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

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

Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, (...) that the 'margin of error' argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call 'the uniformity principle' that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. By R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin.

An impressive array of succinct expositions of a large variety of British and American epistemological theories. Bergson and the Vienna Circle are also treated in detail. Idealism, Realism, and Pragmatism are discussed as well as constructionist, intuitional, and organismic theories.--R. C. N.

A well-documented defense of the thesis that St. Augustine held the city of man, especially Rome, to contain many relative goods, however evil it was from the absolute standpoint of goodness consisting in the worship of the true God. O'Meara discusses in some detail many contemporary critics, e.g., Ernest Barker, who oppose this interpretation, and argues on the basis of historical circumstance and Augustine's own declarations in works other than the City of God.--R. C. N.

Praise for the First Edition: '... a unique and lively business ethics text... fresh and delightful... Sekhar's witty use of stories and cases will engage and enlighten business people in India and the rest of the world' - Joanne B Ciulla, The Journal of Business Ethics 'Richly international in scope and contributes to global concern' - Newsltter IIAS Leiden University 'This book makes an important contribution through its holisitc and balanced approach to the issue... Each chapter has a fair number (...) of relevant cases - many of which are good living examples one can learn from' - Business Standard This Second Edition of Sekhar's highly acclaimed book on business ethics has been revised keeping the student reader in mind. This unique text discusses the way ethical conflicts are handled in reality. The author argues that ethical education should be designed to produce balanced, pleasant and effective managers with the power of insight. Only then will they have the courage to create and use ethically desirable means to sustain organizations in an ambience of liberalism and democratic choice. (shrink)

Chalmers (2018) maintains that even if we understood every physical process in the brain we could still wonder why these processes give rise to conscious experience. The meta-problem is the challenge of explaining why we think this 'hard problem' exists. This response to the target paper endorses illusionist accounts of three 'problem intuitions' about consciousness: duality, presentation, and revelation. Subject–object duality is explained in terms of a clash between two compelling but contradictory convictions about consciousness. Phenomenal presence is understood in (...) relation to the configurational features of sensory experiences. And intuitions of revelation are explained as due to an unfounded belief in introspective ontological access. These illusionist analyses are used to bolster the case for physicalist realism rather than to support 'strong' illusionism. In addition to addressing the meta-problem they suggest a promising approach to the hard problem as wel. (shrink)

This invaluable resource is the first one-volume, in-depth, comprehensive history of modern science ever published.

What clearly emerges from Hegel's writings is that "Geist" refers to some sort of general consciousness, a single "mind" common to all men. The entire sweep of the Phenomenology of Spirit is away from the "disharmonious" conceptions of men as individuals to the "absolute" conception of all men as one. In the Phenomenology, we are first concerned with the inadequacy of conceptions of oneself as an individual in opposition to others and in opposition to God. This opposition is first resolved (...) in ethics, in the conception of oneself as a member of a family, of a community, of Kant's "Kingdom of Ends," as a citizen of the state, and then in religion, in which one conceives of oneself as "part" of God and a religious community. Absolute consciousness is the explicit recognition of one's identity as universal Spirit. The concept of "Geist" is the hallmark of a theory of self identity--a theory in which I am something other than a person. (shrink)

A comparison is made between the Bohm trajectory and Feynman path approaches to the long-standing problem of determining the average lime taken for a particle described by the Schrödinger wave function ψ to tunnel through a potential barrier. The former approach follows simply and uniquely from the basic postulates of Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum mechanics; the latter is intimately related to the most frequently cited approaches based on conventional interpretations. Emphasis is given to the fact that fundamentally different transmission (...) (T)-reflection (R) decompositions, particlelike and wavelike respectively, are central to the two methods: ¦ψ¦2=[¦ψ¦2]T+[¦ψ¦2]R (Bohm trajectory approach); ψ=ψT+ψR (Feynman path approach). (shrink)

This article explores the emergence of standards and regulation associated with the provision of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance systems in the United Kingdom. It argues that despite the intrusive and controlling nature of CCTV technology there is limited formal intervention in the form of legislation, governing its introduction and use. Instead government has sought to influence the regulation of the technology indirectly through its ability to shape and govern policy networks in the policy arena. In doing so, it is (...) argued here, that government remains the dominant actor in the policy process. (shrink)

The acceptance or rejection of computer aids to clinical reasoning is determined not only by the preferences and prejudices of potential users, but also by whether the output generated by the computer aid represents sound clinical judgment. This paper deals with the issue of the appropriate criteria for evaluating the clinical ‘reasoning’ of computer aids. Evaluation of a computer aid should include an assessment of the accuracy or appropriateness of its conclusions and an assessment of the scope of its considerations. (...) In order to use a conclusion generated by a computer aid as a basis for clinical action, information must be available on the alternative conclusions that might have been drawn, the degree of confidence in each conclusion, and the consequences that may result from acting upon the wrong conclusion. If this information is not generated as part of the output of a computer aid, it may be obtained through the use of its explanation and display capabilities, if the aid has such capabilities. Explanation and display capabilities permit the examination of the operations of the computer aid. Examination of a computer's operations is also the most feasible means to evaluate the soundness of its ‘reasoning’. (shrink)

Leveraging perspectives from social cognitive theory, the attention-based view, and social networks literatures, we tested the relationship between unethical choice and network unethicality, which we define as respondents’ perceptions of their peer advisors’ unethical choices. Although social cognitive theory predicts that perceptions of peer advisor unethical choice are positively associated with unethical choice, we theorize that the nature of this relationship depends on the personality of the actor and the situation. Results from a lagged study suggest that individual and situational (...) variables may act as key buffers to the adverse impact of unethical social influence on ethical choice. Strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how scholarship is carried (...) on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his influence on scientists’ understanding of nature, and of science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2 Collingwood’s views of the structure of science had to be constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the hypothetical-deductive scheme. 1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History .2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature . R. C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University. He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist . His current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among individuals within species. (shrink)