretation of the crisis of sovereign debts. They discuss the implications of the crisis for the forces of the left, examining the consequences of the current weakening of the prior American hegemony : does it point to a (...) bipolar or a multipolar world, a period during which regional evolutions will have a degree of relative autonomy, some of which might define the outlines of the alternatives to neoliberalism? (shrink)