The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

Michael Grosso delves into the biography of St. Joseph of Copertino, a Dominican priest known to levitate, to explore the many strange phenomena which surrounded his life and develops potential physical explanations for some of the most astounding manifestations of his religious ecstasy.

Michael Hayes makes a wide ranging journey through religious experience, astrophysics, spiritualism, molecular biology, quantum physics and history.

A working hypothesis of computationalism is that Mind arises, not from the intrinsic nature of the causal properties of particular forms of matter, but from the organization of matter. If this hypothesis is correct, then a wide range of physical systems (e.g. optical, chemical, various hybrids, etc.) should support Mind, especially computers, since they have the capability to create/manipulate organizations of bits of arbitrarily complexity and dynamics. In any particular computer, these bit patterns are quite physical, but their particular physicality (...) is considered irrelevant (since they could be replaced by other physical substrata). (shrink)

" The Way of the Small teaches ways to embrace even life's more difficult passages such as aging, failure, illness, or the loss of a loved one, making even our pain a path to the sacred that helps us find meaning in life as it happens. * ...

Even though OpenMath has been around for more than 10 years, there is still confusion about the “semantics of OpenMath”. As the upcoming MathML3 recommendation will semantically base Content MathML on OpenMath Objects, this question becomes more pressing. One source of confusions about OpenMath semantics is that it is given on two levels: a very weak algebraic semantics for expression trees, which..

We propose related algorithms for unification and constraint simplification in }F’&, a refinement of the simply-typed A-calculus with subtypes and bounded intersection types. }F""’ is intended as the basis of a logical framework in order to achieve more succinct and declarative axiomatiza-.

Michael A. Peters Beijing Normal UniversityDeclinism is back in fashion again. It is now a common and persistent source of historical reflection that has been a constant theme since the first Chris...

This special issue of the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ focuses on theory’s role in contemporary politics, reading, and critiques of literature. Although there will always be questions raised about what theory is, what it can do, and its overall efficacy, “Theory Now” argues that those questions obscure the fact that theory is, and always has been, the precondition for thought. This issue demonstrates what it means to engage with theory in this particular historical moment. One contributor takes a critical look at (...) Michel Foucault’s final lectures, which have only recently been published in French, and evaluates their potential to instruct contemporary theory and politics. Another contributor contemplates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s legacy and insists that the only way to read her work is to anticipate the effects it may have in the future rather than assume that interpretations of her scholarship are now settled. With this issue, recently appointed editor Michael Hardt inaugurates “Against the Day,” a new section composed of short essays that focus on a topic of contemporary political importance. (shrink)

Aggregated reputation scores and rankings have been rightly criticized for lacking a theoretical basis by which to weight the individual perceptions that form them. The resulting product can be a score or ranking that fails to represent the perceptions of many or even most stakeholders. Little attention has been paid, however, to the reverse. Rather than focus on how individual perceptions can be represented at an aggregate level, herein we focus on how an aggregated reputation can influence individual perceptions. We (...) hypothesize that ratings have a significant influence on stakeholder perceptions, especially where other information is lacking. Through experiments, we find that exposure to reputation ratings provides stakeholders with an anchor point – information about what others think – and their perceptions of the firm are adjusted relative to this anchor. We suggest future work on reputation delve into the heuristics and biasesboundedly rational stakeholders deploy when assessing firms. (shrink)

Professor Ziman's project in his paper 'No man is an island' is to promote the understanding of science as a social enterprise. His main enemy is what he calls 'methodological solipsism' according to which 'the world of things and beings is surveyed and interpreted from the point of view of a single individual', and scientists think of themselves as lone explorers relying only on 'the evidence of their own eyes and their rational inferences concerning the hidden mechanisms by which these (...) personal percepts may be generated'. (shrink)

Dr. Fax, vice president of the Humane Society of the USA, an internationally known defender of wildlife and the environment, states, "This new book is about ...

Raising the question -- The cause of evil -- Why evil? -- What it means for evil to be -- Origins -- Genealogy -- Mirrored evil -- The eerie -- The unholy -- The ignoble -- The reality of evil -- Epilogue.

Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost, cities drown, things once thought immortal suddenly aren’t there at all. Whole libraries of knowledge, and whole galleries of secrets are gone. Our culture, our knowledge, and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined, not by what we have, but by what we have lost along the way. Lost Worlds is a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities. No mere miscellany, it (...) weaves a web of everything we no longer have. Michael Bywater, "Lost Worlds" columnist for the Independent on Sunday, teaches at Cambridge University. (shrink)

With the noted intelligence failures prior to the September 11 attacks and the 2003 Iraq War, the US intelligence community has recognized the need to acquire new, outside expertise to mitigate against future intelligence breakdowns. This recent attention on intelligence outreach provides Science and Technology Studies scholars with an opportunity to consider the role they might play in these efforts, as well as the various opportunities and difficulties that can shape these relationships, and the types of knowledge that can be (...) produced and known from engagements with these secret communities. This paper provides a reflection on how two STS scholars have attempted to intervene into intelligence and the lessons learned. (shrink)